Waynesword for September/October, 2009
Saratoga Potpourri
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“I’ve got a Mouthful of Diamonds,
and a Pocketful of Secrets…”
Phantogram, at the Final Stretch Festival, Saratoga Springs
I’ve said it before, but I like recurrent choruses: September is my favorite month, in many ways. Then October is gorgeous in an earthly and mystical palette of its own, and puts us right on the cusp of basketball season, so that’s not so bad either.
The nights are now chilly in upstate New York, great sleeping weather, and crispy fresh air, but the sun warms the morning quickly each day, at least early in the month. The condensation soaks the greenery and the gardens each night so that even when there is no rain you don’t have to water, really. Our area seems so fecund and colorful this time of year, and we no longer take for granted any summery days that remain in the season. Everyone around here complained that the summer was terrible, weather-wise, but to me that only seemed to apply to July; I thought August was great, and we picked wonderful days to visit both the New England Coast (at Misquammicut Beach, Rhode Island), and Lake George (way up north near Roger’s Rock). My wife always thinks it goes by too fast, but to my mind the length of summer this year was just right.
We commemorated it with a summer’s end sleepover in a tent out back for my 11 year old daughter and four of her close friends (lots of yin energy there, as they danced around the backyard giggling and shrieking past midnight—sorry neighbors…) on the Friday night before Labor Day. We followed that with a couple of family nights together at the Final Stretch Downtown Music Festival 2009. Since we had skipped most of the past year’s celebratory events on Broadway due to conflicts of schedule or sheer exhaustion, it was fun for a change to leave our bucolic setting behind and join in with the Urban Street-Fair feeling.
One revelation to come out of that was the source of the quote above—a local duo beguilingly named Phantogram—whose music I’d heard before on the radio (WEXT, 97.7 FM for devotees of original,
independent, commercial-free programming, thank you very much, Chris and Dave…), along with a host of other local musicians from ”the Local 5-1-8” as they like to say on that station. But that first night, with the streets mobbed with several thousand visitors, they stood out. This group features the enchanting vocals & words of Sarah Barthel, who also plays synthesizer, and supplies electronic samples of sound and rhythm tracks, alongside guitarist and composer Josh Carter. They were ensconced in the drive-thru tunnel of The Adirondack Trust Company bank’s main office on a prominent corner of Broadway, and were backed by a multi-media display on screens behind them which accentuated the jittery, danceable, surrealistic shifting of the music they
purveyed. Theirs was not the most crowded venue by any means, but they seemed the most unique of all the performers present that night, though there was plenty of other talent on the streets that weekend. The modest duo is destined for fame, I believe, and the writer for the local “Saratoga Today” echoed that sentiment in an extensive interview with the singer, Sarah. Whereas other local bands will tell the crowd to look for them at Gaffney’s or Bailey’s or The Parting Glass in Saratoga, or maybe Valentine’s in Albany, or Schenectady or Troy clubs, Phantogram mentioned they were playing at a Brooklyn venue, and then a concert hall in Chicago, before embarking on a tour to Sweden, Germany, and other spots in Europe. If they expand their song repertoire sufficiently to achieve concert-length performances, I have no doubt that they have the hooks, the look, the youth, and the distinctive sound to make it big in the music biz at some point soon. We were sorry we didn’t grab a CD of theirs before they sold out.
Transition Time in The Spring City…
The Saratoga Racetrack’s 6-week run is over, as I start this fall piece, and the town reverts to a more collegiate feel. Skidmore is back in session, and our own kids are all back at school and a sense of ritual resumes. In real estate, instead of the calls from casual resort visitors concerning local properties, we are back to dealing with those more serious about pursuing their real estate goals—whether investors, first time buyers looking to gain the tax credit by the deadline, or move-up buyers from starter homes. Hopefully they are now convinced it’s the right time to buy before interest rates inflate again, or prices rise, or both. (I will mention some things below I am doing to strategize as a Buyer’s Agent on behalf of my clients.)
So even though this is supposed to be the more placid time of year, for many reasons, it proved to be anything but.
With three kids in three different schools, the local middle school, the high school, and a private school thirty-three miles away, it seems to my wife and I that we are constantly chauffeuring, shuffling, and schlepping, juggling activities, sports, dances, clubs, open gyms, workouts, and practices, or attending evening open houses, dealing with homework and late meals and really early mornings. We are planning fall college visits for the few free days on the calendar. In a matter of weeks we have gone from lazy, crazy days of summer to hectic, exhausted, shortened and shrinking days of fall. Isn’t it fun being deeply involved in our kids’ lives? We remind ourselves, in another half-dozen years, this too shall pass.
Buyer Agency as My Principal Business…
I don’t usually use this space to tout my skills as a Realtor,
but I feel that, since leaving the ego-driven world of RE/MAX three years ago and going out on my own, I have kept my light too much under a bushel.
I have not had a Lot of high-profile listings over the past year or two, but I have shepherded a slew of wonderful buyers through transactions on some fine properties and budget-minded bargains during that time. Generally I have a half-dozen to a dozen active buyers (both singles and couples) working with me at any given time, and frankly, I would love more.
With them in mind, or sometimes with No One in Particular
in mind, I am constantly scanning the hotsheets on the computer for new listings, back-on-markets, and price reductions, and setting appointments to preview a full cross-section of available listings, in Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, Wilton, and all surrounding areas in the County, or wherever I roam. As a rookie in the business I never understood why good, veteran, agents went to see properties without customers along for the ride—but now I know it sharpens market knowledge to do so. Leaving your business card behind as the first one to visit a certain listing often feels like a bee visiting a fresh flower, though you can’t always make honey out of all of them.
The Art of the Offer Presentation
I’m not the only one to preview, I’m sure, as there are a lot of curious Realtors out there sniffing around the new listings, but once my clients get serious about a certain place, whether intended domicile or ostensible investment, I make a point of heavily researching relative pricing of similar properties, from the buyer’s point of view. As a listing agent, one must, in our business, look for the “highest and best value” in aiming for a price, but the Buyer’s Agent can be committed to achieving the lowest permissible price on behalf of their client, and thereby restoring some balance and sanity to a still somewhat-overpriced and often unrealistic or naïve market. In the hot markets of 2003-2006 in these parts, the only questions for a buyer were: Does it work for you? Is it within budget? How strong an offer do you want to make?
Now the tables have mostly turned and the question is more like: If you like it, at what price do you like it? The buyers frequently hedge their bet by asking me, in effect: How low can we go in on this… WITHOUT upsetting the Seller? The answer to that lies in how much in demand the property might be at that moment, versus how motivated the Seller is, how long the property has been on the market, et cetera. One never knows until the offer is put together and presented, unless the listing agent is authorized to detail how badly the Seller wants to see a contract on their property.
The extra step I take is to write a narrative with each offer,
explaining the buyers likes and dislikes, discussing who they are and what their intentions are, and how much work they see that needs to be done, and what the square footage value will be at time of purchase, versus what it will be at the end of updating and improvements. I am careful not to let any of my clients own the most expensive home of its kind in any neighborhood, and even in the overheated markets I gave cautious advice in this regard. For investors, they need to know they are getting a price where the rents can at least break even on the mortgage and expenses they will face, and this sometimes becomes harder to negotiate than with emotionally-attached residential Sellers. My arguments and rationales do not always work, but I usually provoke the Sellers to understand more fully the Buyer’s point of view on their property.
Many Buyers themselves do not understand the virtues and
talents involved in Buyer Agency—they tend to paint all real estate agents with the same brush—but the comparative analysis process and subsequent negotiations DO require a unique set of skills, as opposed to
marketing a listing and hopefully awaiting an offer or offers to come in.
For more specific details on this process, or a “wants and needs” analysis of your own specific situation, email me at my new, simpler, address in cyberspace: wperras@yahoo.com
Or else call me—my cell is always on: (518) 316-6420—and I am at my downtown Saratoga Springs office at SPA Realty most mornings at (518) 587-9278.
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October Underway…
Now the warm weather of September is already fading in the rearview mirror as I conclude this month’s Waynesword piece. There was a brief few weeks there when the live plants on the deck and colorful perennials in the gardens co-existed with the orange-and-brown dried autumn decorations my wife puts out to prep for the Hallowe’en season. Now the live blooms are mostly history, and earth tones are taking over from the purples/reds/and yellows of just last month.
I am ardently studying Suzee Miller’s Feng Shui Paradigms
which relate specifically to many real estate features, and am commencing my Certification work shortly in this regard, to further help my clients, and not coincidentally, myself. I’m reading Alexander Green’s The Secret of Shelter Island as well, and recently concluded a novel by noted Saratoga resident Russell Banks, called The Reserve.
I’ve given up TV watching as an experiment to see if I get more reading and writing done, and improve my productivity mornings and evenings instead of being besieged by news, sports and entertainment at all hours of the day. If I can get a manuscript of my own finished this winter in and around all my work assignments and kid-chauffeuring, I’ll know that I should have joined the 2% minority who eschew the television tube a long time ago.
What’s Up In The Market?
My feeling is that the tax credits should be extended for the good of the house-hunting consumers who have not opted to buy quite yet, and who weren’t anxious to close on a new home purchase just before the Christmas or Holiday Season, but I doubt that the December 1st deadline will change, despite the efforts of Realtors and other lobbyists to persuade the government to continue those incentives. Alas, many people felt they were being pressured to “beat that deadline” and had not found housing that appealed to them enough to do so. The continued all-time low interest rates should be enough of a motivating factor for such buyers, but some people just can’t be pushed unless they find exactly what they want, others think prices are still too high for their incomes to bear, and some are just destined to keep on renting.
Savvy investors know that the season is here for bargain hunting—both commercial and multi-family money-makers are out there for the taking, and the competition is minimal right now in these areas. With the Global Foundries project (a $4.2 Billion dollar project)—the largest commercial construction project in the nation right now—currently underway in the central core of Saratoga County, I am asking my investor clients to take a five-year snapshot of the economy and look ahead at how robust it should be after 2012 when that chip plant is up and functional, spawning satellite businesses in its vicinity as well.
Condos, however, continue to proliferate, and stagnate. More are built or underway in Saratoga proper than can seemingly be absorbed in the next year or two. There are over 100 units in the $500K.+ range available or being built right now in the City of Saratoga Springs, NY, and with multiple projects having hit the down-market at the same time, the glut of condo product is clearly a problem, though few people (other than Saratoga’s native population) in the real estate world will admit it out loud. Not only has the upper-end market in general been suffering a bit in the entire Capital District, but the second- and third-home buyers are few and far between. In addition, financing rule changes on condos and such have required higher down-payments and less-leveraging than in years past. The unfortunate spectacle of several large-scale projects which have changed the face of Saratoga’s downtown while remaining largely uninhabited may be with us awhile.
When I first got into the business in the late ‘80’s, the townhouse market for starter-home buyers was similarly overbuilt, over-supplied, and undersold. There seemed to be a myriad of them in sprawling developments with lawns of sand and weeds—these are now the civilized, mature neighborhoods of Luther Forest (nearby the aforementioned Chip Plant, 20 years later), Deer Run in Ballston Spa, and Travers Manor, just west of Saratoga’s center, among many others
in the southern part of the County. Slowly the prices came down and bargain prices prevailed for a few years, and many units were bought by investors who rented them out at a profit due to the low acquisition costs, and eventually the prices crept up through the 90’s and jumped up since then, and no one remembers that mini-crisis except the builders and agents who went through it.
The problem with the condo glut, as I see it from my primitive view, is that they are not so easily assimilated, now or later. The prices were intended for the elite 10% at best, and there are not enough liquid buyers in that stratosphere who are likely to “scoop up” the deals that may arise—it’s not like these condos will ever be construed as “starter homes” no matter how much they are reduced. They will neither be purchased in bulk by investors looking to rent them out—the rents here are certainly not Manhattan-level, and would not justify breaking even on 500K or 700K units, not at this point. So how long will these grand facades remain unfinished? Time will tell, and I can’t even guess. For some builders, 2012’s target date for the completion of Global Foundries first plant can’t come quick enough. By that time it may not seem that we ever had a glut here at all. Build them and they will come… eventually…especially if there’s a $1.6 billion tax incentive attached.
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On the bright side, a block or 2 or 3 away from some of the unfinished brick-and-window monoliths, the Saratoga City Center is undergoing a massive renovation of its own, also roughly 20 years after its inception, while adding a considerable amount of enclosed space where before there was open courtyard and brick column’d ornamentation. From the artist’s conception I’d seen in The Saratogian, the new southern façade will be quite an improvement over the institutional blandness of the current structure.
There is also a controversial Recreation Facility being erected on what had been the site of the Southside playground, between Vanderbilt and Jefferson Avenues, a block or so south of Lincoln Ave., much to the delight of Letters To The Editor editors, who never lack for invective on both sides of the subject: Should it have been built at taxpayer expense or not? The next Mayoral election may well be a referendum upon the subject of how tax and bond monies are being spent, or simply how many local citizens are for or against the ongoing project. I find it amusing that mayors past and present from both sides of the political aisle are being blamed for this, but I’m an outsider, a fringe observer from Greenfield, so my opinion matters little.
Both of the above projects should be complete before next spring, we are told.
SPAC—the crown jewel of the Saratoga Park complex—
reported “breaking even” on the past year’s performances, which was seen as a tremendous accomplishment in the current economy, and the fifth year in a row SPAC has stayed out of the red.. Most retailers and restaurateurs also reported a successful summer season, so the proverbial sky—aside, perhaps, from the world of newly-built condos-- is not falling, overall, here, as it continues to do in some bleak locales.
For anyone who tells you the market is perfectly rosy, however, that would be highly suspect, and I would think they were
self-aggrandizing a bit. Form all reports, anecdotal and statistical, that I can see or hear, there is still a lot of financial suffering going on, and it is being felt by builders, tradesmen, bankers, loan officers, appraisers, home inspectors, and Realtors as well.
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A Few More Notes on October
Change is in the air.
By mid-October, the hard frost is upon us. Leaves are half blown down before we got the full-effect of the foliage season, at least out back of my house up here on the Middle Grove plateau. The blooms in the gardens, aside from those amazing hardy mums, are totally shot, turned to brown. Broad-leafed plants are drooping and wilted by the 20-degree nights we just experienced.
The Legacy of Peter Paquette & The Metro
Some sad local news came early in the month that local sculptor and former owner of the phenomenally successful Saratoga night club dubbed The Metro, Peter Paquette, passed away after a prolonged bout with cancer. He was the rare artistic soul who also had a great instinct for business, and he turned a somewhat moribund rock’n’roll bar in the late ‘70’s—located at 17 Maple Avenue, between Lake Ave. and Caroline Street—and took it to a level of popularity and enthusiasm for music and downtown socializing that was unprecedented, and hasn’t been matched since. For those who never experienced it in its heyday during the entire decade of the carefree ‘80’s, I can tell you that most every weekend night, the lines stretched for a block or two with club-goers anxiously waiting to get in. There were 3 sections to the massive Metro—there was a front room visible to the street which usually featured local blues/rock/folk acts, and then a backroom—like a throbbing cavern—which was the best dance hall in town, with speakers as big as refrigerators, whirling lights, and great DJs from Skidmore and elsewhere, spinning the nasty prog-rock/dance tunes from that era. I dropped a whole lot of sweat on that floor, as did hundreds, no, thousands of others… with Steve Rosenbaum, later a prominent independent TV producer, and his lovely girlfriend (now wife and business partner) Pam Yoder in the booth from about ’81-’85, there was no better party venue in upstate New York.
But Peter Paquette’s great innovation, to give the club an added level you couldn’t get anywhere else, it seemed, north of NYC— was “Upstairs at The Metro”—where my friend the brilliant keyboardist Carl Landa held sway most every weekend during that gilded era—performing with a shifting list of smoking jazz musicians and sultry chanteuse’s. The place would slowly come to life between 11 pm and midnight, and it was a lot more civilized as a place to drink up there—white tablecloths, sleek waitresses, big windows set in brick walls overlooking the Saratoga scene to the north, south, and east.
But as the musicians, the nights, the crowd, and the reputation of the place combined to heat up, the fiery brand of music conjured by Landa and his crew jus’ grew (to quote almost-forgotten novelist Ishmael Reed), and exhilaration and whopping and hollerin’ would almost inevitably prevail. Whether his foil on a given night was the soulful singer Jill Hughes, or the evocative Charlie Tokarz on sax, flutes, and all manner of reeds—Carl would ramp the music to high intensity one way or another, and the crowd would be howling in delight.
No matter what the season, it did not matter, The Metro was hoppin’—every Friday, every Saturday night it was packed. And the beauty of it was, Peter would only keep it open on those nights. This was genius on a couple of levels—he was only paying for help on nights when they were busy—there were almost NO slow times, or non-peak hours for The Metro—no off-nights when the cash registers weren’t humming. You couldn’t go up on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday night and expect to find anything going on there (with some rare exceptions). But when it was open, you had to pretty much fight to get in.
Peter was always there, though not always visible, sometimes at a table in the middle of it all, other times behind the scenes or up on the third floor, monitoring things from a distance. He certainly seemed to enjoy the scene he had created, and the vibrant life he had brought to a building that had been a sewing machine factory a decade or two earlier. He ran The Metro from roughly 1980 to 1995, at which time he sold the business (but held on to the real estate, smartly), and returned to his first passion—sculpture. After making more money in fifteen years than he ever could’ve as an art professor, much less an artist, he was able to then devote a decade or more exclusively to his art, while the checks from his investments still rolled in. With his Skidmore-graduate wife Melissa he raised and leaves behind a now college-age daughter, a middle-school son, and another very young daughter. His legacy will live on in his amazing art work, and those with a memory of great days at The Metro. I’m sorry I never got to meet with him in the last decade or so of his life—I should have taken the initiative to do so, I realize now, despite his illness. But in my mind, he will always figure prominently in the era of Saratoga Springs that took me from my joyous 20’s to my fatherly 40’s—and helped make it a splendid place to live one’s life. Rest in peace, brother.
THE POIGNANCY OF A SON’S SENIOR YEAR…
For some time now I’ve been casually reading a interesting
series of columns, run in parallel fashion, by San Francisco newspaper writer Stephen Yoder and his son Isaac. Initially most of the columns concerned financial advice and concerns passed on from father to son during his high school years—who’s going to pay the cell phone bill, gas and car insurance expenditures, how to juggle evening and weekend job hours with the demands of the last couple of years of a scholastic career, that sort of thing. Eventually, the columns concerned the search for the proper college for Isaac, balancing cost versus benefits, etc. The point/counterpoint format showed that the father and son often disagreed but had a healthy means of communication and mutual respect. This column had been picked up for syndication by the Wall Street Journal, and was re-printed on Sundays in our local Times-Union
(Albany, NY), and I found myself looking for it each weekend.
Then there was one column that grabbed me more than normal—Isaac had decided to forego part of his summer to take off on a solo venture with his dog in his more-than-10-year-old vehicle, as a kind of trial pilgrimage of independence, before actually going off to college.
His father noted how he and his wife choked up a bit before letting him depart—feeling the inevitability of his liberation, and the apprehension of the unknown risks at the same time.
But Isaac survived, and wrote about, his trial run as a junior version of Steinbech’s Travels With Charlie, which was one of my favorite books in high school. But that was a relatively brief trip, and in this day and age, parents can stay in fairly close touch with their offspring via cell phones and instant messaging and texting, of course, and the separation anxiety can be alleviated somewhat.
The most poignant column, however, and the one that tugged at my heart the most stridently, was the one written by the elder Mr. Yoder when his son—with his car loaded to the brim, this time minus his dog—finally pulls out of the driveway as he heads off to his freshman year at college, The father, in a last minute panic, notes that one of the car’s rear taillights is out, and wants to call out to his son to stop, and return, so they can fix it before he leaves. But he resists the temptation to act in an over-protective manner, and simply waves good-bye with his wife alongside.
The writer is within a year of my age, and his son is just a year ahead of Miles, my eldest child. We are now going through the ritual of college visits and tours and searches, trying to find the best place and the most affordable package for his matriculation. There is excitement mixed with foreboding. There is pride mixed with sorrow. Most of all, in the back of my mind, there is nostalgia for the thousands of miles we have traveled together, both as a family, and Miles and I alone, since he was born. From the trip to Connecticut and Maine we made when he was about 7 months old, to the most recent AAU Tourneys of the past spring—it seems we have been in the car together almost as much as we’ve been home together. Now the months are counting down before he ventures forth in the same solo fashion as Isaac has admirably embarked upon, and it makes the better part of the last two decades suddenly seem way too finite.
I know that when I finally moved away to college, it was a relief and a liberation for me—but frankly, my parents were nowhere near as involved in my life as we have been in Miles’s, and I did not have a private school background to prepare me for what I would face in college. We’ve prepared him as well as we possibly could have (though we have almost a full year left to go), and yet it still seems hard to believe that he will be ready to take on the challenges of life on his own. I can see why many people tend to keep their kids close at hand— Siena, U. Albany, St. Rose, and many other fine colleges are not more than a stone’s throw away—but we have assumed that he’s headed further away than that, and supported him in that decision. In about 10 months, I’m sure I’ll probably be writing about how it feels to send him off in that direction. For now, we are firmly imbedded in the present tense, focused on—as Eckhart Tolle has cautioned us—The Power of Now.
It does no good to wallow in nostalgia in advance, that’s for sure, but the hint of it makes you appreciate the current moments even more. My wife has been in a book group of several other women who almost all have gone through the process of sending one or more children off to distant schools, and up till now, she was the only one who hadn’t been able to really imagine what they were talking about. Most of them felt poignant, sentimental, or downright remorseful about it— particularly if they were experiencing the empty nest syndrome for the first time after years of continuous child-rearing. One of the women, however, had a refreshingly blithe attitude toward the fact that her youngest daughter’s departure left her time more free to explore her own art or other interests. Contrarians like Lee are refreshing!
We are fortunate on our homefront to have two more children to nurture through the remainder of their school years here at home, once Miles is off to one university or another. Given my late start in the world of fatherhood, I will be really sentimental about the process as I approach 60, when my daughter is finally ready to leave the nest.
I will have plenty of time to reflect on that later. Time to get back to work.
P.S.-- ON ANOTHER LOCAL SUCCESS STORY…
I started this ruminative essay on Fall ’09 over a month ago now, by quoting and writing about the group Phantogram. If I had kept it short and posted this piece right away, I could have been seen as prescient in forecasting the success of that group on a national level. But my procrastinating now makes it a matter of fait accompli reporting—the electronic-trance music duo of Sarah and Josh have just recently been reported by local music-only station WEXT (97.7 FM, broadcast out of Amsterdam and Troy) as being signed to a recording contract by a semi-major label. We should expect big things from them from this point on, and will fondly remember seeing them perform in the Street Festival at the Adirondack Trust Drive-Thru in late summer of 2009.
Sarah’s silky seductive voice and swooping synthesizers and Josh’s hypnotic guitar work will no doubt be drawing fans around the country and perhaps the world, very soon. Congratulations to these local performers, and to all those with similar large aspirations.
More to come in November, and beyond…thanks for reading my webpage and visiting my ‘site….
--Copyright 2009 Wayne Perras
Note: New email: wperras@yahoo.com