The COAST IS NEAR
their wallets.
“You’ll end up paying half what you would in the Hamptons and Jersey Shore and get much more for the money,” says Joel Lucas, a top-selling broker at Coldwell Banker in the town of Essex. He says beyond finding moderately priced homes near or on the water — typically priced between $300,000 and $700,000 — buyers also enjoy lower property tax rates than New Jersey and New York. “When you add in lower property taxes and the easy commute up I-95, that makes a second home purchase up here even more appealing,” Lucas says.
Coldwell Banker just listed The Dickinson Mansion in Essex for $3.25 million — a record asking price for the town. The four-bedroom estate underwent a total renovation that includes a billiards room and wine cellar.
Of course, Connecticut’s shoreline has lured Manhattan intellectuals and wealthy urbanites for decades, many drawn to its quiet charm and New England reserve. One of them was the late author Dominick Dunne.
“Despite its beauty and proximity to New York it’s been a well-kept secret for years,” says Colette Harron, a veteran broker with William Pitt Sotheby’s Realty, who sold Dunne’s former summer home in Hadlyme after his death in 2009. She says the peaceful areas along the Long Island Sound draw buyers who are averse to the glitzy towns strewn along the Hamptons and Jersey Shore. “It’s a discreet, Old Money area and that’s attractive to New Yorkers who wish to relax away from the summer frenzy in many other places.”
A drive along Interstate 95 — or on Amtrak’s Boston-bound trains — slices through the handsome beachfront towns of Madison, Westbrook and Old Saybrook, where Katharine Hepburn owned a home for decades. Farther east, it continues through towns such as Old Lyme, Mystic and eventually Stonington, a waterfront village just shy of the Rhode Island border on a quiet peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound.
William Pitt Sotheby’s Realty is currently listing a three-bedroom home in Old Saybrook for $6.88 million. It faces the Long Island Sound and sits next to the former Hepburn estate. The 3,800-square-foot residence sits on 1.3 acres and includes a stone fireplace in the great room overlooking the water.
“We looked at other areas, but the Connecticut shore just seemed like a much better fit for a weekend home,” says Theresa Lederer, a hospital administrator at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She and her husband, Joe, recently bought a three-bedroom Dutch Colonial Revival home near the beach in Old Saybrook listed at $399,000. “We looked in Rhode Island and other places but here we’re just three houses from the beach and we got a lot more for our money.” The Lederers illustrate the area’s increasingly wide appeal — both to city-folk seeking a country haven and Connecticut locals wanting a weekend retreat close to home.
Despite moderately priced homes in many places, the higher end of the market along Connecticut’s coast is seeing strong sales activity, particularly in the most sought-after towns for second home property.
Forty homes priced above $1 million sold between May 2014 and May 2015 in the so-called Golden Triangle, the six towns along the Connecticut River, including Old Lyme, Old Saybrook and Essex. That’s a rise of 17 percent from the same yearearlier period, says Nancy Mesham, a broker at Coldwell Banker in Old Lyme.
“A lot of buyers, especially from New York, may have looked at this market a year ago and decided to wait,” says Mesham. “But now you get the feeling they are much more motivated to purchase something that fits their lifestyle and budget.”