Glenville has a lot going for it. It has Norman Rockwell downtown. At the heart of the town, is the Glenville Fire Department with its sign advertising for volunteer firefighters. One of the cool things about the Glenville F.D. is that volunteers, regular citizens of our town work alongside our professional firefighters.
These volunteers are very well trained and make for a more effective fire department. This is especially true for major events like hurricanes (and the occasional earthquake, which didn’t do much damage, but I’m sure the Greenwich FD and Glenville FD are ready.) Their David Theis Award dinner is one of the must-attend events in Greenwich.
Glenville also has the Bendheim Western Greenwich Civic Center, which was built much better than the old Eastern Greenwich Civic Center. (Of course, the new EGCC is looking pretty solid. I can’t wait to see the inside.) The Western GCC has great ball fields and according to a local the best sledding hill in Greenwich. The building hosts lots of community activities every week.
Downtown Glenville is a good place to hang out. You can get a lot of shopping done, fill up your gas tank (my wife’s new favorite gas station, now that the Round Hill gas pumps are gone), get a new phone, and passport photos, and stop by the drug store all in a two block area. You also have a wide variety of choices to eat. Glenville Pizza and the Glenville Deli have been there for decades. The Lion has replaced Centro’s and Bambou continues to serve Asian food that is a cut above. Luca’s Pizza has just moved in and I’m looking forward to the opening of a new Mexican restaurant. You won’t go hungry in Glenville.
Glenville itself has a powerful penumbra. When you look at a map of the “Glenville” sales for the last 24 years, you have a lot of sales clustered around downtown and in the one-acre zone just north of the Merritt. Just north of that is a two-acre zone that goes up to Sherwood Ave, but realtor opinions vary as to whether that is part of Glenville. Several agents have Glenville going even farther north and list houses in the four-acre zone north of the Parkway as being in Glenville.
Most agents agree that Riversville Road is the eastern boundary of Glenville in the north and that Weaver Street is the border in the south. However, not all agents agree with this with some including houses in the Calhoun Association south of Glenville Road to be in Glenville. (One agent even thought that a house near Equinox south of Railroad Avenue was part of Glenville.)
For most agents, Glenville ends in the south at Comly Avenue, but agents have listed houses in what most people would think of as Pemberwick, as actually being in Glenville. As I said, lots of people like to be associated with the Glenville brand.
Part of the power of the Glenville brand is the diversity of housing in Glenville. This section has R-6, (two-family zone), R-7 (one-sixth acre), R-12 (quarter-acre), R-20 (half acre), and RA-1 (one acre) zones. As mentioned above some agents include the RA-2 and some of the RA-4 zones in Glenville.
This diversity means that the price ranges in Glenville are some of the broadest in town. In 2023, we had 40 single-family sales in Glenville. The sales prices varied from a low of $650,000 to a high of $7,000,000. Now, the $7,000,000 was out in that eastern penumbra of the Glenville influence. Take out that sale, and the next sale highest was for $5,260,000 in Riversville. That one out-of-area sales skewed the average sales price in Glenville by $44,000. Bottomline, the broad price range, particularly, the highest-end sales makes the average annual sales prices bounce around in a manner that may not be reflective of where the market was going that year.
A much better measure is the average price per s.f. This price doesn’t react as strongly to one or more outliers. When you look at the price per square foot in Glenville, you see that price rose steadily from $282/sf in 2000 to $471/sf in 2007, or an increase of 67% in 7 years. From 2007 to 2012 the Great Recession resulted in falling average prices/sf. By 2012 the average price/sf had dropped to $300/sf. We had a nice rebound from 2012 to 2015, when the price/sf jumped 53% in 3 years to $459/sf.
For the next four years from 2015 to 2019, prices were fairly flat; and then came Covid. Prices climbed every year so that by this year the average price/sf for the 10 sales that we have has so far averaged $655/sf. This is an increase of 66% since 2019.
However, take even these numbers with a grain of salt. If you look back over the last 24 years you can see that we have had 783 sales or an average of 33 sales per year. However, the number of sales has varied from a high of 53 sales in 2021 to a low of 11 sales in 2008. The three big years for sales in Glenville were in 2005 with 46 sales, 2017 with 45 sales, and the record year 2021 with 53 sales.
The 2005 bump was attributable to the townwide boom in sales in the first 7 years of the century. The 2017 sales bump was attributable to the federal income tax limiting state and local tax deductions to $10,000. This resulted in an influx of buyers from Westchester County, which has the highest property tax rates in the nation.
Many of these sales were concentrated in Glenville and other sections of Greenwich along the NY border as former Westchesterites wanted to stay close to their NY friends and family. This bump led to a bust the next year as many downsizers who would have moved had already done so.
COVID caused a sudden upturn in Glenville, and townwide sales, in 2020 and 2021. We did see a drop in Glenville sales in 2022 and 2023, but sales in those years were still above our 21st Century average. So far this year we have had 10 sales, which when annualized comes out to 29 sales.
It looks like 2024 may be our first below-average sales year, but it is not for lack of demand. Our average days on the market for 2024 have been only 32 days. This is the lowest this century. Even last year, we had an average of 87 days on the market.
While 32 days on the market is tight, so are only 5 single-family homes for sale in Glenville. Of those 5 listings, the longest has been on for 71 days. At the other end of the spectrum, I put 32 Deep Gorge on the market this week with an open house on Saturday (since Sunday is Father’s Day). It has 5 bedrooms and 4,426 sf. We listed it for $2,299,000 or $519/sf. It’s nearly move-in ready. we’ll see what the market has to say. It’s been pretty positive so far. (Update: The house went to contract in 18 days with multiple offers.)
Mark Pruner is a principal on the Greenwich Streets Team at Compass located at 200 Greenwich Ave. He can be reached at 203-817-2871 or
[email protected].
