Week 126: The Norwalk Experiment. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
Norwalk is growing faster than anywhere else in Fairfield County. Former office buildings are becoming apartments. Industrial waterfront is becoming public boardwalk. Manresa Island is planned as a 125-acre public park. Wall Street is adding affordable housing. South Norwalk is adding hotel and harbor activity. East Norwalk is adding train-oriented rentals. West Avenue is trying […]
Week 125: Cleaning It Up. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
When my wife and I bought our first house on South Avenue, we paid $230,000 for a small antique on a quarter-acre lot. Behind the detached one-car garage was a patch of overgrown scrub: weeds, brush, vines, volunteer trees, the kind of neglected little corner every first-time homeowner inherits and quietly hopes no one notices. […]
Week 124: The Hotness Index. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
Low inventory is only the starting point. The Hotness Index asks which markets are hot, and why. When a house “just like yours” sells for a million dollars over asking on the first weekend, the instinct is to take that result to the bank. But one big sale does not make a market hot. To […]
Week 123: The market is not broken. Your assumptions might be. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
18 takeaways from this week’s ‘Boroughs and Burbs’ show, with Jonathan Miller and Scott Hobbs joining Roberto Cabrera and John Engel. Low interest rates do not automatically make housing more affordable. This is probably the strongest idea in the whole conversation. Jonathan’s point is contrarian and memorable: When rates are pushed too low, they can […]
Week 122: Real Estate Is Not a Numbers Business. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
Real Estate Is Not a Numbers Business We would like to believe real estate is a numbers business. But people don’t make rational decisions under pressure. The outcome of almost every deal is determined by how the people involved understand and manage emotion. Emotional intelligence, not data, is the primary driver of real estate outcomes. […]
Week 121: The Five Gardens of the Year. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
I’ve broken lower Fairfield County down by how each town actually functions — not how it photographs.First, the “big four” are Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, and Westport. They’re in a class by themselves — brand-name destinations like Aspen, Palm Beach, or Palm Springs. But as with those places, each has a completely different […]
Week 120: Why We Don’t Understand the Rules Anymore. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
This may sound like a story about a classroom. Or artificial intelligence. Or people gaming a system.It’s all of those things. And it’s about the difference between the rules people think matter and the ones that actually do.In the spring of 1985, we were juniors at New Canaan High School, running a ten-week economic simulation. […]
Week 119: New York Reacted to Bad News. Connecticut Shrugged. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
Manhattan reacts like a stock market. Deals are made or pulled in real time, so when uncertainty hits, you see it immediately in contract data. Fairfield County behaves more like private equity. Transactions depend first on what is available to buy, and supply has been consistently tight. That means external shocks like war or rising […]
Week 118: The Top 10 Reasons Wilton Is Unique. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for ’tis the only thing in this world that lasts.” That observation comes from Gerald O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. If he had been looking for a town in Fairfield County, he might have chosen Wilton. Among the towns of lower Fairfield […]
Week 117: The Top 10 Reasons Darien Is Unique. John Engel’s Real Estate Column for the New Canaan Sentinel
Darien is, in many ways, the very best of Fairfield County. That’s a begrudging admission from this third-generation New Canaanite because the towns are so similar. From a distance, they look almost identical. Up close, the personalities feel very different. Both towns look nearly identical on paper: about 21,000 residents, roughly 7,000 households, median household income […]
