Well, maybe the Back Country is stirring to life

22 Aiken Road, priced at $3.950 million, reports a contract after just 50 days on the market.

Like most of the streets up there in our far north, Aiken has been pretty much dormant in the past years, so maybe this is a beginning. 13 Aiken Road is still available at $4.250 million, but there may be no particular rush there; it started at $10 million in 2005, and is still with us.

But still, this is the second sale on Aiken this year, so that’s encouraging. 38 Aiken sold in June for $3.2 million, hooray! Unfortunately for the owner, she’d paid $6.9 for it in 2002, and had it on the market seven years, after beginning at $6.995 in 2013. But a sale’s a sale, eh?

Addendum: 38 Aiken was sold to the buyer by Marge Rowe, a renowned figure in Greenwich real estate who was famous for sheperding her clients around town in her Rolls Royce. I always suspected that Marge kept her wealthy clients by listing and selling their houses at wildly-inflated prices. David Ogilvy in a Rolls.

And that was possible back then because there was no internet and not even a central repository of prices; buyers were at the mercy of their agent, who selected which houses she’d show them, and was their sole advisor on values. I entered this racket back in 2003 just as the Greenwich MLS went online and made sale histories and selling prices available to its members. I shared that information with my customers, some agents did not, until sites like Realtor.com and Zillow went around the MLS wall and published the data for all the great unwashed to see.

But Rowe, Ogilvy et al were right to be alarmed; prices did drop and have dropped, as information became free and customers could compare houses for themselves. And in thoe legend’s defense, they were also right, legally, in shielding their buyer clients from that information. Under the laws of principle/agency, both the listing agent and the buyer’s agent were considered to owe a fiduciary duty to the owner; the buyer’s agent was, again, legally, treated as a subagent of the listing agent, and the authority to represent a property flowed through and down from the listing agent.

That principle was honored in the breach; buyer’s agents formed a relationship with their buyers, and most of them treated them their pinciple rather than the owner. The law was finally changed around 2002-2003 to reflect this reality and created the legal entity of a a ”buyer’s representative”, enabling buyer’s agents to fully represent their clients: ferriting out court cases, impending forecloaures, divorce proccedings, etc. — anything that might strengthen a buyer’s negotiating position.

So, between ending the realtors’ monopoly on price infomation, and the legal recognition that buyer’s reps owed a fiduciary duty to their client, not the owner, prices have fallen; competition will do that, and that’s been good for buyers, if not for sellers. Of course, buyers become sellers, sooner or later, and then the advantages of ths new system may not seem so positive, but, there it is.

(apologies for typos — I’m rushing out the door. I’ll spell check on my return.)