http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/advice/chi-re-housing-citigroup-0622jun22,0,2078882.storyEven bankers find home sales difficult
Former Citigroup chief can't sell house
By Sharon L. Lynch | Bloomberg News
June 22, 2008
Former Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Charles O. "Chuck" Prince III lost his job because of the housing slump. Now he's having a hard time selling his home.
Prince's five-bedroom Tudor-style house in Greenwich, Conn., has been on the market for six months. He has cut the price by $300,000 to $5.85 million, according to the property listing.
The housing recession has hit the bedroom communities that Wall Street favors most. The median home price fell 8.1 percent in Greenwich in the first quarter from a year earlier. Declines were as much as 25 percent in 14 of 19 wealthy Manhattan suburbs in Connecticut, New Jersey and Westchester County, New York, since the start of the year, according to a Bloomberg survey of brokers and multiple listing services. The drop shows that 83,000 job cuts and $393 billion of mortgage-related losses and asset write-downs at financial firms are damaging even the most expensive U.S. real estate markets.
"There is really just no firewall around these sorts of communities that insulates them from what is going on in the housing market," said Nicolas Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "No one wants to make a purchase and have to tell a spouse, a partner or a friend that 'Oops, I bought and that house is worth less today than it was.' "
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