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The Boston Globe
Enjoying their chicken on the sea
The Jost family sits down for dinner on their boat in Boston Harbor where they live. The Jost family sits down for dinner on their boat in Boston Harbor where they live. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)
By Jane Dornbusch
Globe Correspondent / July 29, 2009
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CHARLESTOWN - It’s probably a common fantasy, right up there with running a cafe or buying a winery: living on a boat. For the Jost family, this dream became a reality. Cheryl and Jeff Jost and their children, Zach, 15, and Becca, 14, live in Constitution Marina on a 49-foot Gulfstar they named Galileo. And not just in summer. They’re in residence in Boston Harbor year-round.
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* One cook’s best dish Family enjoys their chicken on the sea
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A little over a year ago, the veteran boaters - they always spent a lot of time on board during the warmer months - sold their big Milton house and made the decision to be “live-aboards,’’ which means become year-round boat dwellers. “We had always intended to move onto the boat when the kids went to college,’’ says Cheryl, an optometrist who now walks to work at her Cambridge Street office. “But they said, ‘Why wait? Why not do it now?’ ’’

So the Josts, who’d lived aboard as newlyweds, took the plunge, so to speak. Says Zach: “I don’t miss anything [about living on land]. My friends think it’s sick.’’ (For those who don’t speak teen, that would be a term of approbation.) And Becca has sworn she will never live on land again.

“It’s been so much better than we expected,’’ says their mom, who feels as though she’s stumbled upon a hidden way of life in the heart of Boston. To her knowledge, they’re one o

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Even to Save Cash, Don’t Try This Stuff at Home
By SUSAN SAULNY

CHICAGO — Saving money never cost quite so much.

When the toilet in Carol Taddei’s master bathroom began to break down a few months ago, she decided it would be cheaper to buy a new one than pay for repairs. Ever frugal in this dismal economy, Ms. Taddei, a retired paralegal, then took her economizing a step further, figuring she could save even more by installing the new toilet herself.

Initially, things looked good with the flushing and the swishing. That is, until the ceiling collapsed in the room below the new (leaky) toilet. Rushing to get supplies for a repair, Ms. Taddei clipped a pole in her garage. It ripped the bumper off her car, and later, several shelves holding flower pots and garden tools collapsed over her head.

“It just kept getting worse,” Ms. Taddei said, ruefully describing what came out to be a $3,000, three-day renovation at her suburban Minneapolis home, finished by a professional from Mr. Handyman, a home repair service that takes emergency calls.

With the sour economy has come a class of ambitious do-it-yourselfers who are tackling things that, before the days of rampant penny-pinching, might have been left to paid professionals. An unlucky few like Ms. Taddei have learned that being thrifty sometimes comes at a high price and can bring along with it a new scourge of the times: saver’s remorse.

“Oh, tell me about it,” Ms. Taddei said. “Sometimes it’s better just to bite the bullet.”

Certain things are almost always true when times are tough, experts say, and they are not all bad. People drive less to save on gas, so there are fewer car crashes. People smoke less because cigarettes are expensive. Diets simplify and, sometimes as a result, become more healthful. Stress levels, on the other hand, tend to increase.

And while there is no national database that tracks do-it-yourself home injuries in recessions, experts say that there does seem to be an increase in the kind of accidents and mishaps that come with spending mo

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Have Mop, Will Travel: A New Wave of Caretakers
By FINN-OLAF JONES

IF the image of a caretaker brings to mind a creepy, solitary character from the pages of Stephen King or Harold Pinter’s 1960 play, meet a new breed who travels the world fighting rodents, loose roof tiles, burst pipes and other harbingers of second-home apocalypses.

The economic crisis may have upended many people’s lives, but some intrepid souls have found that leaving the rat race — voluntarily or involuntarily — can mean living in a dream house, with mortgages, taxes and utilities already covered.

Last June, Kevin Shea, a former management consultant with an M.B.A. who once counted the Ford Motor Company as a client, and his wife, Alicia, decided to leave the corporate world in search of adventure. They created a Web site detailing their skills in home repair, gardening, cooking and animal care, in the hopes of landing a caretaker’s job. So far, the Sheas, who are from Belmont, Mass., have found positions at a 20-acre estate on the Connecticut River and a seaside property in New Hampshire, where they fished from the dock.

“We are building references for more exotic destinations,” said Mr. Shea, 59, citing a desire to go to places where he can pursue fly-fishing and skiing. “We took our professional attitudes and incorporated them into getting good places to take care of.”

He added that, “If you’re just in it because you want a free place to stay, you’re not going to build trust, which is what you need to get the job."

Gary Dunn, the publisher of The Caretaker Gazette, a newsletter and Web site that matches property owners with caretakers, said it was a “boom time” for the business. The Caretaker Gazette has over 11,000 paid subscribers, up more than 10 percent from two years earlier, he said.

“Homes that used to be flipped quickly are now empty for extended periods of times,” Mr. Dunn said. “Years ago, we didn’t hear from real estate investors. Now they’re advertising. Meanwhile, we have more people who have lost their jobs who want to

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Peace, Quiet and Pajama-Clad Jazz
By STEPHEN P. WILLIAMS

FRANKIE FOYE styles hair for a living, traveling to studios and locations around the world to make models look just right in fashion advertisements for such clients as Bergdorf Goodman and Victoria’s Secret.

Since she spends so many days working with big crews in noisy photography studios filled with blaring music and inordinate demands, she has made her large one-bedroom apartment in the West Village a serene, private sanctuary.

“I hardly ever have people over,” Ms. Foye said recently, as light poured into her living room and kitchen from the three huge windows.

She doesn’t want any bad energy messing up the carefully curated mood of the high-ceilinged rooms. “I love living alone,” Ms. Foye said.

Despite her penchant for quiet, she sometimes colors and cuts the locks of very good friends, or very interesting people, at home. In one corner of her eat-in kitchen, with its ancient painted cabinets and original hinges and door pulls, a chair sits in front of a tall custom-made mirror.

“This is the salon,” she said. “Debbie Harry has had her hair done here. Molly Sims. Jennifer Nettles, the singer from Sugarland. Another singer named Patty Griffin.”

Ms. Foye, who changed her name from Mary Ellen to Frankie years ago, just because it sounded right, grew up far from New York, and celebrities, in Manchester, N.H.

She was the last of seven children, raised by her father after her mother died.

“I’m third-generation Black Irish in America, and my father even had a trace of a brogue,” she said.

After high school, she studied hairstyling in Manchester, and found she had a real talent for the trade. Seeking to live in the broader world, she got a job at a high-end salon on Newberry Street in Boston. It was boring.

“One day I walked by another salon with amazingly high-energy music blaring, and the people looked like they were having a good time and I thought, ‘Wow, a black salon,’ ” Ms. Foye said.

She got a job there, and learned a whole new approach to hair

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home nyc

Where have all the homebuyers gone? Buyers are asking where have all the realistic home sellers gone. Sellers need to look in the mirror and ask what they would pay for their own home. The kitchen you renovated in the 80’s looks the same way the 50’s kitchen looked to you when you bought the house 30 years ago. That modern 70’s bath with groovy tiling is now just an eyesore. While wall-to-wall carpeting was all the rage, it-is-no-longer, ditto for the wallpaper. Moreover, that knotty pine lower level you entertained your friends in back in the day is now just a musty basement. The truth is, someone is buying the bones of your home, and they want to create their own memories. You don’t like the cabinets, the tile, the siding or the paint colors on your next home either. Buyers don’t care about your daughter’s wedding in the backyard and how beautiful it was. Honestly, when was the last time you spent money on the garden other than weekly maintenence. We cannot be in both a seller’s market and a buyer’s market at the same time. It is highly unlikely that you will sell your home for a premium and buy your next house at a discount. If your home is not selling, it has nothing to do with your Realtor’s marketing plan. It’s the price; price melts away objections.

Every house has a fair market value; the price point at which a buyer is willing to pay and a seller is willing to sell. Both parties need to be realistic, but in a buyers market the sellers need to be more flexible. As a seller, is it more beneficial for you to sell your home now or ride out this cycle and wait for the next boom? Does it make sense to list a home with a fair market value of $1.5 million for $1.650 and wait until next year or beyond to get the higher price? Do you think the market will be 10% higher next year? The catch is- the market needs go up 20% because your house is listed 10% above fair market value. Just ask the sellers who finally sold their homes after a year on the market what their early offers were, the price they found insulting;

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Branding the Family
By PENELOPE GREEN

THE christening of the Novogratzes’ seventh child, Major, took place on a bright, hot Saturday evening last month at the family’s new concrete-and-steel town house just south of the Richard Meier towers on the West Side Highway. Major’s father, Robert Novogratz, greeted his guests wearing tinted aviators and a navy blue jacket with white piping over a guayabera, a look that recalled a young Robert Evans with a bit of Elvis thrown in. “Isn’t this sick?” he said with the slightest Southern drawl.

To reach him, you had to pick your way through the electrical cords and equipment of the television crew that had spread out through the house and onto the deck upstairs, filming the family for a Bravo channel reality show that will air early next year. Outside on the deck, Suzanne Vega sang a song she wrote for her daughter, Ruby Froom, 14, who also performed that night, singing the Beatles’ ballad “In My Life” with a friend, as the camera crew — there were three or four of them — struggled for space in the crowd.

As Mr. Novogratz’s father, Robert Novogratz Sr., a retired Army colonel, noted, “It’s not your typical baptism.” When the family’s publicist shook his hand, he added wryly, “You need a publicist for a christening.”

It would appear this family does, anyway. For the last decade or so, through a series of town house renovations in downtown Manhattan, Cortney and Robert Novogratz, now 37 and 46, were a Gerald and Sara Murphy — the Jazz Age “it” couple immortalized in Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” — for the age of “Flip This House.” Self-made and self-taught, they bought, built, remade and decorated once-distressed or condemned properties with fresh-plucked Art Basel booty, Boffi kitchens and French salvage, which they then sold for large profits and moved on (all the while hosting huge parties and producing multiple children, including two sets of twins).

Bewitched by their model good looks, their Southern just-folksiness (Cortney is from Georgia, Robert grew up mostly

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By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

ANDREW BAISLEY described himself as a “cheerleader for Brooklyn” — at least until a month ago, when the proud Bushwickian decided to take a peek at the Manhattan rental market. Now he has a one-bedroom in Chelsea with outdoor space and a 10-minute commute, all for an “unbelievable” $2,100 a month.

“When you go to Manhattan, there’s an air of selling out,” he says. “I’ve accepted that.”

Great Recession prices are drawing even the most loyal outer-borough dwellers back to Manhattan. The migrants hail from Hoboken, Astoria and the brownstone blocks off Prospect Park, as New Yorkers who found themselves priced out of the gilded isle in the boom years are bidding farewell to long commutes and skinny-jean chic.

Among the lures: $1,600 one-bedrooms on the Lower East Side. Lenient landlords who no longer require security deposits. And an overriding sense that an obscenely overpriced borough is now, well, slightly more reasonably overpriced.

“There’s a part of me that feels like I’m cheating on Brooklyn,” said Keith O’Brien, a 30-year-old in marketing and public relations who recently jumped from a spacious two-bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to a Lower East Side walk-up. “But this was a unique moment in real estate history where renters have the upper hand, which seemed unbelievable a couple of years ago. I realized that it would have been foolish not to start looking at places.”

For an extra $100 a month, Mr. O’Brien — a seven-year Brooklyn stalwart — is now enjoying a trendy location and a six-minute commute, in exchange for losing half of his living space. “There’s no sink in the bathroom,” he said, “but concessions must be made.”

Newly minted Manhattanites range from 30-somethings seeking a professional edge through a shorter commute, to out-of-work recent graduates who think they can get a better deal on the Upper East Side than in the usual post-college enclaves of Williamsburg and Fort Greene.

Numbers on the New York rental market are notoriously unreliable, but recent reports sugge

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Craft House at home with Tom Colicchio
Colicchio is the founder and co-owner of the Craft restaurants and head judge of the television series 'Top Chef.'
Interview by EDWARD LEWINE

Restaurant pet peeve: Don’t touch my napkin. I do not want the server to pick up the napkin and put it on my lap. I know it belongs there; maybe I don’t choose to put it there.

Always with him: Two little rings that come from Guyana and were used as part of a woman’s dowry before marriage. They are on a leather cord around my neck. They just appeal to me, and I don’t know why.

Food aversions: I hate okra and grated mountain yam for the same reason. They’re both slimy.

Worst thing about his kitchen: It’s a New York City apartment kitchen. It’s narrow. I can’t open the refrigerator and the oven door at the same time. But you don’t need to have a Rolls-Royce kitchen to make a great meal.

Why rent? I already own a house on the North Fork of Long Island. So I don’t need a tax break, and I can’t afford to buy the space and the view I am able to rent.

Favorite place in apartment: We have this roof deck, and I love the sunsets and the view of the Hudson River. New York City can be so claustrophobic, but I get to look out at open space.

Morning routine: Up by 7 a.m. Put on a pot of coffee, sit down, turn on CNN, grab a guitar and start playing. My wife, Lori Silverbush, comes down around 9, we spend time together and I leave the house around 10:30.

Worst culinary creation: It was a little potato dish I made that for some reason came out dry and disgusting. We dubbed them the Hingham potatoes, named after the town in Massachusetts where they were made. They were fully inedible.

Most-used cookbook: Recipes tell you nothing. Learning techniques is the key. So I would say Jacques Pépin’s book “La Technique.” I don’t have the copy I had when I was 14, but I have the new edition signed by Jacques.

Collection: Guitars. I have a 1932 Gibson L-1, a 1944 Martin 000-18, a 1963 Gretsch Country Gentleman and various newer guitars. I try to keep t

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Snark Attack
By TERI KARUSH ROGERS

AS unsold properties proliferate and encounters with the scalpel fail to move them, some New York City sellers are being undermined by an often nameless enemy.

Even as they rearrange the furniture and pray for a sale, their apartments are being picked apart online by anonymous strangers.

Brutally frank discussions about specific listings can draw hundreds of comments on sites like StreetEasy, Curbed and Brownstoner, where traffic has increased as buyers and interested observers seek insight into the turbulent real estate market.

Commenters scour these Web sites, attend open houses or study brokers’ advertisements and then post their analyses. Recent postings included these:

“The layout is downright medieval; totally irrational.”

“The penthouse is a joke. Bachelor pad central, but ’70s style.”

“If I am paying 1.6, I want my own washer/dryer in the apt. and to live in a building that doesn’t look like a leftover from the Lefrak housing plan.”

“The bathroom looks like a Chinese bordello.”

“If that apartment’s not ugly, what the hell is?”

“The brokers are doing a huge disservice to the owner of this place. It will sit, sit, sit and die a slow and painfully stale death.”

Reviews of specific apartments are a growing phenomenon. “This is something we’ve just noticed this past quarter — our traffic has gone through the roof,” said Dawn Doherty, the vice president for strategic development at StreetEasy.com, a Web site that publishes detailed information on listings, sales and comparables, and plays host to an increasingly active discussion board called Talk. The site’s page views since last fall have more than doubled, to 10.5 million per month, as users display an appetite for more than just hard data.

“What’s happening now is the numbers aren’t enough,” Ms. Doherty said, referring to the information published by StreetEasy. “People are asking questions they can’t ask their broker, and they’re really interested in the qualitative perspective, in getting opinions of people.”

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THE last time Claire Bigbie, now 30, skateboarded in an empty pool, she was 24. But she can easily conjure the stomach-dropping sensation, the sound of the board rasping on the pool coping, the happy effort it took to carve up to that edge.
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It was a “permission pool” in San Francisco, meaning its owners had given the neighborhood skaters permission to skate there.

Pool skating, for those of you who missed “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” the 2001 documentary about the sport’s early days in the 1970s, emerged in drought-wracked Southern California, when filling a pool was against the law for a time. Early skateboarders found these steep caverns irresistible, irritating the pools’ owners, who saw them as vandals and trespassers.

Later generations of skateboarders, like Ms. Bigbie, consider them legendary. “They were the first wave, and we were the third wave,” she said. “Now skateboarding has gone mainstream, and it doesn’t mean too much.”

Still, for Ms. Bigbie, an interior designer and aesthetic omnivore, and her boyfriend, Jay Shapiro, 33, a skateboarder who is the bass player for Space Vacation, a heavy metal band in San Francisco, skateboarding — its renegade, Zen essence — is a way of life. And pool skating is the apogee.

This is how the empty pool as metaphor and touchstone became a focal point for the tiny Victorian house Ms. Bigbie and Mr. Shapiro bought in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco four years ago. In the backyard, they planned to sink a swimming pool, and never fill it. As a placeholder, they erected a skate ramp that had belonged to a friend and was made, in part, from reclaimed barn siding.

“It was beautiful,” Ms. Bigbie said mistily. “We called it ‘Living the Dream.’ ”

Inside the house, she and Mr. Shapiro dreamed of a bathroom designed to look like a pool, with pool tiles, depth markers on the walls and even cement coping that they would use as shelves. That they achieved the pool as bat

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New fees could chill home buyers
By Kenneth R. Harney / The Nation’s Housing | Sunday, April 19, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Real Estate

Mortgage rates and house prices are down, but new home-appraisal and mortgage-underwriting changes taking effect this month are throwing new hurdles in front of would-be home buyers.

Take Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s add-on fees for loans purchased after April 1.

In some cases, applicants are being hit with extra fees of 3 percent to 5 percent because of the type of property they want to buy or refi, their credit scores, or the size of their down payment.

Some major lenders who sell loans to Fannie and Freddie are going further - tightening underwriting rules beyond what either corporation requires. For example, as of April 6, Wells Fargo, one of the country’s largest mortgage xoriginators, imposed a new minimum FICO credit score of 720 - up from the previous 620 - on all conventional loans purchased through its wholesale system that have less than a 20 percent down payment. It also began requiring a total debt-to-income ratio maximum of 41 percent - down from the previous 45 percent.

Fannie Mae now has an across-the-board three-quarters of a point mandatory fee on all condominium loans, no matter how high the applicant’s credit score. For a once-popular “interest-only” condo loan with a 20 percent down payment and a borrower credit score of 690, Fannie imposes the following ratcheted sequence of add-ons: One-quarter of 1 percent as an “adverse market” fee; another 1.5 percent for the below-optimal credit score; three-quarters of a percent for the interest-only payment feature; and three-quarters of a percent because the property is a condo. The total comes to 3.25 percent extra, which can be paid upfront or rolled into the rate.

On top of the extra fees from Fannie and Freddie, borrowers are now starting to get hit with two sets of cost-raising appraisal rule changes. Fannie and Freddie have begun requiring all appraisers to complete an extra “market con

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Refurbishing Normal
By ROB WALKER

‘NORMAL’ BATHROOMS

Last year, The Journal of Industrial Ecology published a comprehensive analysis of the “consumption drivers of the Danish bathroom boom.” O.K., that sounds pretty esoteric. But the study’s authors, Maj-Britt Quitzau and Inge Ropke, were getting at a bigger idea that’s easy to relate to: How do consumers decide, in our relationship with material culture, what is “normal”? The authors documented how the ways in which some Western homeowners answered that question between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s had some negative ecological consequences.

Clearly our notions of “normal” change as a result of innovations or economic circumstances or even the vagaries of fashion. Quitzau and Ropke were looking at the way people in one country think about one room, but the pattern is familiar. A century ago, having a bathroom at all was “a sign of status,” they wrote. Gradually the bathroom became normal, as did more frequent showering and so on. And around the mid-1990s, a new wave of bathroom remodeling transformed a previously function-oriented and hygienic aesthetic into one of “identity formation.”

Consumers spent more and more time in the bathroom with a new array of personal-care products needing more space. Double sinks offered togetherness; elaborate spa tubs offered escape. Now a showroom of sorts, the bathroom required high-end materials. Additional bathrooms eliminated wait time; even television sets and radios popped up in what was becoming, for some, a “retreat.” Not surprisingly, the cumulative effect included using a lot more water and energy. Observers of the American remodeling business have seen similar trends. One bathroom addition that’s been popular in recent years: “body spray” showers that blast you from multiple directions, a no-doubt luxurious experience that uses a tremendous amount of water.

Today, given that many Americans’ consumption patterns have been affected by the economic slowdown, it’s interesting to consider whether a version of normal mi

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Don’t Even Say the Words
By TERI KARUSH ROGERS

IN the past few years, New York City’s frenzied love affair with real estate fueled a veritable geyser of cocktail party/water cooler/diaper circuit chatter. In these circles, who bought what and for how much was far more fascinating than the mating preferences of celebrities or the dark machinations of Dick Cheney.

Flash forward to the winter and now spring of our proliferating discontent: the median sales prices of co-ops have plunged more than 20 percent in six months with no bungee cord in sight, buyers are abandoning six-figure deposits on new condos, and sellers stranded with underwater properties are feeling like victims of a Ponzi scheme. The toupee is off, and in the flat gray light of the morning after, real estate looks a lot like tech stocks in the aftermath of the Internet boom.

So for those who have invested in it, has real estate become the dirtiest pair of words in town?

“From what I see, it’s not that it’s a dirty word, but that it’s not a word anymore,” said David S. Markus, 44, a former hedge fund manager who owns a co-op on the Upper West Side. “Nobody wants to talk about it. In my building a year ago, people would talk about how much someone listed their apartment for. Today nobody wants to talk about the fact that we have three apartments in the B line that are for sale and none have sold. We’re all in this together and everybody’s apartment has come down in value and nobody wants to talk about it.”

It may be that real estate is more persona non grata than public enemy No. 1.

Susan Bernfield, 44, the artistic director of a nonprofit theater company, bought a TriBeCa loft with her husband in 1996. Most of her friends — artists, architects and people in publishing, a smattering of bankers and lawyers — settled there around the same time, before the colonization of their area by new development. She says that the subject, tenor and frequency of real estate conversations has shifted drastically over the past few months.

Before, she said, most

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When the Real Estate Game Cost $9.95
By JULIE CRESWELL

IN the alternate universe of late-night TV infomercials, Carleton H. Sheets once reigned supreme. Standing against a backdrop of tropical seas and gently swaying palm trees, he promised that viewers, no matter how down on their luck, could soar into the ranks of the super-rich by investing in that most bubblicious of assets: real estate.

“Even if you have no money, no credit and no experience in real estate,” you, too, could achieve financial freedom, he advised in a sonorous baritone that, after mesmerizing insomniacs for several years, gained even greater purchase with viewers during the recent housing boom.

All you needed was Mr. Sheets’s real estate course, available for the low, low price of $9.95. Only five minutes left for this trial offer. Call now. “Why not make this the moment you stop dreaming?” he intoned.

The dream that Mr. Sheets dangled in front of average Joes and Janes was a hand in the game, a piece of the action. When property values began soaring in the late 1990s, so did the frequency of Mr. Sheets’s infomercials. For millions of real estate wannabes sitting in their living rooms, he embodied the bubble as much as Citigroup or Merrill Lynch did.

“He was the king of the real estate infomercial,” says Sam Catanese, chief executive of Infomercial Monitoring Service, a research firm in Philadelphia.

Today, Mr. Sheets presides over some holdings of his own that appear to be troubled, his late-night profile has greatly dimmed, and the world that he so avidly promoted — easy real estate riches — is in shambles.

Even so, he retains a loyal flock of true believers.

“If you write the truth about Carleton Sheets, you’ll make a lot of people mad,” says David L. Hancock of Burlington, N.C., a Sheets devotee who credits his mentor’s training course for his start in real estate investing.

“The truth is, some people take the information and use it and some people are simply lazy,” says Mr. Hancock, who has also appeared in Mr. Sheets’s infomerci

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Houses, Decked Out for a Sale, Are Burglarized
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

PIEDMONT, Calif. — The Sunday open house is a sure sign of spring, a seasonal ritual in which marble-countered kitchens, light-filled master suites, spectacular rear gardens and closets galore are decorated to perfection to draw buyers.

It is a common ploy here and elsewhere to have professional decorators “stage” unoccupied homes that are on the market with borrowed furnishings and appointments to help fetch top dollar, especially now that real estate sales have wilted like a week-old flower arrangement.

But along with fragrant jasmine and wisteria in bloom, there is caution in the air here. The same painstaking efforts to attract buyers have also attracted thieves.

An unusual wave of burglaries has hit unoccupied houses for sale in this affluent 1.8-square-mile bedroom community in the hills east of Oakland, and it is testing the forced cheerfulness of real estate agents who are already reeling. Last weekend, two staged houses were burglarized in nearby Orinda, a wealthy suburb, robbed in the morning hours before planned afternoon open houses.

“It’s brazen,” said D. J. Grubb, the president of the Grubb Company, a real estate agency based in Oakland. “These are highly aesthetic crimes. The thief seems to be someone with very good taste, somebody who knows that mauve is out.”

In Piedmont, the discriminating criminals have made off with bath linens, dressers, upholstered chairs and sofas, table lamps, mirrors and end tables (not to mention the flat-screen televisions). In perhaps the most perplexing incident, the perpetrators stole high-end bed linens, a duvet cover and a metal bed frame from a master bedroom — but left the matching dust ruffle.

“They were clearly interrupted,” said Martha Holstlaw, an agent with Pacific Union, another real estate firm.

Last month, the Police Department in Indio, in Southern California, arrested three people accused of breaking into about a dozen houses for sale in Indio, Indian Wells, Palm Desert and R

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Trying to Replace Brokers With Auctioneers
By TERI KARUSH ROGERS

DROWNING in listings they cannot sell, most New York City real estate agents still aren’t ready to kiss their potential commissions goodbye and welcome the auctioneer to town.

Unless, of course, there’s something in it for them.

Two executives of a low-flying boutique brokerage firm that carved out a profitable niche selling Manhattan condominiums to foreign buyers during the recent boom are starting a technologically sophisticated venture to auction those souring investments online. They will collect a 6 percent commission (split evenly between buyers and sellers) for their efforts.

“The tools brokerage firms are using today no longer work,” said Albert Feinstein, 33, a lawyer and principal broker of New York Business Group who is the managing director and co-founder of the $3 million venture, Bid on the City. “The market is frozen, so brokers can’t put a price tag on real estate.”

Bid on the City is to roll out this week with about 10 Manhattan condo units that will be auctioned in a simultaneous live and online “bidding event” a month later. Power will not be concentrated in a gavel-wielding hand; instead, an engine built by PropertyShark.com will register online and in-person bids and essentially run the auction.

About half of the first group of apartments are newer one- and two-bedrooms belonging to individual sellers who paid $660,000 to $1.375 million within the past several years. Most expect to take losses. The other half belong to developers who will offer apartments at significant discounts from current asking prices, Mr. Feinstein said. He would not identify the developers until the listing agreements were completed.

“We’ve combined a brokerage approach with the bidding component of auctions in an attempt to create an eBay for real estate,” said Vlad Sapozhnikov, 35, the other co-founder of the venture and a senior vice president at New York Business Group.

Under the Bid on the City model, sellers sign a 30-day exclusive listing

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With Advocates’ Help, Squatters Call Foreclosures Home
By JOHN LELAND

MIAMI — When the woman who calls herself Queen Omega moved into a three-bedroom house here last December, she introduced herself to the neighbors, signed contracts for electricity and water and ordered an Internet connection.

What she did not tell anyone was that she had no legal right to be in the home.

Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend’s couch into a newly empty house that sold just a few years ago for more than $400,000.

Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said about a dozen advocacy groups around the country were actively moving homeless people into vacant homes — some working in secret, others, like Take Back the Land, operating openly.

In addition to squatting, some advocacy groups have organized civil disobedience actions in which borrowers or renters refuse to leave homes after foreclosure.

The groups say that they have sometimes received support from neighbors and that beleaguered police departments have not aggressively gone after squatters.

“We’re seeing sheriffs’ departments who are reluctant to move fast on foreclosures or evictions,” said Bill Faith, director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, which is not engaged in squatting. “They’re up to their eyeballs in this stuff. Everyone’s overwhelmed.”

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Omega sat on the tiled floor of her unfurnished living room and described plans to use the space to tie-dye clothing and sell it on the Internet, hoping to save some money before she is inevitably forced to leave.

“It’s a beautiful castle, and it’s temporary for me,” she said, “and if I can be here 24 hours, I’m thankful.” In the meantime, she said, she has instructed her adult son not to make noise, to be a good neighbor.

In Minnesota, a group called the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign recent

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But Manhattan housing prices were driven higher by record earnings and bonuses on Wall Street, and they fell hard when the music stopped last fall.

The quick fall in prices is shown in the experience of Abigail Disney, a philanthropist and documentary filmmaker, who a year ago put her sprawling 17-room co-op on West End Avenue on the market for $13.5 million.

With trophy homes commanding ever higher prices from the titans of finance, Ms. Disney priced the apartment at 20 percent more than she had paid for it only a few months earlier. Harry Belafonte, the singer and actor, had created the huge space many years earlier by breaking through the walls of two smaller apartments.

After a series of price cuts, Ms. Disney has finally found buyers for the property, for just under $7.5 million, a 46 percent discount from her initial asking price. But to make a deal she agreed to restore the walls and convert it back into two apartments and sell it to two buyers.

Despite government efforts to ease credit around the country, the market in New York is being starved by a limited availability of credit, especially for jumbo mortgages, which are loans of more than $729,750. More than half of all apartment sales in Manhattan are above even the expanded limits of conventional mortgages, which carry lower interest rates.

Jonathan J. Miller, an appraiser who prepares quarterly reports on Manhattan, said the market could continue to fall through this year and next, especially if credit remained tight for most buyers. After that, he said, it could take several more years to work through the excess inventory.

The housing recovery will also depend on the state of the economy, which many forecasters say will take a disproportionate toll on New York City before the recession ends. In New York, the financial industry accounts for more than 30 percent of all wages, and at least some of the wages of half of all very high income households, according to the New York City comptroller’s office.

While employment fell nationwide last year,

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Bargain mortgage rates aren't for everybody

By Lynn Asinof, Globe Correspondent | March 29, 2009

With mortgage rates falling below 5 percent in recent weeks, lots of homebuyers and those wanting to refinance their mortgage are deciding that it's time to act.

But many of those borrowers will discover the seductive rates touted in the headlines are out of their reach. Those with less than stellar credit ratings, folks with modest down payments, or those borrowing in the condominium market will find that their best rates are still above 5 percent, sometimes even topping 6 percent. Historically that's not bad, but it's well above the 4.75 percent that they may be expecting.

"A lot of people are going to be shocked, thinking they can get something and then finding out that they can't," says Amy Tierce, regional manager of Fairway Independent Mortgage in Needham. Rates headed back up over the past week, with mortgage websites listing 30-year fixed-rate loans at just over 5 percent. But those rates, too, will be unattainable to many.

Here's why: Consider the impact of a single point in a credit rating on a $417,000 fixed-rate 30-year mortgage with one point paid at closing. Recently, a borrower with a 720 credit score and a 25 percent down payment could have gotten a rate of 4.875 percent, according to Tierce. But drop that score to 719, and the rate jumped to 5.25 percent.

For condo buyers, that one-point difference in credit score would have an even greater impact, with the rate jumping to 5.75 from 4.875 percent. A two-family home? The rate goes up to 6.125 percent from 5.625 percent.

Indeed, the impact of variables such as credit scores, appraisals, down payments, and housing type is making it tough for people like Tierce to ballpark rates at all.

"I have been in this business for 20 years, and there has never before been a time when I couldn't quote you a rate off the top of my head," she says. "Now I can't do it."

Still, there is mortgage money available for those who meet today's more stringent underwr

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Know where sellers are coming from

By Jaci Conry, Globe Correspondent | March 29, 2009

Despite a cool real estate market, the economic downturn has prompted some folks to put their homes up for sale.

For instance, Ann Quilty of Braintree, a licensed attorney who works as a legal recruiter but has decided to become a nurse, is sacrificing to get her new career underway by putting her three-bedroom Colonial on the market.

"I agonized over the decision to sell the house," she said. "But I really feel that it will take a lot of pressure off of myself. I need to be able to focus on my new career. The economy is really, really bad. Who knows what's going to happen?"

A single mother of a 10-year-old girl, Quilty has been taking nursing prerequisite classes over the last year and will enter a clinical program full time in January. Once she sells her home, Quilty plans to rent a more affordable place nearby, to minimize the transition for her daughter and to keep her in the same school.

She admits to being a little emotional about selling her home. "I love the house. It means a lot to me. But I've been telling myself, sometimes you have to take a step back to go forward. I'll buy another house later, after I'm finished with school. Hopefully the economy will be in better shape by then, too."

Quilty, who bought her home seven years ago for $310,000, is listing it at $330,000. "I think it's priced to sell. It's a really cute house in a good school district," she said.

"I'm sure I would have gotten more money a few years ago, but I don't need to make a ton of money on the sale. For me it's about peace of mind."

While people choosing to - or being forced to - sell in a down market would have to be considered "motivated sellers," that doesn't mean they're desperate. And, said some agents, it would be a mistake on the part of buyers to assume they are.

"There seems to be less desperation in sellers' minds these days," said Quilty's broker, Todd Webster, vice president of the South Shore real estate company Success R

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