From Bloomberg
Second-quarter sales volume dropped 29 percent and the median price fell 11 percent to $735,000 from a year earlier in the resort communities on the East End of New York’s Long Island, Suffolk Research Service Inc. said in a report today.
Housing prices for high end properties, especially in Manhattan and in the resort areas of Long Island has been somewhat resistant to the market crash until now. We’re seeing signals now that no where is safe from the deflating housing bubble.
This was another pleasant summer afternoon spent exploring houses in Babylon Village. We weren’t the only ones out and about. At each of the houses we went to we ran in to at least one other couple there looking for their dream house.
Time begins to draw short for me and my wife. Our baby is due at the end of September and we need to make a decision out our apartment lease about a month or two after that. We made some tentative plans about what we’ll do if we have to stay in Fairfield for very long after the baby is born. Most likely we’ll rent a storage unit and make more space for ourselves by transferring as much non-essential stuff to the unit as we can. Storage units aren’t cheap, but they’re much cheaper than buying the wrong house.
Anyway, on to the houses.
Sometimes you walk into a house and you see the story of the place right away. 24 Smith is a big, old Victorian built some time in the 19th century when Babylon was still a going concern as a resort town. The rooms are big, the ceilings high and the place has tons of charm.
Unfortunately, nobody has done much taking care of the place in a long, long time. The paint on the doors and moldings are cracked and peeling. Cheap, brown paneling covers many of the walls, making you wonder what scary damage is being hidden. The kitchen is very very old, although not original, and the bathrooms are in bad shape. Every room in the house is filled with junk. The very large yard has gone pretty much wild and the garage looks like it’s ready to fall down on the owner’s 70’s-era Corvette.
This could be such a beautiful house. It’s sad to see it in this condition. Finding someone to buy this place is going to be a challenge. Not only would you need someone who could handle the purchase price, still high at $625K, they’d need to be able to spend well into the six figures to renovate the place.
This is a very nice split colonial, way up on the very northern edge of Babylon school district. In fact, it’s so far north that it’s outside of the Village proper.
We liked this house a lot. I really liked the split-level layout. On the ground floor, the family room and an office/bonus room were on one level and the kitchen, dining room and living room were on a higher level, then there were stair leading to the actual second floor where the bedrooms were.
The kitchen has been recently redone, but it’s very small. The current owners bought the place for $400K in February of ‘07 and that’s obviously one of the first things they did. The house has been semi-renovated, but is still in need of some work. The house needs to be re-sided and some of the older windows replaced.
The backyard is nice and big. It’s also split-level, with retaining walls separating off parts of the back yard. Unfortunately, the new owners put in a large, oval, above-ground pool. If we bought the place, that would have to go immediately
It’s a nice place, but a little pricey for us at $429K. Babylon schools are good, but its location puts it well out of walking distance to the train or to anything in the Village.
This one wasn’t technically an open house. We called the listing agent and asked to see it. The property belongs to an estate. The home wasn’t properly maintained for years and then it laid empty for six months after the previous owner passed away as his sons were figuring out what to do with the place. Fixing up the place and cleaning it up for showing is obviously going slowly. When we toured the house, every room was still filled with the deceased occupant’s junk.
The place is in pretty bad shape. In my opinion, it’s a livable house if it was cleaned from one end to the other. My wife is of the opinion that it needs a new kitchen, bath and carpets before we could even think of moving in and it’s hard to argue the point. The yard is a disaster and the deck off the back feels like it’s falling apart.
The house itself it rather oddly laid out, but spacious for an inline ranch. It’s worth thinking about if the owners were willing to take a significant lowball, but at $349K it’s pretty much a non-starter.
I was thinking about this last night and decided to see if Comedy Central had the video in their online archives. There was a bit of a stir from BNL’s management after this piece aired. The Daily Show people never got approval to shoot on site. Someone at the show knew someone at the let them in to film.
I knew both of the Brookhaven “scientists” in this video. They probably both would have been disciplined for this had they not both been planning to retire shortly after.
Newsday does a little article about Southard’s Pond here in Babylon.
It is the 100 acres of woodland maintained between Park Avenue and Sunrise Highway in the middle of Babylon Village: Southards Pond Park.
It is a segment of the greenbelt — one-eighth of a mile long and one-quarter mile wide — extending from Argyle Park in the south to Belmont Lake State Park in the north, but unlike those parks, which are cultivated extensions of human-designed environments with paved sidewalks, vegetation planted and maintained, playgrounds and sculpted spillways — Southards Pond Park is deliberately kept as a well-tended pathway through an otherwise untamed natural environment.
Bob Grover, a director of environmental services with Greenman-Pedersen Inc. and an avid birder, describes the area as unusual in its variety of birds because of the variety of bird-friendly environments, including marshy wetlands, small streams, wooded wetlands and a large pond, each with its own attraction for distinct bird species.
Read the rest here.
Just as an aside, Newsday’s website is just terrible. I have my RSS reader set to their “Long Island” feed and this didn’t show up there. The only way I found out about it was through a Google Alert. Shouldn’t there be an easy way for me to look at news that’s specifically about my town or county without having to troll through their entire, badly designed site?
The wife and I went to two open houses on Sunday. There were a lot to choose from, owing in part to the nice weather and the beginning of the spring glut. As usual, though, the pickings were slim for us. This is is due in part to the fact that we’ve narrowed our search parameters even more. With a baby on the way, we’re not even considering any house that’s not in the Babylon school district.
This one has been on the market for a few weeks now. It’s on Locust, so I drive by it fairly often on my way to the gym. I’ve had a pretty good look at the outside. It’s an attractive house on a modest corner lot and is in pretty decent shape.
It’s a pretty big house for the lot. The back of the house is maybe ten feet from the end of the backyard, although there’s usable yard space on either size of the house.
The inside of the house was is good shape. There’s been a lot of work done in the past few years, unfortunately a lot of it isn’t to my wife’s taste. The kitchen was nicely done, but the master bath, and to a lesser extent the second full bath, isn’t to our taste at all. It’s really worse than if the bathrooms were old and crappy.
One other thing I noted about this house is that it’s crammed with stuff from one end to the other. The garage is packed with stuff as is the funished basement and one of the bedrooms upstairs.
I’m going to keep my eye on this one. I think the bathrooms pretty much rule it out, but it’s otherwise a solid house and would suit our needs otherwise.
When the wife and I first saw this home pop up on MLS, we thought it was pretty overpriced. It was listed as a four bed, one bath house, no garage, on a a very small 40×83 piece of property. But the pictures showed some charm, it’s close to the train and you never know.
Once we saw it we knew that it wasn’t just somewhat overprices, it’s ridicuously overpriced. Even the realtor offered that she’s been trying to get the owners to drop the price a bit. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that at an open house.
First of all, it’s a three bedroom house and the bedrooms are kind of small. I’m not sure how they get to four bedrooms unless they’re counting the enclosed porch as a bedroom. And second, the house directly faces a giant, ugly, concrete building with a huge rollup door. I’m pretty sure that’s part of an LIRR train yard. Who wants to come out of their house every day and look at that across the street. Ugh.
The rest of the house was decent, if unspectacular. The kitchen has been recently redone. The counters and backsplashes are an icky-looking granite. The carpets in the bedrooms have been pulled up to reveal beaten up hardwood floors.
This is a house with potential, but the big, train building across the street is pretty much a deal breaker.
I got this from The Consumerist. In Stockton, California, the mortgage crisis has resulted in waves of foreclosures, creating a virtual ghost town of empty homes in a former real estate boom area. Houses that once sold for $700,000 have trouble fetching even $200,000 and many houses stand empty without a prospective buyer in sight.
Marketplace’s Tess Vigland talked with two families in the area, the Sinclairs and the Fiddlers, and how they’re dealing with the situation. The Fiddlers are sticking it out, figuring that eventually the low housing prices will draw people back into the area. The Sinclairs, on the other hand, have given up. After months of scrimping and saving to make their ever increasing payments, they’ve simply stopped paying their mortgage.
Sinclair: We went through months of being skinflints, because we knew that we were going into the red, so we didn’t buy anything. All the sudden, we had a bank full of money and we’re living rent-free, but we know that’s not really our money.
Vigeland: How does that feel?
Esmeralda Sinclair: Great! Like he said, we were so tight with money…
Dan: It does feel great, because all the sudden, we feel like we have a little margin now where we can go out to dinner, get a babysitter…
Vigeland: But you’re not paying your mortgage. You’re not paying the biggest obligation you have. How does that feel good?
Esmeralda: We already went through the guilt. his is really what we need to do, not what we wanted to do, but what we need to do.
Read the rest of the story here
Here’s an old postcard my wife bought on eBay. It shows the front of The Watson House, an old hotel on Fire Island Ave in Babylon. The postmark is 1914.
…the Watson House, beautifully located on Placide Avenue is one
of the largest, and in its various appointments probably without
a rival, the finest hotel on Long Island. In size it is one
hundred and thirteen feet on the front, by forty-seven feet
deep, three stories high, with a cupola twenty feet square.
The parlors are elegantly fitted up with rich furniture, and
the dining room capable of seating two hundred persons. The
sleeping rooms are eighteen feet square, with ceilings twelve
feet high. The house is lighted by a two hundred light automatic
gas machine on the premises. Lawns, gardens,
croquet and cricket grounds, occupy about eight acres surrounding
the house.
–Historical and Descriptive Sketches of Suffolk County by Richard M. Bayles (1874)
I upgraded the site to WordPress 2.5 today. I also figure that while I’m kicking the tires I’d try out a new look. The green background was interesting, but I think a nice, clean look suits the blog better.
The masthead picture is Argyle Lake. I’m not sure I really like it. I might go wander around Babylon this week with my camera and look for something better.
So I logged on to MLSLI a couple days ago and it appears that they’ve updated their search function. The search is now a little more Web 2.0-ish with some Javascript behind the scenes changing the town search options based on what county you pick. On the old search you had to select County and Search Type, then click through to a second page so you could pick your towns and other search criteria. Now you can run your entire search from one page. Welcome to 2004 guys. Well done. Unfortunately, if you don’t link to a house properly you get a page full of Cold Fusion errors, but one thing at a time here.
Unfortunately, as the title of the post says, the place still looks like ass. In fact, it doesn’t look all that different than it did back in 1998 when I worked on it.
Way back in 1997/98 I worked for the now-defunct Long Island Savings Bank as a web programmer and consultant. LISB had a contract with MLSLI to host and update MLSLI.com and ended up doing a lot of that, although I didn’t do any of the basic design. Please don’t blame me for that.
Sadly in all this time, with zillions of web hits under its belt, MLSLI still looks like something I would have been embarrassed to put on my CV back in 1998. You’d think they could hire a graphics guy or something.
Oh well. Baby steps people. Baby steps.
I’ve noticed some new user registrations lately. If you’re a real person, welcome! If you’re a bot or a spammer, you will be deleted.
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