The oddest of amenities

2005-05-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

A giant boulder, salamanders and a long, long driveway might scare away some buyers, but in the Hamptons, they're frills

BY TAMAR ASEDO SHERMAN
Tamar Asedo Sherman is a freelance writer.

May 20, 2005

The hottest of the hot real estate markets on Long Island is the Hamptons, where if a house doesn't sell in a couple of months, brokers advise sellers to drop the price. Yet amid the hottest of the hot are some homes that might get a cool reception from a typical buyer.

Chris Chapin, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman in East Hampton, rattled off several unique properties that over the years have required a special buyer.

One example is a house in Springs that has a huge boulder deposited by a glacier that occupies most of the backyard. Measuring approximately 30 feet long by 15 feet wide by 6 feet high above ground, the rock, called a glacial erratic, rules out the possibility of erecting a swing set or swimming pool.

Yet for Shelby Raebeck, having the glacial erratic in the yard was an attraction. "It's a beautiful rock, the largest glacial erratic on the South Fork," he boasted. His kids love to climb on it. The Raebecks bought the property shortly after it came on the market four years ago and paid full price, which was under $300,000. The small cottage was a wreck, he said, and they gutted it and refurbished it.

Then there was the house in East Hampton that had a toilet and bathtub in the middle of the master bedroom. Since it didn't sell in a reasonable amount of time, Chapin said, a real estate broker bought it, removed the oddly placed plumbing fixtures, set them in a newly constructed bathroom and sold the refurbished house at a tidy profit.

Different strokes for different folks, he said, recalling a piece of land in Bridgehampton with a swamp. Everyone thought it would never sell. After all, you can't build a house in a swamp, even though houses are springing up around it. But along came Andy Sabin, president of the South Fork Natural History Society Nature Center in Bridgehampton, who leaped at the opportunity to own a pond to raise tiger salamanders. They are the biggest land salamanders in the world that exist only in a few ponds on eastern Long Island, he said.

Then there was the 3-bedroom, 1 1/2- bath ranch on a half-acre in Sag Harbor village, directly across from the firehouse. When the alarm goes off to alert the volunteer force, dozens of cars converge, and fire engines roar off to fight the blaze. For many people, that would be a nuisance and a deal breaker. But it was sentimental for a woman who grew up next to a firehouse and convenient for her firefighter husband, so they bought it for $535,000, the full asking price. Had the same house been on a quiet street in the village, it would have commanded nearly $700,000, Chapin said.

A unique house on the market is the second-most isolated house in the Hamptons, according to Chapin. (The most isolated is on Gardiners Island.) Located at the end of a peninsula that includes a 700-acre nature preserve near Sag Harbor, its isolation is both its major selling point and its worst flaw.

"You have to drive through a golf course, then another mile on a bumpy dirt road through beautiful woods to the house on top of a bluff. It's the longest private driveway in all of the Hamptons to get to one of the most beautiful settings you could ever imagine," he described.

It's for someone who really needs to get away from it all. There is no one within a mile of the place. The asking price for the four-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath, 2,500-square-foot home on 1.8 acres is $6.8 million.

In another case, a house in Water Mill sits on a four-acre property at the top of a hill some 225 feet above sea level, one of the highest points on the South Fork. From the house there is a panoramic view of the Hamptons. On a clear day, you can see four miles across to the Atlantic Ocean.

Sound spectacular? It took two to three years to sell because just behind the house is a 100-foot tower supporting high-tension power lines. Neither the wires nor the tower is visible from the house; nevertheless, their presence reduced the price of the house by a half-million dollars to $1.3 million, Chapin estimated. The buyers promptly knocked down the house and built a new one.

Erma Orofino, associate regional manager for the Hamptons for Prudential Douglas Elliman, remembers a tiny cottage close to the Village of East Hampton that she described as "ugly," with what she thought was a dreadfully outdated pink and black kitchen. It lingered on the market for three years until one woman came along and thought the kitchen was "to die for. She wouldn't change a thing!"

The sale proved to Orofino, "There is no property that won't sell at the right price and terms." She firmly believes that regardless of a bad location, poor condition of the house, outdated style - whatever the idiosyncrasy of the property might be - it all boils down to price.

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The Hamptons NY

2005-05-01T05:06:00.000-07:00