50 Sumner Road has been put back up for sale

Houlihan has the listing and has priced it at $4.995 million. The house needed some serious work when I toured it in 2015, and that was accomplished by new buyers, who paid $1.575 for it that year, then pretty-much completely rebuilt and expanded it before returning it to the market in 2018 at $3.6 million. They ended up getting $3.150 million, eventually, in 2019, and those buyers in turn sold it two years later, post-COVID, via a bidding war “won” by these owners for $4.6 in 2021 (obtaining a mortgage for 100% of the purchase price, which is nice work, if you can get it).

Now it’s back. It’s a nice house, if this is your taste, and the grounds are pretty special. But the back country has traditionally sold at a discount from properties closer to town, and I’ll be curious to see if the area’s new popularity is still enduring. Yes, houses up here are typically described as “just minutes away from shopping”, but when a dash into town to pick up that forgotten quart of milk or a dozen eggs is a 30-minute roundtrip, or children need to return to school to retrieve their forgotten homework (do they still assign homework these days?), the cost of the privacy and spaciousness so far above the Merritt can grow old, for some.

not sure if anyone is expected to actually use this “kitchen”, but up here, who cooks? And the caterers will be brining their own equipment anyway.