Away, and in the dirt…

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

In the 1968 movie adaptation of John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer, Ned Merrill (portrayed by Burt Lancaster) stands on a neighbor’s poolside terrace in Speedos, gazes out at the Westport, Connecticut suburban landscape, and contemplates swimming across all the backyard pools in the upscale valley to his own grand residence and waiting family, somewhere on the distant horizon of his rapidly waning psyche.  As he proceeds on this symbolic journey throughout the running time of the film, Merrill’s unfortunate personal tale unfolds and the viewer bears witness to an allegorical undoing of a once flush ad agency man (total 1960’s protagonist profession) who has obviously come upon more pressing, dire circumstances in recent months. In the final scene we find a shivering Merrill/Lancaster grasping the rusty gates of a boarded up estate, his own foreclosed home, in total mental cataclysm, alone, and with no apparent hopes of redemption.  Judging from the total nothingness he is left with in these last crumbling moments of the story, he obviously cheated on his wife.

I made reference to this very film just last Friday as my Buyers and I pulled up to a padlocked, once grand executive residence in an affluent neighborhood of Northbrook, Illinois. Before us stood 4,000 square feet of rambling, rat bitten, mold ridden, and overgrown memories plotted on a once bucolic, but irregular, single story setting. The original white exterior clapboard is now green and soaked with moisture, the cedar shingle roof sagging like a sway-backed horse. Shards of broken glass and rusted carriage bolts from half-hanging shutters lay strewn across slick mossy patio pavers while the kidney shaped swimming pool, abandoned except for 5 feet of rubbish and tree limbs and swamp water, sinks quietly into the back corner of the overgrown trapezoid. Ghosts of a late 1960’s cocktail party society hang from the gray, weathered latticework and peer out from the tilting gables above the gutterline; their faint voices and forgotton laughter lacing the early summer breeze. A single wind chime dances somewhere in the backgound.  What a dump.

“Somebody definitely cheated on someone,” I say as I wedge the entry key into the oxidized padlock. The house is not only a foreclosure, it is a foreclosure of a foreclosure.  Literally.  A whole lot of things have to go wrong for something like that to happen.

My Buyer and his wife just stare at me and the house in silence. It definitely showed better on the MLS, I conclude.

“The Swimmer, with Burt Lancaster” I continue, struggling with the padlock…  “He lived in a house like this–or rather, a house like this once was…” 

We decide to walk around the grounds instead of forcing the main double entry open and ultimately happen upon a missing floor-to-ceiling glass panel in the enclosed breezeway leading from the cabana. We creep into the main house and immediately cover our faces. The mold spore count is in the billions.  Still, we are intrigued as we tip toe through room after room of soggy flooring, decaying woodwork and bowing drywall trying to salvage a collective image of how grand the place once was in it’s residential heyday while at the same time, realizing that the whole dilapidated structure could collapse on us at any moment. 

“The value is in the dirt on this one,” I say.

“There sure is enough of it,” replies the wife, face covered now with a Handi-Wipe from her purse. “I’m glad we left the babies with the nanny.”

“By dirt I mean the land value. At $509,000, this place is priced as a tear down,” I say.

“Ya think ?” chimes in the husband, breaking his code of silence for the morning.  We have all been friends for years and in the time that I’ve known them, we’ve submitted contracts on three different foreclosure situations and lost every one in some form of multiple offer or another. Still, we persevere in search of the Under $600,000 North Shore 4 bedroom 3 bath Holy Grail of short sales or the very least, suburban infidelity.  They are also trying to sell their own place, a listing I want no part of whatsoever, for so many different reasons.

“Maybe we should drift away from this whole foreclosure idea and just concentrate on simple divorce situations…you know, before it gets this far,” my client says pointing toward a hole in the ceiling but really, to the whole situation in general. Everything we’ve looked at recently is more or less unlivable. Even the places we lost in negotiation were hardly bargains in the historical sense of real estate. My client wants to find a mini mansion for half a million and back taxes, in a good school district, in move-in condition…immediately after the perfect non-represented cash buyer walks into his Sunday open house and purchases his FSBO for full price…with no contingencies.

“I’ll be sure to enter that into my search criteria the next time I log on….Divorce Pending…Enter,” I shoot back. 

The truth is, to find the above mentioned bargain under $600,000 I’d need to be licensed in a neighboring state; say…Iowa or central Wisconsin—someplace far away from the Lake Michigan waterfront, where the dirt is cheap and any total loss is a much smaller number in comparison.

You see, Ned Merrill lost everything in 1968 Westport, Connecticut dollars; his home, his family, his friends, his profession, and finally in the end, his mind. His personal fall was long and hard given the importance of community status in that Jonesian social climbing era of the mid 20th Century.  Ironically, what he couldn’t seem to lose–in the end–were the memories; the ghosts in the gables, the voices in the wind, the padlocked house on the hill.  It was a Rum Ricky society and those rogues like him, deemed unfaithful and no longer credit worthy, were likewise, no longer welcome at poolside; the tiki torches extinguished forever, just like the stack of uncollectable bank notes in the Foreclosure Department of any local Savings and Loan in America today.

As we pulled away from that last showing I thought about all the houses I ever lived in and how humble each was in comparison to the place we just toured, even in its present state.  The image of its grand past was stuck in my mind. If totally restored, how much could it possibly sell for in say, 2008 Westport, Connecticut dollars?

As a game we started to add up the costs of a total renovation on the drive back to Chicago; kitchen, roof, landscaping, pool…. every detail. An hour later as we parked in front of the For Sale By Owner sign of my clients’ own overpriced condo, we were still counting and refiguring the budget. The number we ultimately reached would have brought both Ned Merrill and  Burt Lancaster to their knees, even at the top of their respective games.  It was a number that would remedy all the mistakes and indiscretions of the past; a number that would get any loan officer fired for even trying to push a package through underwriting in today’s lending environment; a number that made us all consider searching for a townhouse in the city instead, lest we one day find ourselves shivering and standing before our own foreclosed rusty gates in nothing but swimwear…