The Gadfly of Greenwich Real Estate
The home of Dominick DeVito on Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Conn. Mr. DeVito, a builder and renovator of large homes, returned to real estate work after his release from prison early in 2013. Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times
As he drives his white pickup truck past the manors that crowd the hills and meadows along Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Conn. — a town that has long signified what it means to be rich in America — Christopher Fountain snorts.
One of the gaudy estates is owned by a hedge fund kingpin now residing in prison; others belong to a real estate investor just coming out of prison and an investment adviser who steered his clients and their billions to Bernard L. Madoff. Then, to cap it off, a guy in an 8,000-square-foot mansion is charged with crushing his wife’s skull in with a baseball bat.
This is “Rogues Hill Road,” or so Mr. Fountain has called this 3.5-mile stretch of asphalt. “All these aspirational schnooks came out here thinking that they had really made it,” said Mr. Fountain, a real estate broker, blogger and lifelong Greenwich resident. “But then the tide went out and what you are left with is a bunch of crooks.”
Believe it or not, Mr. Fountain actually makes a living brokering mega-mansion real estate deals to these so-called schnooks, among others.
And his blog, For What It’s Worth, has attracted a cult following among those he lampoons — the financial titans who can afford to plunk down $5 million or more on a house but who nonetheless seem to appreciate his scabrous take on Greenwich residents’ run-ins with the law, debt-fueled implosions or plain old bad taste.
Indeed, Mr. Fountain would seem to spend as much time selling schadenfreude as houses.
The essence of his complaint — that decades of easy money and ceaseless greed have created a glut of unsalable houses that will remain a blight on his hometown for many years — highlights one of the more curious anomalies of today’s explosion in asset prices.
Though the Federal Reserve’s policy of rock-bottom interest rates over the last few years has revived the value of many of the nation’s subdivisions and sent stocks soaring to historic highs, it has prompted only modest interest in the over-the-top Greenwich mansion, a classic emblem of quick riches.
Mr. Fountain likes to point to the prominent Greenwich characters in the public spotlight as part of the problem. Topping Mr. Fountain’s list of homeowners are Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund executive now serving an 11-year prison sentence on charges of insider trading, and Frederic A. Bourke Jr., co-founder of Dooney & Bourke, the high-end handbag accessories store, who has just been imprisoned for bribery and whose house is on the market for $13 million.
He also likes to skewer Walter Noel, a founder of Fairfield Greenwich, the investment firm that raised more than $8 billion for Mr. Madoff and subsequently became the target of investigations. Mr. Noel’s 175 Round Hill address is just across the road from Mr. Bourke’s home. The estate of Steven A. Cohen, whose hedge fund pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in November, is six miles east of Round Hill Road.
Mr. Fountain includes in his gallery plenty of lesser-known people pushed into bankruptcy after overreaching, borrowing millions to build 15,000-square-foot houses that no one wanted to buy.
Mr. Fountain’s contention that the legal and financial troubles bedeviling Greenwich big shots have contributed to this slump — a view that is hotly disputed by his more established competitors — is more anecdotal than scientific. Still, the numbers are stark.
According to Trulia, the real estate website, the average price per square foot of a four-bedroom house sold in Greenwich in the last three months was $442, down 40 percent from a year ago and 11 percent from 2009.
Mr. Fountain says that more than 43 houses are on the market for at least $10 million — many of them unsold for more than a year.
What will it take to sell them?
“My rule of thumb now is divide the asking price by two,” he said. “Although the owner’s ego always makes that very hard to do.”
Mr. Fountain began to vent on his blog about two years ago.
“I’m sure Greenwich attracted some nefarious characters back in the ’50s and ’60s, but the past decade has seen just a parade of sad sack crooks,” Mr. Fountain wrote in a cri de coeur about how the 100-acre pastures and graceful mansions of his youth had been replaced by garish castles squeezed onto four-acre lots.
This was especially true, he felt, of Round Hill Road. “The road, to me, represents all that is sordid in our modern business world, money-grubbing poseurs putting on airs, until the handcuffs are slapped on.”
It is tempting to dismiss this as an old-money lament from someone who missed out on the past decade’s asset boom. While Mr. Fountain’s father rode the train into Grand Central every morning to a Wall Street job at White Weld, a white-shoe investment firm that is now defunct, his own career path has been rockier.
After practicing law in Bangor, Me., Mr. Fountain returned to Greenwich, where he spent most of his time defending small investors suing big Wall Street banks over dubious investment advice. He quit his job in 2000 after publishing his first book, “The New Millionaire’s Handbook: A Guide to Contemporary Social Climbing.” But his writing career stalled, and in 2001 he beat a retreat to selling houses. At the age of 60, Mr. Fountain has had three careers over the last decade and now rents a modest farmhouse in North Stamford, Conn., about 10 miles from Round Hill Road.
Nevertheless, his outbursts over new-money excesses in Greenwich have struck a vein, attracting readers who, Mr. Fountain says, include not just bankers and local real estate mavens but also followers in Europe and Asia. Cliff Asness, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has commented on the blog, and Mr. Fountain’s taste for Greenwich gossip makes him all the more appealing. |
