City Versus Country Houses, Millerton Edition

  |  June 7, 2012

Many of you asked us to talk about the pros and cons of buying a piece of upstate New York real estate “in town” versus in the country. Of course, those pros and cons are all relative. Do you want to have neighbors, or do you want total privacy? Do you want to walk to your coffee and morning paper or do you want to shut out the modern world? We can’t really answer those questions for you, except to say that with more land comes more responsibility, and more taxes. With less land comes more social interaction and less peace and quiet.

Let’s look at a village and a rural property in the wonderful town of Millerton, NY, which we’ve covered before. Its assets: close to the Metro-North station, got a nice bike route through it, movie theater, couple of good restaurants. Here’s a village Victorian that caught our eye, for $289,000.

What do you get for that? Four beds, two baths, three floors, on half an acre of land, with property taxes estimated at $5,235. Lots of period detail and some modern updates, though the listing makes it sound like there’s still some restoring to be done.

37 Barton Street, Millerton. $289,000. GMAP.

A comparable house — four beds, three baths, 2,700 square feet — outside of town commands a very different price. This colonial revival is asking $645,000 ($100K less than the last assessment, per the listing), even though it advises buyers to “take it to the next level.”

What it’s got is land — over six acres of it — and views. Is that worth another $360,000, do you think? We think the kitchen needs an overhaul, which must be what they mean by the next level.

122 Charlie Hill Road, Millerton. $645,000. GMAP.

 

 

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