Active Rain

Open Sunday, November 14, 2-4pm: 8 Harwood Ave, White Plains, NY 10603 Extremely charming pre-war 2 bedroom, 2 bath Tudor with exquisite period woodwork on a quiet street. Beautifully maintained and landscaped. Lovely flat rear yard with deck. Stately fireplace accented by gorgeous built-in cabinets. Hardwood floors, original chair rail in dining room. Full walkout […]

There are people that have a perception of my car that is in fact quite different from how it really is. It is a nice automobile if I say so myself. I drive a 2008 BMW 528XI that I bought in the summer of 2007. I was 40, and given the amount of time I […]

I have blogged before about Facebook business pages and how they differ from your personal profile. Now, new applications are coming into prominence that can make your Facebook business page even more robust and appealing, such as the Roost application now used by almost 20,000 agents already. What the application does is add a “Home […]

Follr.com is a social business card you can get that is like an online directory of everywhere you can be found, from AIM to Zillow and everything in between: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google profile, Foursquare,Wordpress, you name it. It is developed by Active Rainer Stephen Fells and is the true one-stop shop for those of us who either […]

Price and Terms.  Price. Terms.  I will bet you a 6-pack of Old Milwaukee that if you ask first-time buyers what the term “terms” is that a bunch of them would screw it up, maybe because their buyer agent is a glorified door unlocker who is a payment behind on his car. But that’s another post.  Right […]

In a county where the median sales prices of a single family home hovers around $700,000, affordable home ownership often seems far away. Dutchess or Orange County, perhaps. However, unless you absolutely must have a yard, a cooperative apartment could be you ticket to home ownership without sacrificing proximity to Manhattan. Westchester county has over […]

This past August, Teresa Boardman published a piece on Inman News on how the real estate blog was dead. Her point was more intricate than the tag line. In my view, she was decrying how all the noisy bad content was crowding out the small proportion of quality content. It got a fair bit of […]

This Market Report is for the Yorktown school district and all data is taken from the Empire Access (formerly Westchester-Putnam Multiple) Listing Service. It compares the sales of single family homes from October of 2010 to October of 2009. Prices of Active and pending listings are list price only, as contract prices are not disclosed until closing.  Very […]

This market report is for single family homes in the Croton-Harmon school district. All data is from the Empire Access (formerly Westchester-Putnam) MLS. Contract and asking prices are list prices, as contractual prices are not disclosed until closing.  Croton had 5 closings in October at a median price of $400,000, considerably lower than the $679,000 […]

I got the following email today:  we are withdrawing our offer of purchase on XX Rd.  The reason is the mold problem.  He is hearing that the mold goes right through to the studs and even the beams and he doesn’t want to subject his family to that. I thought this was a good buy and […]

After putting a short sale into contract just a few weeks ago, I was pleased to get a call for the broker price opinion just yesterday. For the uninitiated, a broker price opinion is part of the short sale approval process and I have waited months in some cases for one to be ordered. It is […]

This is for single family home activity in the Briarcliff Manor school district for October of 2010. All information is derived from the Empire Access (formerly Westchester-Putnam) Multiple Listing Service.  Compared to October 2009, Briarcliff Manor sales crushed in terms of transaction totals: 6 to 1. Median price is way down, but for a traditionally light […]

  This market report is for single family home activity in the Ossining school district for October of 2010. All information is derived from the Empire Access (formerly Westchester-Putnam) Multiple Listing Service.  After a poor September, Ossining rebounded nicely with 11 closed sales at a swollen median price of $535,000. Volume was actually down from October 2009, […]

Governor-elect Cuomo, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, Representative Lowey, State Senator Oppenheimer, and Assemblywoman Galef: Congratulations on your election and re-elections today. I didn’t vote for any of you. With the exception of Mr. Cuomo, it was on your watch that I have watched this great republic brought to its knees. I voted for Jimmy McMillan for governor, […]

Yet again, I find myself nodding in agreement with the latest New York Times editorial on the mortgage mess. This has me wondering if I am becoming like so many other NY Times readers, some sort of limousine liberal, anti-business, anti-free market, pro government intervention, lefty. I was always a laissez fair kind of entrepreneur, […]

Well, it’s Halloween, so why not a report on Sleepy Hollow? Yes, there is a Sleepy Hollow, and yes, Washington Irving is buried here. There is an Old Dutch Church, a Sleepy Hollow Bridge, and the high school’s mascot is the Headless Horsemen. Old Sleepy Hollow road is VERY spooky at night, winding along covered […]

On this Halloween 2010, I’ll depart from the typical scary stuff (lawyers, in-laws) and expound on a few lesser spoken of scary things in my beloved industry.  Measurer terror (AKA Time Vampires). The folks who ask to walk through a place two weeks before closing so they can measure every room as I wait for […]

Ossining has always had its share of problems through the years, and among them, since I was young, was always the blighted downtown area. The story goes that Ossining always had a vibrant, prosperous downtown until the early 1960’s, when Arcadian Gardens shopping center was opened on the south side of the village, and all the commerce abandoned Main Street. […]

 Apparently I have missed the latest celebrity news about Charlie Sheen’s recent drug-induced binge where he was found in his hotel room with a porn actress and cocaine, but not his clothes. While the guy on the radio wondered aloud about Sheen’s crazed excesses, it was brought up that he paid the porn chick $12,000 […]