The fringe areas cringe

15 Mountain Laurel Drive dropped $300,000 today, and now asks $3.2 million. I don’t think this will do it, but it sold for $3.7 million in 2004 ($4.930 in current dollars), so there’s a hammering going on here.

The owners have been trying to sell this 1996 house since 2013, when they started at $4.595, without success, which only illustrates how illiquid real estate “investments” can be. It’s always informative to hit the Tuesday-Thursday broker open house tours, and see the historical waves of development. A paleontologist would have field day, surveying each boom and bust of the Greenwich real estate market, starting with the earliest years, through the Rockefeller days of Deer Park and Khakum Wood,and then through the decades thereafter. When the market’s been hot, builders stretch out, seeking cheaper land. They prosper, for a while, then retreat when the market retracts — picture a tidal action.

Mountain Laurel Drive is a product of the 90s, and now finds itself stranded, like many other developments on our outskirts. In the past, the market has always rebounded, and these areas have recovered, but with our increasingly perilous state budget woes and the change in tastes of buyers, I’m not so sanguine today.