By Mark Pruner
This year, Greenwich’s northern school districts are blowing away the southern school districts in single-family home sales. Combining Parkway’s 93 sales, North Street’s 92 sales, and Glenville’s 62 sales results in a total of 247 sales. Collectively, the eight other Greenwich elementary school districts have only 208 sales out of our total 455 sales so far this year. Therefore, the northern school districts account for 54% of sales, while the remaining districts in town only have 46% of sales.
In the “sought-after” districts of Old Greenwich, Riverside, and Julian Curtiss/Central Greenwich, there are only 107 sales out of the 455, representing a mere 23% of the market. Backcountry and Mid-country, despite having much lower density, are outperforming the “hot” areas by more than 2:1.
People are opting for more space and moving away from those small lots along the Post Road. Houses are sitting empty in Old Greenwich and Riverside as properties with ample land are quickly being snatched up, leading to historically low months of supply that we haven’t seen in years.
Maybe that’s going a little too far. I live in backcountry, and this year backcountry and mid-country are back. No longer do I need to apologize to my friends in Old Greenwich, where I grew up, about prices dropping in backcountry and houses sitting on the market for years, with the grass growing so tall that the horses don’t have to bend their necks to get to their organically grown, grass breakfast.
Houses, even some quite expensive ones, are selling much better in backcountry and mid-country than they have since the Great Recession. So why are sales so poor in OG, with only 36 sales so far this year? The short answer is what has been hindering the market for the last two years: Inventory. Parkway, North Street, and the Glenville districts have inventory, while most of the other districts don’t.
As of the end of October, we had 51 listings in the Parkway district and only 4 listings in the Old Greenwich district. Someone looking in the Parkway district, the two and four-acre zones, has 12 houses to choose from for every one house on the market in OG. And it’s gotten worse in November; this week, if you’d like to buy a house in the Old Greenwich school district, you have a choice of 2 houses. One is listed for $35 million and has been on the market for 530 days, and the other is listed for $4.4 million and has been on the market for 480 days.
The Parkway and North Street districts are where the front country was in 2021, the all-time record year for Greenwich house sales. There has been a lot of talk about the 1,007 sales that we had in 2021, but there has been less talk about the fact that 1,124 homeowners listed their houses in 2021, and we had 152 carry-over listings from 2020. So far this year, we have had 624 single-family home listings and carried over just 136 from 2022. So far in 2023 we have had a total of 660 listings available for sale compared to 1,267 listings available for sale in 2021.
Parkway, North Street, and Glenville school districts, particularly those in the 1 and 2-acre zones of Glenville, have sales because they have inventory, but that won’t last. We saw lots of the so-called “shadow” inventory get eaten up in 2020 and 2021. This was the inventory that people had been holding off listing, waiting for the market to go up. We are now seeing the last of that in backcountry and mid-country.
As of the week before Thanksgiving, we only have 126 listings. We are 9 listings away from our all-time low of 117 listings that we hit back in August. We have less than 5 listings in Cos Cob, Dundee, Hamilton Avenue, and Old Greenwich districts. North Mianus and Riverside’s inventory don’t break into double digits.
When you look at contracts, the North Street district with 19 contracts and Glenville with 12 contracts are where the activity is. As you might expect, Parkway is the district with the next-highest number of contracts, with 9 houses under contract out of a total of 65 contracts waiting to close. Together, these three districts have 62% of all the contracts waiting to close. They also have 70% of the inventory, and these are the districts where the inventory is particularly expensive.
What’s been remarkable this year, unlike the pre-Covid and Covid eras is that we are seeing good sales at all price levels, including those over $5 million, over $10 million, and even over $20 million. High-end COVID refugees found that Greenwich was a great place to summer, for bailout houses, for working from home several days a week, and a great place to put some money when more liquid assets have been very volatile.
With inventory being eaten up in mid-country and backcountry, and a little more (well, a lot more) inventory in the front country, we might see a shift in sales south, but it’s not going to happen in the near future.
Mark Pruner is a sales executive with Compass Real Estate, a part of the Greenwich Streets team there. He can be reached at mark.pruner@compass.com or 203-817-2871.
