Schadenfreude

Nobody is immune from the housing crash.

From Bloomberg.com comes Geithner Rents Westchester Home After Failing to Sell:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is renting his home in Westchester County, New York, for $7,500 a month after failing to find a buyer, according to data on the Westchester-Putnam Multiple Listing Service Inc.

Geithner, 47, was trying to sell the brick and stucco Tudor-style home, the listing shows. The house on Maple Hill Drive has five bedrooms, about 3,600 square feet, and an eat-in kitchen with Siematic cabinetry and black granite countertops.

“Careful attention has been paid to the design of every feature of this sophisticated home,” according to the listing.

The home was marketed in February for $1.635 million, according to Scott Stiefvater, president of Stiefvater Real Estate in Pelham, New York. The price was reduced to $1.575 million in May, he said.

The inventory of similar homes for sale in the area may have affected the property’s prospects, said Debbie Meiliken, a broker at Keller Williams Realty New York.

“There was a lot of competition,” Meiliken said. “Sometimes people will put the house for rent if they’re not prepared to sell it and take a loss.”

Home sales in Westchester County fell 41 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to an April 27 statement from the Westchester-Putnam Multiple Listing Service. The county’s median home price fell 14.5 percent to $532,000, the organization said.

As regular readers of EBR know, I have consistently felt that Mr. Geithner was the "bad penny", showing up repeatedly at disastrous governmental/Fed decisions that always and forever benefitted Big Finance. No matter that the companies have since lost their pristine credit ratings, if they are not bankrupt or acquired or in government conservancies.

I suppose it was his AAA credit rating that let him afford such an expensive house!


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