COLDWELL BANKER honored one of its agents recently with a party at the Alpine Country Club in Demarest.

Although such events don’t happen very often in these lean real estate times, the agent, Michele Kolsky-Assatly of Fort Lee, had achieved something that doesn’t happen much anywhere: an accumulated $1 billion in home sales. Company officials said it was the equivalent of selling a house a week for each of the 18 years she had been their agent.

“How’d I do it?” Ms. Kolsky-Assatly said last month in a phone conversation. “Well, for the first 15 years, I never took a day off.” She isn’t proud of that, she added, as the work came at the expense of time with her spouse and children.

An even more compelling question might be: How did she and other top-selling agents maintain the pace over the last three years — as prices fell roughly 20 percent statewide, inventories grew fat, and total sales volume went slack?

Last year, Ms. Kolsky-Assatly had $71 million in sales, all of them in Bergen County. In a list of the country’s 250 top agents compiled by the real estate consulting firm Real Trends, she was ranked 51st in sales volume.

Another Coldwell Banker agent, Elaine Pruzon of the Short Hills office, came in ahead of her, recording $94 million in closed sales in 2010 and ranking 32nd. Arlene Gonnella of Weichert Realtors in Short Hills came in just behind Ms. Kolsky-Assatly, selling $68 million worth of homes and ranking 61st.

These agents are working in tony territory, where the houses and penthouses have high price tags. ButMs. Kolsky-Assatly asserts that she consistently markets houses across a range of price points. “I’d sell a doghouse, if I could fit through the door,” she said jokingly. She was recently hired to sell one of the most expensive houses in New Jersey: the $28 million Henry Clay Frick mansion in Alpine, which has been on the market for more than three years. The home, set on 14 acres (accommodating 14 horses), is ensconced in Forbes magazine’s “Most Expensive ZIP Code” for 2011.

At the lower end, she has a two-bedroom Teaneck condominium, listed for $479,000.

“Whatever the price point,” she said, “I would say my strength is, well, do you know what a gift of gab means? I’m not bashful. I tell the truth. I say to people right off: I’ve done the research, here it is, and this is the best you are going to get. If they ask me when the market is going to turn around, I say, how the heck do I know?”

Also, she cited an old-school commitment to print advertising. “I am willing to spend money to make money. My clients are still looking at those newspaper ads in the mornings over a cup of coffee. I know it, and those ads tend to grab them in a way that online advertising doesn’t necessarily.”

Other documented top-sellers say they see their success as essentially flowing from true grit in a marketplace fraught with stress and frustration.

“Every agent in every town in New Jersey will tell you they have to work twice or three times as hard as they used to in order to complete any transaction,” said Gordon Crawford, who leads a six-person team at Re/Max Properties Unlimited in Morristown that sold $81.6 million in 2010 and was ranked 60th among teams.

This year, his team will close about 120 sales, versus 108 in 2010, for a significantly reduced dollar volume of about $56 million, Mr. Crawford said.

He described an instance of working with sellers in Sparta who insisted on listing their house for $639,000, although Mr. Crawford pointed out that with about 275 houses on the market in Sparta, $550,000 was the appropriate figure. “Seven months later,” he said, “it is listed for $500,000, so offers could start coming in around $490,000.”

In Margate, a barrier island community near Atlantic City, the top sales producer, Paula Hartman, runs a team at Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors that did $52 million in business last year, and she expects to do about the same this year. “But we sold 100 houses last year, and this year it will be about 150,” she said, “each one requiring maximum energy.”

With today’s tightened mortgage-lending standards and wary property assessors, Ms. Hartman said, brokers have to “sell every house twice — once to the buyer, and once to the bank.”

“In this climate, you really have to love your job,” said Ms. Hartman, whose handle on Zillow is RedHeadedRealtor. “I started out as a dental hygienist, and every day I think about how grateful I am not to be cleaning teeth.”

Ms. Hartman, like Ms. Kolsky-Assatly, has bolstered her daily work life with family: Both women now have sons who work alongside them; also, Ms. Hartman’s husband is her computer systems handler, and her daughter does office support work.

“I think that is a huge part of success,” said Ken Baris, the president of Jordan Baris Realtors in West Orange, founded 60 years ago by his father, who still works with him. “The knowledge you gain by osmosis, and the level of trust between the partners is incomparable.”

His agency does not publicly report its sales volume. But Mr. Baris says he employs computer analytics — his own and others’ — to rank agents on their “sales and negotiating ability.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “an agent will be a really prolific lister, and have their name on all the signs, and everybody thinks they are really popular, but then have a shockingly low percentage of listings taken to sold.”

Also, Mr. Baris said, he analyzes what percentage of an agent’s listed properties are relisted with the agent when the contract expires without a sale. And he assesses agents by the proximity of sales price to list price in each transaction — whether they are representing a buyer or a seller. “It’s not always perfectly clear what they are doing right,” he said. “Whatever it is, we want to go with it.”

What’s keeping Montclair’s housing market looking, well, less depreciated? It’s not homes selling in the 07043 zip code. Nope — according to this New York Times article, we can thank Montclair’s Estate section in 07042 for keeping the overall average sales values up — at least according to Ken Baris, president of Jordan Baris Realty in West Orange. Baris states 42 homes that sold in the Estate section, sold at a median price of $1.218 million. The article, which compares Montclair, Millburn and West Orange, mentions folks discouraging the use of “Upper” for 07043 as divisive (oh, not that old chestnut again). Lots of interesting zip code talk from realtors on Trulia.

Here are two relatively new listings — one in Upper Montclair, the other in Estate Section.

Both homes are listed for $879,000. The Estate section home, at 9 Locust Drive, is .52 acres with taxes of $23,653. The Upper Montclair home at 3 Wellesley Road is .26 acres and taxes of $21,738. Click on the address links — Locust Drive looks incredibly dated, while Wellesley looks freshly renovated.

How do you predict these will sell? Is Wellesley priced too low? Is Locust too high? Play realtor and tell us what you think will happen.

http://www.baristanet.com/2011/09/montclair-real-estate-07042-saves-the-day/

OVER the last six months or so, it seems several New Jersey towns have developed symptoms of split personality — at least when it comes to their real estate markets.

Take Montclair, for instance: the median sales price has been declining, as anyone can clearly see from looking at the downward pitch of the line graph updated weekly on many brokers’ Web pages by Altos Research. But decline means different things in different places. In the area often called Upper Montclair (ZIP code 07043), the descent to $615,000 from $700,000 was herky-jerky, up and down, between April 1 and the middle of September, according to Altos. But in the rest of town (ZIP code 07042), the median skied nonstop down a steep mountain: $700,000 all the way to $400,000.

Likewise, median prices harmonized in Millburn Township and its Short Hills section — another area with its own ZIP code — while clearly singing different parts. Millburn/Short Hills is one of the very few communities in the state where sales values are rising again, according to Karen Eastman Bigos, a broker with the Towne Realty Group.

The median for the township rose to $620,000 from $570,000 from April 1 to mid-September. Over the same period, the median for Short Hills rose to $1.6 million from $1.5 million. That means property in Short Hills escalated more in value — by about a percentage point — even though it is more than twice as expensive.

“How do we explain these things?” asked Ken Baris, the president of Jordan Baris Realty, a company that recently developed a “hyperlocal” computer system for analyzing price trends by school district or neighborhood. “Local, local, local — there is no other word but local in real estate.”

West Orange being the Baris agency’s home turf, Mr. Baris was able to supplement the township’s overall April-to-September median graph numbers on Altos — a decline to $310,000 from $345,000 — with more focused data from three of its neighborhoods: Llewellyn Park, Valley and Mount Pleasant.

Of 35 houses listed in the historic walled enclave of Llewellyn Park over the last 12 months, he said, only 5 sold, at a median price of $598,000. That was down 23 percent from the previous year’s median, but he said the decline is less significant when you consider that “one home sold for $2.8 million to Whoopi Goldberg, and values skewed up pretty dramatically because of that for a while.”

The five houses sold this year went for 91 percent of list price, so Llewellyn Park was in line with the overall average for the town. In the Valley neighborhood, houses fetched only 81 percent of list price, he said, but in the Mount Pleasant area, they sold for an average 94 percent.

In Montclair, where there is a concerted emphasis on thinking of the town as one diverse whole — children are bused to “magnet” schools, and the moniker “Upper” is discouraged as divisive — several agents resisted comparisons of trends on the two sides of town.

“Sometimes people come in saying they only want to buy in the one ZIP code, 07043,” said Linda Grotenstein, an agent at Coldwell Banker. “I usually find they have a misunderstanding of what the ZIP codes imply.”

The housing stock is more homogeneous in the northern half: mostly well-groomed Victorians with three to six bedrooms. The south end has far greater range: everything from run-down, run-of-the-mill triplexes on narrow lots to peerless mansions on manicured grounds, in the “estate section.”

In fact, by Mr. Baris’s reckoning, the estate section in the southern part of Montclair has kept overall average sales value afloat. It had 42 listings this year, and 18 houses sold, at a median price of $1.218 million, 31 percent more than last year.

“If you took out the estate section,” Mr. Baris said, “Montclair would have depreciated as a town.”

In Millburn/Short Hills, Ms. Bigos ascribes the huge price disparity to the teardown craze that swept Short Hills starting in the late 1990s.

“That is when the spread started to widen,” said Ms. Bigos, a lifelong resident of Short Hills. “All the new houses going up doubled and tripled in value.”

Both Millburn and Montclair have Midtown Direct New Jersey Transit train service to Manhattan, which various reports have shown can increase property value by as much as 20 percent. Millburn has had it for 15 years, while the service arrived in Montclair seven years ago.

West Orange does not have a train station, but offers jitney service to the South Orange station.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/realestate/one-town-but-two-housing-markets-in-the-region-new-jersey.html

AFTER the shrewd and wary real estate blogger known as Grim (real name: James A. Bednar of njrereport.com) bought his first house in Wayne last spring, he quickly announced where he would start with renovations: the damp basement.

Showing and telling with pictures on his blog — which up to then had concerned itself only with the vagaries of the market and how to get a deal — Mr. Bednar demonstrated to his hundreds of followers the “right way” to keep a basement dry.

He excavated dirt to eight inches below the foundation, laid down stones and drainpipes, applied flashing and asphalt coating to the foundation walls, insulated them with foam board, and then regraded the property with backfill.

This was three months before Tropical Storm Irene; did we mention Grim is shrewd?

Mr. Bednar’s basement did stay dry — although Wayne, which has many low-lying areas that are federally designated flood plains, was among the hardest-hit communities in the state. President Obama even stopped by Wayne (along with neighboring Paterson) to view the devastation and promise aid in rebuilding.

In the view of some worried brokers and agents, though, rebuilding buyer confidence in a piece of real estate, once it has gotten wet, may be beyond anyone’s powers.

“Anytime there is penetration — even seepage, even if only under extreme circumstances,” said Robert Lindsay, an agent at Coldwell Banker who has been selling houses in Wayne for 35 years, “it will affect property value.”

In Mr. Lindsay’s view, damage to buyers’ confidence in certain neighborhoods, or in specific houses affected by Irene, might take years to repair. “This is the hottest hot button there is for buyers,” he said. “People do tend to have short memories, but in this case, they figure, if it happens once, it can happen again.”

Right now, of course, extreme circumstances prevail — and buyers are probably “gun-shy” anyway, as Gary Large, the president-elect of the New Jersey Association of Realtors, put it. Mr. Large is also the Morris County manager for Prudential New Jersey Real Estate in Morristown.

In many towns in northern New Jersey that have high water tables, homes are generally equipped with sump pumps, and often battery backups, since home inspectors usually recommend them when buyers request a report on a home before purchase.

But sump pumps are not necessarily enough of a confidence booster in today’s climate, said Susan Hunter, the vice president of the Lois Schneider Realtor in Summit. One agent with her company had a closing scheduled for Aug. 30, two days after the storm. During the walk-through inspection, Ms. Hunter said, “the seller mentioned that for the first time in 30 years,” because of Irene, “there had been some minor seepage into one area of the basement.”

The buyer’s lawyer immediately insisted that money be put in escrow to cover the cost of repairs if the situation worsened.

Post-storm jitters have also been contagious among lenders, Ms. Hunter said. “Many banks are now requiring a ‘final inspection’ by the appraiser to inspect the home for storm damage before closing,” she said in an e-mail. 

“We have already had a couple of closings delayed by this process,” she added.  “Unfortunately it can cause a domino effect: if one buyer can’t close, the buyer for his house can’t close, and so on and so on.”

State real estate regulations require sellers to disclose whether a basement has ever been wet or damp, and to complete a disclosure form at the time a house is listed.

If sellers have not told the truth, and the basement floods after closing, “there is a viable potential for damages against the seller,” said Ken Baris, the president of the Jordan Baris agency in West Orange (where there was also widespread basement water damage from the storm).

One of Mr. Baris’s agents, Mary Louie, helped her daughter Frances Louie last year with the purchase of a three-bedroom home in Springfield on a street that lies within a flood plain.

“We knew it was a flood plain, obviously,” the younger Ms. Louie said. “We had to get flood insurance. But there have been a lot of big storms this year, and we never had flooding.”

Lenders require buyers in areas categorized as flood plains to obtain the insurance, which is available through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On the Web site, floodsmart.gov, anyone can search whether risk of flooding for a given address is “low to moderate” or “high.”

“The neighbors said there have been floods,” Ms. Louie said in Irene’s aftermath, “but nothing ever this bad. There is mud all over the walls in our basement.” At that point she was still awaiting the arrival of cleanup workers from the town’s emergency management office.

Several of her neighbors who have paid off their mortgages had let flood insurance lapse — and at one house water had risen almost to the second floor. “I guess they have lost everything,” she said.

Mr. Lindsay recalled clients in the late ’90s who had bought a house near a flood plain, but not in it, who were not required to get flood insurance. That changed in 1999 after Hurricane Floyd, which caused extensive flooding in New Jersey. Federal authorities redrew the map to widen the flood plain and include the property.

“It was a kick in the shins,” Mr. Lindsay said. “Now the owners have to accept both the stigma and the cost, around $25,000 a year.”

When floodwaters entirely recede this time around, Mr. Lindsay said, he predicts that FEMA will again redraw its maps.

No matter the precautions taken, however, the surprise factor is always there, and Mr. Bednar, for all his hard work, was not exempt. “The basement was bone dry, not a drop of water,” he reported. “The chimney, however, let us down.  In our defense, we didn’t get there with the renovations yet.”

Still communicating with your employees using newsletters and bulletin boards? It may be time for your organization to think more creatively about how to use technology to improve internal communication.

In the past, organizations typically followed a top-down communication model, with messaging coming from the company or the top executive and directed downward to the employees. That’s more or less the same process that kings used in the Middle Ages to communicate to their subjects.

Today’s internal communication process is more complex. Organizations still have certain messages that must be communicated from the top, but in today’s more democratic organizations communication is more two-way in nature, with employees given the freedom to make suggestions, ask questions and (gasp!) dialogue with the bosses. Horizontal communication also plays a larger role in today’s organization, meaning employees are encouraged to communicate among themselves to help solve organizational challenges and promote teamwork.

Here are some low-cost, easy-to-use internal communication tools that might spark better conversation and a heightened sense of community among employees.

>> Yammer

Yammer allows employees to network and share ideas using a social media format similar to Facebook or Twitter. Yammer is strictly internal, however, so the conversation cannot be viewed outside the company. Each employee can establish a personal profile, pose questions, share photos, create polls or share links. Like the other tools discussed in this article, employees can reach their Yammer account 24/7 from the home or office computer or from mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads.

Jordan Baris, Inc. Realtors, a New Jersey real estate company, illustrates why Yammer can be so effective. One employee posted a message on Yammer asking other employees if they knew of a good hardwood floor vendor. Thanks to responses on Yammer from other employees, work started in less than 48 hours on the customer’s new hardwood floors.

Yammer is built exclusively for organizations, the features are corporate-friendly. More than 100,000 businesses use it, including top brands such as Nationwide Insurance and 7-Eleven.

>> Facebook groups

While Facebook is best known as the social network of choice for friends and family, the service has gained in popularity as an internal communication tool since establishing Facebook Groups last year. For smaller businesses and nonprofits that might not want to establish a formal intranet site, this can serve some of the same functions.

Like Yammer, Facebook Groups allows employees to converse with one another, collaborate in teams and share photos. Because of Facebook’s popularity, one benefit to organizations is that most employees already use Facebook and are comfortable with its features.

>> SKype

Like Facebook, Skype is better known as a communication tool for individuals, but it is also widely used by businesses both large and small. Skype allows groups of employees to collaborate on projects using group video calls, audio conference calls and instant messaging. Skype is especially useful for organizations with employees who work from home or are too scattered geographically to make regular face-to-face meetings possible.

http://www.reporternews.com/news/2011/aug/30/internal-communication-through-technology/

THE more specific the facts an agent has at his disposal — facts, for instance, about what has sold just down the street, and for how much, and how long it took — the likelier he will probably be to persuade a seller to set a realistic price. Therein lies the usefulness of data-packed Web sites like Zillow, Trulia and Streeteasy, which can be mined by the tech-savvy for the level of detail that will be most persuasive to their clients.

But what if you weren’t all that tech-savvy, and could rely instead on a program customized for your area, providing data that allowed you to measure your client’s house against others in a particular area, school district or street — and to share the results with your client on the spot?

Blossom Vernon, an agent with Jordan Baris Realtors in West Orange, said she was recently called in by a Maplewood seller who had listed her home with another agency for six months with no activity. “We sat down with my laptop,” Ms. Vernon said, “and I showed her that her home had been significantly overpriced, at over $499,000.

“Based on what she saw on the screen, we very quickly set an asking price of $432,000,” Ms. Vernon added. “The house went under contract for $425,000 within six days.”

What Ms. Vernon and her client saw on the screen had been generated by a program customized for the Baris agency with hyperlocal real estate data. The final $425,000 sale price on the client’s house, coming in at 98 percent of the list price, turned out to jibe perfectly with the program’s estimate of what a house in this price range in this district would bring within the first 30 days on the market.

“It allows our agents to do hyperlocal analytics with a few clicks on the screen of their phone or their laptop or tablet, right there in real time, while they are sitting on a client’s sofa or driving around a neighborhood looking at houses on the market,” said Ken Baris, the agency’s president.

The program, called Advantage, was created by his brother Russ, a Web technology specialist in Connecticut, from data including automatic weekly updates by the Multiple Listing Service, “cleansed” of misspellings, typos and errant numbers that can contaminate results.

It makes use of so-called cloud computing technology, which stores a specific collection of data on a remote computer and makes it accessible to everyone in a given group — in this case the brokers who work for Baris.

“When you go to discuss a list price with a client, and you show them this,” said Jose Alduende, a vice president of Jordan Baris, “they don’t fight about price. It’s amazing, they just don’t fight.”

One afternoon last month Ken Baris provided an impromptu demonstration on his cellphone. Asked to pick a random Baris listing in a given town — Morris Township — he selected 5 Dorothy Drive, which has been on the market since July 3, and is now priced at $428,000.

Within seconds, he produced screenfuls of market data concerning the neighborhood (Burnham Park) and the school district (Hillcrest/Hamilton) for houses in the $400,000-to-$599,000 range:

¶90 listings were active; 202 homes had been listed in the last 12 months.

¶47 percent of total listings had sold or were under contract.

¶The average sale price had been holding steady over the last 30 days at $481,617.

¶The average number of days a house had spent on the market was down 3 percent, to 74 days.

¶Houses had sold for 94 percent of list price, on average.

¶15 percent of listed homes — 31 houses — had sold in the first 30 days. Of those, 16 percent (5 homes), had sold above list price.

Mr. Baris says he is so enthusiastic about what the Advantage program can do that he has decided not to sell rights to use it to any competing agency in New Jersey — although he has made presentations about its potential at a National Association of Realtors convention.

Earlier this year, he did make a deal with Coach Realtors of Long Island, a firm with more than 600 agents, which is now using its own customized version of the program. “We have a lot of tools for our agents to use, in fact probably more tools on the shelf and in our toolbox than we can use all the time,” said Coach’s broker/owner, Georgianna Finn. “But when I looked at this program, it provides data in a way no other program does — very, very local and very, very specific.”

Mrs. Finn said that she realized the program was likely to be “picked up and reinvented” by some other company, since “that is the way it happens in the world of technology development.”

“Right now, however, our agents have something no other agents have,” she said.

Other brokers and agencies said they could not assess the Jordan Baris Advantage program because they had not seen it in action. But Perri K. Feldman, an agent with Keller Williams based in Livingston, was one of several brokers — among them a short-sale specialist — who pointed out one obvious flaw: Multiple listing statistics don’t ordinarily specify whether a property is a short sale, a foreclosure, or an estate sales, and analyses based on that data will therefore not specify either. (Mr. Baris conceded that this was true.)

At the Coldwell Banker agency, which is part of the national real estate conglomerate NRT, a technology specialist named Monty D. Smith said he was experimenting with cloud computing technology on a proprietary system that would “put the entire real estate transaction process online.”

Imagine, Mr. Smith said, a transaction in which there were “no paper documents, no need to store the documents for years at agency offices. All parties to a transaction would be able to sign in at any time to check on the status of any part of the transaction, and take necessary actions to move the procedure along.”

“This project is not about marketing real estate,” Mr. Smith said, “but it could improve and speed up the process in revolutionary ways.”

ANYONE who has stepped into the often-stressful real estate market in New Jersey lately can hardly help being aware that it is an increasingly rude arena.

With the supercilious buyers, hypersensitive sellers, inconsiderate sales agents and adversarial lawyers, “it really can be a jungle out there,” said Roberta Plutzik Baldwin, a broker for Keller Williams Realty in Montclair, somewhat ruefully.

“In a climate like this, where so many people feel financial anxiety, and sometimes every $100 is an important issue,” she said, “anger and animus seem to come out more frequently.”

Even when people have “tons of money,” said Karen Eastman Bigos, a broker for Towne Realty Group in Short Hills, more and more are “harsh” with remarks and attitudes, especially buyers.

Yet Ms. Bigos and Ms. Baldwin were among a number of real estate professionals emphasizing that courtesy still counts a lot and can sometimes be crucial to getting a deal done at all.

“Many, many times,” Ms. Bigos said, “I’m seeing deals turn on politeness, or the lack of it.”

A few weeks ago, she recalled, sellers told her how much they liked a particular buyer’s agent and her clients whom they had met at a showing. The sellers asked Ms. Bigos if it would violate any rules to accept their bid even though others might come in higher.

“I explained that you cannot discriminate,” Ms. Bigos said “and they said it had nothing to do with that, but they were sick of rude and nasty people walking into the house, and these people just seemed so polite in comparison. They wanted to go with them, even if it cost something.”

Ken Baris of Jordan Baris Realtors in West Orange said, “Huge, huge — courtesy is huge.” He recalled selling a house a couple of years ago for a professional hockey player to a buyer who had been taken with the property. The buyer had explained in a warm letter how much it would mean to live in the player’s house. Even though a competing bidder offered $100,000 more during the three-day attorney-review period mandated in New Jersey, the player went with the letter-writing buyer.

Last month, Mr. Baris added, “we had a situation where a buyer had come to his last, highest and best offer, and the seller still felt he needed a little bit more money.” The seller took it upon himself to do some research for the buyer concerning how a door and window might be added to his condominium as the buyer wished to do. He asked his agent to tell the buyer how much he hoped the deal could proceed. This prompted the buyer to offer an extra $2,000.

Many times sellers are not present when potential buyers get a first look, or even a second or third, at their homes. Brokers often discourage it. But Ms. Bigos says that in her affluent community, nannies and other service personnel are quite often on the premises during a house tour — and might pass along overheard comments.

“One time,” she said, “my clients had a dog groomer sitting in the driveway in his truck, who heard people saying, ‘Oh my God, who would paint a house this color?’ Well, the dog groomer was a very close friend of my sellers’ son. Needless to say, that sale never got out of the starting gate.”

Even if everyone is civil, or even gracious, during the precontractual phase, things can get strained when lawyers enter the picture, several brokers pointed out. In today’s market, much of the wrangling over price actually takes place after a buyer has a home inspection done — whereupon a lawyer writes a letter demanding that the seller either pay for repairs or offer a price discount.

“A seller gets a scathing letter from an attorney saying ‘this, that and the other, and more’ has to be fixed, and a seller can be offended,” said Susan Hughes Hunter, the vice president of Lois Schneider Realtor in Summit.

“People feel this is their home, their blood, sweat and tears,” she noted, “and this letter makes it look like the house is falling down. The way attorneys speak is black-and-white, and in truth, it’s not really their job to say, ‘Oh, please, we would so love it if you would be kind enough to fix your roof.’ ”

Ms. Baldwin of Keller Williams says she always urges both buyers and sellers not to take such things personally, and to “think of a real estate sale as business, nothing more.”

Ms. Hunter agreed with the idea that “part of the role of a Realtor is to soften the edges, and keep people’s eyes on the goal, so there is less of a feeling that someone is trying to insult you.”

But the broker can’t control feelings or attitudes, as Mr. Baris acknowledges.

“One very rainy day,” he said, “a buyer got to the door of one of our homes on the market and asked the seller, ‘Would you like me to take my shoes off?’ ”

The seller, meaning to be courteous, said, “Don’t worry, leave your shoes on and we’ll clean the floors later,” Mr. Baris recounted. “Turned out later the buyer told the agent, ‘I really like the house, but we can’t live in a home that has been tracked up with mud and dirt.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/realestate/in-home-sales-courtesy-goes-a-long-way-in-the-regionnew-york.html

An analytical computer tool developed by Jordan Baris realty — which it unveiled to the National Association of Realtors, and recently sold for use to a Long Island agency (but says it will keep proprietary in New Jersey).

FOR 20 years Wayne Collier, a construction superintendent in Midtown Manhattan, endured a daily commute of an hour and 45 minutes each way in order to live in the historic town of Hyde Park in Dutchess County.

“Just to come home at the end of the day to the open, unspoiled feeling of the Hudson River Valley was worth it,” he said, recalling that in winter, he often arrived home to a landscape of white, fluffy snow that had not turned gray from city grit, and that in the warmer months, the Hudson was the lure.

Looking back, Mr. Collier, 54, who recently retired, said he did not regret all those hours on the road or wish he had moved closer to work. He and his wife, Stella, 53, an administrative assistant, live in the same three-bedroom two-bath ranch with wraparound porch that they bought for $127,000 21 years ago, and where they raised their two now-grown sons.

Indeed, it is the unscathed, understated beauty of this 37-square-mile river town — along with the relatively low cost of its residential real estate — that has been the draw for many people like Mr. Collier.

About 90 miles north of New York City, Hyde Park has almost 12 miles of shoreline along its western boundary. Its southern border is the city of Poughkeepsie, 6.5 miles south of the town center; its northern border, the bustling village of Rhinebeck, 10 miles to the north. The municipalities of Clinton and Pleasant Valley, far less densely populated than Hyde Park, are to the east.

Within those boundaries lies what residents like Michael Dupree and Michael Fleischer consider an oasis in the otherwise overcommercialized exurbs north of the city.

It was 17 years ago that the couple, owners of a plumbing valve business in Manhattan, spent $282,500 on a small Greek Revival-style house overlooking the river. In the years since, they have renovated and added on to it, and according to Mr. Dupree, the chairman of Hyde Park’s planning board, who is also active in local preservation organizations, “It has since morphed into a three-bedroom three-bath colonial with a pool and pool house.”

The couple do a partial commute, with Mr. Dupree traveling to Manhattan some days and Mr. Fleischer staying there four days a week. The two spend long weekends in Hyde Park, and these days, from their terrace, are engaged in planning for their poolside wedding next spring, and in “watching all the kayakers go by,” Mr. Dupree said.

Open space and unspoiled beauty exist in abundance, but sustaining them is the job of Thomas J. Martino, Hyde Park’s supervisor, and he points out that this town of 20,275 people doesn’t have much of a tax base. Many of its historic properties — the Franklin D. Roosevelt estate, Eleanor Roosevelt’s getaway home at Val-Kill, and Frederick Vanderbilt’s estate, for example — are on the National Register of Historic Places and are therefore tax-exempt. The Culinary Institute of America, also in Hyde Park, is tax-exempt as an educational institution; the town’s land trusts, which work to maintain the open space and prevent suburban crawl, have similar protection.

With an annual budget of $11 million, Mr. Martino said, Hyde Park needs to increase its tax base to take some of the burden off the shoulders of homeowners. The problem may go some way toward getting solved with the arrival of Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, which has applied to build a large hotel complex on a 330-acre lot along Route 9, a major north-south highway, across from the Culinary Institute. As it stands now, he said, there are only a few motels and bed-and-breakfasts, so that many visitors come for the day to see the historic sites but then go to Poughkeepsie or Rhinebeck to stay overnight and shop.

“For all of this loveliness,” the town supervisor concluded, “there is a price.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Leaving behind the density of Poughkeepsie, one travels north along Route 9, which has its share of large historic estates, interspersed with small and mostly well-maintained strip malls. There is no town center in Hyde Park, and as a result, Mr. Martino said, “people who live here are clamoring for more retail, because to really shop they have to travel to Kingston, where there are big-box stores, or to the Galleria in Poughkeepsie.”

Most homes are in clusters along side roads, though a few renovated older houses sit alone in large fields. Still others hover along the river’s crenellated edge, and even if they are more costly, most are not ostentatious.

There are a number of newer town-house communities, as well as one development dating to the post-World War II era. That was when John Golden, now 87, built and sold 650 Cape Cod houses for $6,900 each. Today many have add-ons and updates; they sell for about $200,000. Mr. Golden, who was born and raised in Hyde Park, and his wife, Gloria, 85, live on the river in a house he built for $25,000 about 40 years ago.

According to the office of Timothy McGowan, the town’s assessor, there are 5,144 single-family homes in Hyde Park, along with 606 town-house condominiums, 15 apartment buildings and 292 multifamily homes.

Because the population density is relatively low in comparison to surrounding areas — about 550 people per square mile — there is a distinctly open and airy feeling to the town, which abruptly disappears at its borders.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

There are listings for about 180 single-family homes and 25 town houses. Forty-one single-family homes sold in the first half of this year, versus 44 for the same period in 2010;  and only four town houses have changed hands, versus 17 for the first six months of 2010, according to Santo Tambone, the executive officer of the Mid-Hudson Multiple Listing Service.

The market strongly favors buyers. The median price of a single-family home in the last six months was $190,000, versus $200,000 in the first six months last year. The median for a town house was $174,750 for the last six months, $145,000 for January through June 2010.

For single-family houses, average time listed is 141 days; last year it was 132. The highest price paid this year was $580,000; last year it was $430,000.

According to Susan Serino, broker-owner of Century 21 Serino Realty, asking prices range from $214,900, for a four-bedroom one-bath Cape, to $675,000 for a four-bedroom three-bath house, and $1.495 million for a five-bedroom six-bath colonial on 8.8 acres with river views. Ms. Serino says prices have dropped across the board in the last five years, and relatively few homes have sold in newer condo developments, among them the 162-unit River Ridge at Hyde Park.

THE SCHOOLS

The Hyde Park Central School District has about 4,000 students enrolled in five elementary schools, one middle and one high school.

SAT averages last year at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School were 528 in math, 522 in reading and 514 in writing, versus 516, 501 and 492 statewide.

Three public schools — Hyde Park and Violet Avenue Elementary Schools and Haviland Middle School — were built 70 years ago by the Works Progress Administration. Constructed in the Dutch Revival style of architecture, they are now on the National Register of Historic Places.

WHAT TO DO

The area is a foodie’s haven, thanks to graduates of the Culinary Institute, said Mr. Dupree, who cited the menu offerings of the Local Restaurant and Bar in Rhinebeck, which has locally grown and produced food. “It’s killer dining up here,” was his assessment.

There are also many offerings for hikers, said Katherine Forbes, who lives with her husband, Michael, and daughter, Divya, 12, in a two-bedroom three-and-a-half-bath town house bought five years ago for about $300,000.

The three often hike trails in the area, including the state-run Walkway Over the Hudson and the Roosevelt Farm Lane Trail, a 3.6-mile round trip connecting Val-Kill with the Roosevelt estate. During the summer, Divya attends a basketball day camp offered by Marist College in Poughkeepsie.

On weekends, the Forbeses take in the offerings at the two movie theaters in town, both on Route 9: the Hyde Park Drive-In, owned by the National Park Service; and the seven-screen Hyde Park Roosevelt Cinemas.

THE COMMUTE

The trip to Grand Central Terminal from Poughkeepsie, about 10 minutes south of Hyde Park, takes about an hour and 45 minutes on the Hudson line of Metro-North. A monthly ticket costs $443. Driving time, via the Taconic State Parkway and the Saw Mill River Parkway, is about the same.

THE HISTORY

Settlement of the area, including what is now Hyde Park, began in the first half of the 1700s with land patents granted by the British government. In 1742, the town was first named Stoutenburgh, after Jacobus Stoutenburgh, an early European settler.

By 1795, the area was called Hyde Park, and the name became official in 1812, after a post office was opened there, according to Patsy Newman Costello, the president of the town’s historical society. The Roosevelt family home was built in 1826, and Franklin Roosevelt was born there in 1882.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/realestate/exurbs-too-appreciate-an-oasis-living-inhyde-park-ny.html?scp=5&sq=jordan%20baris&st=cse

ADRIENNE NATRILLO and her husband, Javier Gomez, moved to Berkeley Heights, N.J., from Connecticut four years ago because the town was 15 miles from her office in East Hanover and had houses they thought were much better buys than those in nearby communities.

Now Ms. Natrillo, a scientist, and Mr. Gomez, who is in the insurance business, are rediscovering Berkeley Heights, an architecturally eclectic town of 13,000 in western Union County, as they pilot their 4-month-old son’s stroller down its rolling, shady streets.

“Unless something happens with our jobs,” she said, “I feel like we’re going to be here 30 years.”

Real estate brokers say Berkeley Heights has been a relatively easy place to sell homes, even in a recession, because it is less than 30 miles from Manhattan, with easy accessibility to a commuter train line and Interstate 78, in the southern part of town.

But Ms. Natrillo and Mr. Gomez, who bought a four-bedroom 1980s colonial for $700,000, enjoy the place for what is right there: the great outdoors, for one, and residents who say hello.

Berkeley Heights was a sleepy, rural community until the American Telephone and Telegraph Company built a research facility in 1941 in its southeastern corner. Bell Laboratories, which later became Lucent Technologies, straddled Berkeley Heights and New Providence and brought thousands of workers to western Union County.

Seventy years later, however, the general effect remains uncluttered, almost rural — much more like a town much farther from New York City, like Sparta, the previous hometown of Joseph Bruno, the mayor. “We have a lot of folks here who want to live in the country but also want to live close to work,” he said.

“It’s kept its small-town charm as long as I’ve been here,” said Mr. Bruno, who has lived in three houses in Berkeley Heights since moving to the township in 1992.

Mr. Bruno, a store manager for J. C. Penney not far away in Wayne, took on the part-time job of mayor this year. As in other places, the township has had to run on a shoestring budget recently, he said, but not to the point that services have been cut.

Although Berkeley Heights is within minutes of Interstate 78, the lifestyle is quiet, and residents tend to stay put. Mr. Bruno, who bought a four-bedroom house seven years ago for $640,000, describes the town as “multigenerational” and cited two neighbors who are putting additions onto their houses to avoid having to move.

Kenneth B. Baris, the president and broker for Jordan Baris Realtors, whose main office is in West Orange, says he has had a number of clients choosing to stay in town when they trade up to larger houses, “which is a very positive statement.”

The quality of the local schools is a selling point, as are the tax rates, which tend to be lower than in similar bedroom communities in nearby Essex County. The town, nestled in the Watchung Mountains, feels more spread out, less densely populated.

Yimin Tang and his wife, Bei Jiang, are engineers. They just paid $490,000 for a four-bedroom 1963 bilevel. He said they had looked nearby in New Providence, Mountainside and Warren Township, but felt Berkeley Heights offered the best deal. “This is big enough for us,” he said. “And there’s some potential for the future.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The township, area 6.3 square miles, is bordered by the Passaic River to the north and I-78 to the south. It sticks out of Union County like a hitchhiker’s thumb, with Morris County to the north and Somerset County to the west and south. Two thoroughfares cut east to west: Mountain Avenue and Springfield Avenue, the commercial strip.

To the east on Springfield, near New Providence, is a sprawling shopping center. To the west, Springfield looks a lot more like Main Street U.S.A., with American flags fluttering above a block that includes a bagel store, a barber shop (with a barber pole) and a hardware store.

“Berkeley Heights is really a small town at heart,” said Mary Ann Walsh, a RE/MAX agent who moved here with her husband 13 years ago from Maplewood to raise their children. “We have every amenity as any other place, but when I got here, I felt very welcome. It’s a very friendly town. We feel like we got the best of both worlds.”

The Berkeley Heights train station — near the intersection of Springfield and Plainfield Avenue, the main north-south road — is at the center of town. Several restaurants, a park and a variety of businesses are within walking distance of the station, including a garage, a dry cleaner and a plant nursery. Signs for yard sales are stapled to utility poles.

The landscape to the south, moving along Plainfield away from the river, is hilly and verdant. Tall hardwoods drape a variety of houses that run the gamut from older frame structures, to 1960s-era split-levels, to recently built brick colonials in the Cinnamon Ridge section. Most houses have front yards large enough to play catch.

“It’s not like other towns,” Ms. Natrillo said, explaining that even with subdivisions, the styles vary enough that “as you go down the street, you pass all different types of houses.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

A recent look at the Garden State Mutiple Listing Service showed 80 residential properties for sale, ranging from a two-bedroom condominium, for $259,000, to a five-bedroom custom-built colonial for $1.35 million. A three-bedroom ranch built in 1956 is listed for $500,000, with an annual tax bill of $8,000.

Robert Edgar, the township’s tax assessor, said 135 houses sold in Berkeley Heights from July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010, for an average of $558,000. He said 58 houses sold from July 1, 2010, to March 31 of this year, with an average sale price of $577,000.

According to Trulia.com, the median sale price in Berkeley Township between November and January was $547,950, or 4.8 percent higher than the median price in the corresponding period one year earlier.

Mr. Baris says there are sometimes bidding wars for houses within the zone for the Thomas E. Hughes Elementary School. Average sales prices in that section of the school district over the past year are $713,000, with 15 percent of houses selling in 30 days.

According to Mr. Baris’s data, 62 percent of houses listed from $600,000 to $699,000 sold in the past year, with an average of 35 days to sale. As he put it, “What we’re finding is that this is a real sweet spot for the town, pricewise.”

THE COMMUTE

New Jersey Transit has two direct trains to New York Pennsylvania Station each weekday morning on the Morris and Essex line, and two direct trains each weekday evening for the return trip. Travel time is 50 to 56 minutes, and a monthly pass costs $308.

There are also eight morning trains that require a transfer at Summit or Newark Broad Street to get to Penn Station. Parking at the train station for residents is $285 a year. There is a three-year waiting list for spots, but Mr. Bruno says the township is planning to expand the lots.

Another option is Lakeland Bus Lines, which offers service to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Five buses make the trip, scheduled for 55 minutes to one hour, each weekday morning, making three stops along the way. A 10-trip ticket is $88.80.

WHAT TO DO

Berkeley Heights is surrounded by open space. At the northern edge of the township, only a block from Springfield Avenue, is the Passaic River County Park, part of which is in the Union County parks system. To the south is Watchung Reservation, Union County’s largest park, at 1,945 acres. People go there to hike, fish, canoe, ride horses and picnic.

Among summer programs offered by the township’s recreation department: a playground camp for students in Grades 1 through 7; concerts and movies; lessons and camps in tennis, table tennis and gymnastics; and several adult fitness programs. Family membership at the Berkeley Heights Community Pool is $425 a year for residents.

THE SCHOOLS

The system has an early-childhood center for prekindergarten through first grade, three elementary schools for Grades 2 through 5, a middle school and Governor Livingston High School. Average class size at Hughes Elementary is 18.6 students, about the state average.

The high school has about 1,000 students in Grades 9 through 12. SAT averages last year were 573 in math, 547 in reading and 552 in writing, versus 520, 496 and 499 statewide. The graduation rate for the class of 2010 was 100 percent, versus 94.7 percent statewide.

THE HISTORY

In 1845, David Felt built a mill, a general store-cum-church and about half a dozen other buildings on Watchung Reservation land bought from the descendants of Peter Willcox, the first European settler. The community, called Feltville, survived for about 15 years, and in 1882 was used as a summer resort, Glenside Park. The Union County Park Commission bought the land in the 1920s, and some of the Feltville buildings still stand, off Glenside Avenue.