You seldom get to rub elbows with a $200 million producer, but when Keller Williams Scarsdale Team Leader and friend Jen Maher invited me to see the great Ilan Bracha yesterday, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.  If you have never heard of Ilan, he’s quite a story. An emigre from Israel, when he […]

File this under “you can’t make this up.” Whilst confirming the home inspection with a seller client, he filled me in on garage access and then casually said ” oh- don’t mind any free roaming sheep if you see them on the property. The adjoining 98 acre farm is corralling them in.”  Now, after 15 […]

Is a contingent offer at market value?  I have the same conversation over and over as I meet people in the same situation. Case in point: Today I interviewed a very nice couple in a small town just north of Westchester County who expired with their broker last month. I won’t bore you with the […]

I love my team.  The stomach bug domino effect has hit the Faranda household, and I packed it in earlier today with one last thing on my “to do” list undone. A short sale we have listed in Putnam Valley is due to have the electricity turned on for inspections to take place (yes, we […]

Athletes speak of a “good tired” and a “bad tired” after a game, good after a win and bad after a loss. Tonight I am the good kind of tired. 13 months ago I met with a very nice lady in White Plains who called me after a Realtor she was interviewing proposed that since […]

With the weather in Westchester County (presumably) changing as Winter approaches, we in the real estate business have grown to expect a cyclical slowdown in our industry starting around the holidays and stretching into the colder weather. The arrival of autumn has caused anxiety for many a seller, fearing that they’ll sit unsold until the […]

Since so many of us wrote on a local enterprise yesterday for Small Business Saturday, I thought it would be a cool idea for us to put our posts on local small business in one place like so many other themes. Moreover, why blog on local small businesses once a year or once a week? […]

When you hear a name like “Briarcliff Classic and Imported Car Service” you might envision a garage filled with Porches and Fiats with a temperamental guy in a beret acting more like a chef than a mechanic. With BCI, however, you’d be wrong. I remember Briarcliff Classic from when I was a kid in the […]

Today is one of those rare days where I can marinate in the begotten all day with no fear of neglecting chasing the buck. So we’ll have some fun. This is probably boring to most, but Mommy thought it was cute. I agree.  Mark is our spokesman this year. Art Linkletter’s legacy is quite safe. […]

This has happened before, but I have never written about it. Today at my office, right after an appointment with a nice lady who listed her home in Yonkers with me, I was alone and catching up on returning phone calls. Line 2 rang while I was on line 1. Line 2 doesn’t have voice […]

I seem to recall a Twighlight Zone episode where a bigot wakes up one morning and is transformed into the ethnicity that he has been persecuting. That was the first thing I thought of when I read that the law firm of Steven J Baum is closing and laying off 89 employees. The closure comes […]

Quick preface:  In 1997, the brokerage flavor of the month was pre-recorded property hotlines with voice mail. Instead of dealing with a salesperson to get information on  a property, consumers could call a recorded hotline and get the details on the listing pressure-free. They had the choice of hanging up or leaving a message. I […]

There is nothing we like more than an enthusiastic, gung -ho buyer in this market.  There is nothing we like less than a stressed out buyer who makes life hell for all involved.  So, when that gung-ho buyer locks their rate in for 30 days and we haven’t even signed contracts yet, it doesn’t take […]

Any REALTOR association will have the inevitable news on our web page on the passing of a current or former member with some frequency. It is never a happy thing to read, and today’s announcement was particularly significant for me- not because we were very close (we weren’t), but because I knew firsthand what a […]

Like anyone else, I love it when I get a cash offer on one of my listings. That is rare, but it is also nice when we get an offer that has terms including a healthy 20-30% or larger down payment. That doesn’t happen all the time either. What is keeping the lights on in […]

If one were to do a heat map of population density for Westchester, Putnam and the Hudson Valley, they would discover an amazing fact about Philipstown- of all the river communities from Westchester to Poughkeepsie, Philipstown -including Cold Spring and Garrison- is the least populated and perhaps most pastoral river town for 60 miles.  That’s […]

The October real estate closing statistics in the Ossining School district indicate a drop from October of the prior year.  In October 2011, 7 single family homes sold at a median sale price of $410,000.  In the same period last year, 11 single family homes sold at a median sale price of $535,000.  Obviously, this […]

In the current economic climate where deals die so often that we sometimes have to “sell” a listing twice or three times just to get to the closing table, more due diligence and evaluation of buyer qualifications is a serious mandate. Twice in the past month I have seen instances where a pre approval was […]

Late last week, a short obituary ran for Joan McGovern. She was 86 years old and a 50-year resident of White Plains. The Westchester-Putnam Association of Realtors also also ran a short tribute to her, as she was a former licensee with Century 21 Wolff in White Plains. A mother to 13 children, that her […]

In Westchester and the surrounding counties of New York, quite a bit can happen between the acceptance of an offer and contracts being signed. Once an offer is accepted, the buyers still have to do their home inspection and settle those matters before memos go out and contracts are drawn. Even then, there is still […]