Column: What’s Going On in Your Neighborhood

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By Mark Pruner
Sentinel Dashboard Editor

Pruner-column-chart-1-13The 2016 winner for most popular neighborhood in Greenwich is North Mianus. Last year we had 11 houses sold there and we only have four listing presently which gives us 4.4 months of supply. It’s a small neighborhood but it meets so many of the things that people were looking for in 2016 and will be looking for in 2017. It’s a real community with smaller properties, close to town, good schools, and for Greenwich, reasonably priced houses.

The runner-up is Cos Cob, and arguably the winner for larger size communities in Greenwich. Cos Cob last year had 73 properties sold and we have another six contracts waiting to close as of the end of the year. While Cos Cob is only 6% of our listings, it was almost 13% of our sales in 2016. So with only 28 listings, we have 4.6 months of supply and a hot market. When you add up all the sales, contracts and active listings we have 107 properties that were in play in Cos Cob in 2016.

Pemberwick and Old Greenwich are neck and neck with less than six months of supply, presently on the market. Glenville also does well with lots of demand for a limited number of houses. Riverside, which has been our leader before, has fallen to 7 1/2 months supply with 54 listings and 86 houses sold in 2016 as prices have risen significantly lowering demand. However, Byram which has our least expensive housing also lags behind Riverside with 11 months of supply. For the same price you can get a much larger house in Westchester, you just have to pay the higher taxes.

Illustrating the trend of people wanting to live closer to town, South of the Parkway has 13 months of supply and north of the parkway has 22 months of supply. Now South of the Parkway covers a huge area of Greenwich, from the parkway to the Post Road. For analytical purposes this area which has 37% of our listings makes little sense as it encompasses a wide variety of neighborhoods, lots sizes and price points. It would make a lot more sense to break up this huge area into the 1 acre and 2 acre zones and add a central dividing line, but we work with what we have.

You need to take all of these numbers with a large grain of salt. For example, Old Greenwich has houses from under $800,000 to over $8,000,000, on small 1/6th of an acre lots to multiple acre lots on Long Island Sound. These markets are very different but the MLS groups them altogether for statistical purposes and this might not be a bad thing. The houses maybe be different, but the kids play on the same Little League teams, they go to the same middle school and eat the same Lion’s Club pankcakes. Breaking up areas by price may make sense for Realtors and even buyers, but it’s still one community and people are drawn to it regardless of what their budget is.

MARK PRUNER is the a Realtor with Douglas Elliman in Greenwich and was their number 1 individual agent in 2015 – 203.969.7900, mark.pruner@elliman.com.

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