New listing in Riverside

290 Riverside Avenue, $3.995 million. There’s an interesting price history here: I was the listing agent for the property when it was newly constructed in ‘06, and we sold it for $3.8 million. The actual buyer was a Finnish corporation that purchased it to house its US CEO. When the company ended its operations in the U.S. in 2010 and moved that executive back to the home country, even the Riverside market had been hit by the 2008 crash and was still down in 2010. The company was in no mood to leave an asset here, so rather than wait, it sold the house to the current owners for just $2.880. They got a bargain, it appears.

It’s a very nice house, built by an excellent local builder, but I do wish he hadn’t ignored my advice to keep the one-acre lot intact; instead, he built a second house behind this one, to the detriment of both.

That same builder is a very good friend of mine and a few years later while we were out fishing on the Sound, he admitted that, taking into account the cost of building that second house and the premium he could have earned by selling one of the few remaining one-acre lots in Riverside (both points I’d made), he “probably could have made the same, or maybe more profit”. I reminded him of the adage “too soon stupid, too late smart”, but a striped bass hit the bait at that moment and I never did get his response.