Perhaps he'll make it up on volume

99 Porchuck Road, new construction, has sold for $1.545 million. The builder Peter Thalheim is a great guy and an excellent builder, but he should never have built on this site; it’s been a disaster for everyone who’s touched it before, the tar baby of back country real estate. Four-acre lot, yes, but most of that is unusable creek, rock cliff, and scrub brush — nasty stuff.

The listing claims 3,770 sq. ft., which, if you include the 620 in the basement and the 763 in the attic is accurate enough, so what would it cost for a builder to build that? $201 per square foot would bring him close to break-even: $754,000 build, $762,500 for the land, $38,625 for the buyer’s agent’s commission, but $201 per foot seems cheap for this level of construction, what with a masonry chimney, crown molding, hardwood flooring and so on, and we’re ignoring carrying costs since April 2018. Bad move. On the other hand, the buyer did well, so from his perspective, “lose-win” was not a terrible outcome,