Oh tempora! Oh mores!

Well, hardly that bad, but our housing stock does continue to evolve. Take, for instance, this new construction at 180 Stanwich Road, listed today at $6.530 million. It’s hardly to my taste but then, I am hardly the builder’s target audience, so we’re square.

The sale history of the 1925 house it replaced provides a look into the market changes that have occurred in the past few decades. Although grievously dated, it sold in just 14 days in November 2001 for $1.950 million. Barely three years later, in march 2005 it sold for $2.6 million after 11 days, a 33% increase just for sitting there. Those were fine days for home buyers, not so good for buyers.

But that sale also served as a demarcation in the market for old homes. They still do sell, but to an increasingly-thinner buyer pool, so sales take longer and yield scrawnier returns. The 2005 buyers of this place, for example, put it back up for sale in 2014 at that same $2.6 million they’d paid nine years before and there it sat until 2014 when they finally sold it to this builder for $2.050.

So it goes.

Gone and mostly forgotten