Price war in Old Greenwich

If you want to see an active market at work, look in the low $1 range. 100 Wesskum Wood Road, Old Greenwich (on the corner of Sound Beach Avenue) listed for $1.195 million and buyers fought for it immediately. Closed today for $1.277 million. A 1975 house, nothing special, but right on Binney Park, and at very much the right price.

I almost always discourage clients from engaging in bidding wars, but in this case, I think the buyers did okay.

UPDATE. Funny story; we bought the original owners of this home’s Steinway A piano back in 1975, loaded it into a rented U-Haul and brought it to the Brighton/Alston student slum where I and my brother Anthony, a student at BU’s music school, shared an apartment. We were met there, as pre-arranged, by “Turtle Truckers”, a hippy outfit that advertised on the local Boston free-form radio station, but despite my telling them exactly what was involved: moving a grand piano up to our third-floor apartment, the stoners were shocked when we slid open the gate: “wow, man, that’s a piano!” So they fled, leaving me stranded on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, with a piano in a rented truck, due to be returned that day.

Using the Yellow Pages — remember them? — I found “Black Movers” in, I think, Roxbury, and they agreed to let me store the piano with them over the holiday and deliver it the following Tuesday. Which they did: Tuesday morning, a trio of movers appeared, all living up to the name “Black Movers”. The largest of them, who could have been a linebacker in the NFL, dismissed his helpers, strapped a belt around his head and the piano and carried the damn thing on his back all the way upstairs. A huge, generous tip was awarded, gratefully, but I also got a memory that, obviously, I’ve never forgotten.