URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1071 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 4, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Super Agents, Super Teams
BYLINE: By GERRI HIRSHEY
SECTION: Section 14CN; Column 2; Connecticut Weekly Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2331 words
THE young couple are seated together awaiting another real estate agent's appraisal in what is called the ''English pub room'' of their 1730 antique home in Westport. Theirs is the kind of property that ads typically limn as ''historic charmer with state-of-the-art amenities.'' This means the imposing stone hearth is hung with a tasteful dark plasma screen instead of a fox-hunting print.

The couple took two years to renovate, expand and hone the place to Architectural Digest perfection while they lived elsewhere. The home's craftsmanship and detail are exquisite, from the outdoor fireplace to the fully wired and Wi-Fied his-and-hers offices much desired by Fairfield County's Blackberry-dependent financial services cadres.

''Those offices are absolutely going to sell this house,'' says Michelle Genovesi, a Westport broker with a 100-gigabyte memory for detail, detail, detail, and a sales presentation that corners and shifts as smoothly as the BMW she drove up in. ''Commuters are willing to spend more for things like this if it means they can work at home one or two days a week.''

Ms. Genovesi, a former Wilhelmina model, is the founder and top producer of her Westport-area firm, Michelle & Company. Despite the housing market slowdown, her three-agent team did $70 million in sales volume in 2006.

Teams are a trend in the region's residential real estate market. Sharing resources, from office workers to Webmasters, has become practical as agents struggle to keep up with local and Internet listings. According to the National Association of Realtors, Web listings are now consulted by 80 percent of Americans looking to buy homes.

Successful teams like Ms. Genovesi's are actively courted by big national agencies, which are only too happy to encourage their local, personalized approach. Ms. Genovesi says she has had many corporate suitors but has opted to stay with a parent company, William Raveis Real Estate and Home Services, because its founder and chief executive, William Raveis, ''allows you to unleash your personality in the business.''

''He's not fearful of you growing and branding yourself,'' she says.

Mr. Raveis said: ''Michelle is a mega-agent. We're in negotiations for her to double that sales volume, expand her territory and her team.''

To that end, Ms. Genovesi is shopping for her own office building, where she will add to her current team -- two ''buyer specialist'' agents and a six-person staff that provides administrative, Web, mortgage and marketing support.

''Most people in our industry are reactive to the market,'' Mr. Raveis said. ''She's very proactive. She branded herself and created this team approach before anyone else out here thought of it. Now there are lots of Michelle wannabes.''

Among the more visible branded teams in the region are Mike Luchen's in Westchester, whose ads promise, ''Team Mike Luchen Realtors speak English, Italian, Spanish, Polish and German.'' There are married teams and sister acts, like the Twin Team in Westchester, identical sisters whose Web site trumpets ''A Shared Synergy.''

In Essex County, N.J., the Baldwin Dream Team, a ReMax quartet of former freelance writers and administrators, will be one of three teams featured on a new reality series, ''Bought and Sold,'' on HGTV in late April. Roberta Baldwin, lead agent of the team, which did $40 million in sales in 2006, explained why she set up her own shop within the ReMax penumbra: ''I wanted to be more entrepreneurial, and I found people to help me grow my business that I can absolutely trust to have our interests at heart. It's pretty cutthroat in real estate, either on your own or in a big company. Clients also like the idea that they'll be taken care of even when I'm busy elsewhere.''

Mr. Raveis, whose business has 55 offices in Connecticut and Massachusetts with 1,700 agents and claims $5 billion in annual sales, has big producers besides Ms. Genovesi. Most notable is Jean Ruggiero, who, embedded in Greenwich -- a hedge-fund capital -- can bring in $110 million in yearly volume by selling executive castles.

The rich do shop differently, Mr. Raveis said, and he especially values Ms. Genovesi for her ability to reel in and placate corporate titans and their families -- and their decorators. ''To deal with the high-end seller and high-end demands and be sane well, she's amazing,'' he said.

Selling white-glove service requires a statelier pace, and no visible pressure. Ms. Genovesi's presentation to the couple with the Westport property takes more than an hour and includes a customized, meticulously researched portfolio on their home and others in the area, prepared by her staff. She is the third agent the couple have interviewed.

As the spring real estate market gets off to a brisk start -- Ms. Genovesi says you can peg it, reliable as the first robin, to the first weekend after the Super Bowl -- they want to be ready.

The last agent the couple interviewed left a brochure and dashed off after a few words about installing a lockbox.

''Under no circumstances do we do a lockbox here,'' Ms. Genovesi says. ''You do not walk in and out of an exceptional property at will.'' She will show the home herself, and only to those prequalified with a discreet questionnaire and mortgage preapproval.

''If buyers decide after a tour it's not right, I'll introduce them to my buyer team members, who will share with them whatever else is in the market,'' '' Ms. Genovesi says. ''That's where I pass the baton. My focus is on selling my properties.''

She says she will sell the home three times: to other agents, to a buyer and to the bank appraiser. She will invite other agents in for a look and a catered lunch, but there will be no open house. ''Too many people just want to check out the granite counters and get some ideas,'' she says.

Calling Ms. Genovesi, the wife says, was ''almost automatic,'' given her reputation and visibility. According to a competing agent, ''No one would think of listing a high-end property without having Michelle at least do an appraisal.''

For her part, Ms. Genovesi does not want to know the competition. ''I have 23 years' experience here,'' she says, ''and I can say that I own the high-end market.''

As conversation deepens, Ms. Genovesi's pronouns subtly slide from ''your'' to ''our,'' as in ''Our appliances and renovations are mint.'' Finally, the sensitive part -- the number -- comes up. Ms. Genovesi routinely turns down listings if the asking prices are unrealistically high. Sometimes sellers come back to her -- and her number -- after other agents fail to move the house. ''The number is just a suggestion based on my experience and market education,'' she says. It can be fine-tuned. She tells the couple her number and commission. They nod.

One more big question hangs: Are things moving? ''There's lots of inventory now,'' Ms. Genovesi says, ''but in some segments, only 50 percent sold last year, in others only 25 percent. Statistically, the high end hasn't taken as big a hit as the rest of the market -- especially with this year's Wall Street bonuses. We're definitely feeling those bonuses now. We find that when the market turns, it's the lower and higher ends that still do well. It's the middle market that suffers the most.''

AS part of her presentation, she explains her career path: ''In the late '80s, no one was really taking any part of the business and owning it. So I decided to focus on listing and marketing exceptional properties. To do that I needed to brand myself. I started to spend money to make money. I put my photograph in my ads. Back then, everyone said, 'What's with the picture?' But people remembered. I started getting calls.''

Ms. Genovesi does business in expensive but understated clothes and in two BMWs: a 5 Series S.U.V. for ferrying clients, and a sportier 3 Series convertible she just bought as a 50th birthday present to herself. She had considered indulging in a Maserati but rejected it as ''too pretentious.''

Nothing, not even a well-earned midlife toy, should interfere with the image she has honed carefully, some might say obsessively, since she arrived in Connecticut as a fiancee looking for a house and got her real estate license ''on a whim.'' After two long engagements, she is ''single and fine with it.''

As the eldest of five children born into an Air Force family, ''I'm a habitual caregiver,'' she says. A mobile childhood, much of it in Europe -- five moves during the last two years of high school -- made her an extrovert of necessity. Her brief modeling career was fun, chiefly for the travel, but she found fashion confining.

By taking the long view in her next endeavor, she says, she has carved herself a posh, Scalamandre-upholstered niche here on Connecticut's Gold Coast. ''Exceptional properties'' translates to $2 million to $15 million. Most of Ms. Genovesi's listings have names, like Pier Way, Lord's Manor and the Hermitage. They will appear on premiere Web sites with detailed virtual tours. Qualified buyers will get custom portfolios including a CD-ROM virtual tour of the property, its photo imprinted on the disc.

Some homes, like Judith Paixao's riverside compound, a property once owned by the prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, have exceptional provenance. Ms. Le Clercq and her husband, the choreographer George Balanchine, also owned a summer residence across the road. ''It's a singular property that needs the right buyer,'' Ms. Paixao said. ''I needed someone who could think way outside the box, and that was Michelle. She gets it. She arranged to have two Chico's holiday catalogs photographed there -- and showed the place right in the middle of the shoot.''

MS. GENOVESI has other ideas for the 1730 antique property. ''Weather permitting, I can have an aerial photographer here by the weekend,'' she tells the couple. From the air, the manicured grounds will show to estate-like advantage. ''People are starting to look now,'' she tells the owners. ''Our biggest binding month, when offers are written, is March.'' The couple have one more agent to see; they promise a prompt decision and see her out warmly.

''I'm sure I've got it,'' Ms. Genovesi says as she heads to her car.

Even perfect properties require an alternative mind-set. On another day, Ms. Genovesi demonstrates her house-showing technique at a modernist masterwork in Saugatuck Shores -- waterfront, private dock, $8.8 million. This is not a home to perfume with the smell of baking cookies. But the automatic shades will be raised to the view when buyers stroll in. Cool jazz -- appropriate to the modern art, the custom leather floors in the library -- will provide a chic soundtrack. ''We're not selling a house,'' Ms. Genovesi instructs. ''We're selling a lifestyle.''

This is how she was able to price the home next door to this one at an audacious $9 million -- almost $2 million over what she said the Westport market was bearing at the time.

''In exceptional properties you have to market outside the town you're in,'' Ms. Genovesi says. She researched waterfront prices all the way to Greenwich and sent e-mail messages to more than 500 potential customers. A Darien agent saw it and brought her clients, who had been looking at waterfront in Greenwich, where the prices are higher. They bought it for the asking price.

Thus, in so many ways, Ms. Genovesi is not what Mr. Raveis calls a ''maintenance'' Realtor -- that diligent professional who tucks so many suburban families into center-hall colonials. Nor does she fit the voracious, blonde-in-a-gold-Lexus cliche of the go-go '90s. At the weekly team meeting at Michelle & Company, six women come and go, talking of corporate ''relo.'' Mobility is the agent's bread and butter: corporate relocations, divorce, remarriages with blended families, empty nesters.

Audrey Demetres, one of the two agents who concentrate on buyers, says this is an especially fluid market. ''I came from a house where my teenage wallpaper is still on the wall,'' Ms. Demetres says. ''But I don't think I've ever sold anyone a house that was thinking in terms of a lifetime home. They'll either upsize, downsize. They never think of staying in that 30-year-mortgage house. I have one family that couldn't move up fast enough -- a two-bedroom cottage, then a colonial, then new construction, all before they were 34.''

Ms. Demetres's counterpart, Suzanne Dodge, left a high-profile career in real estate marketing in Manhattan after she had her third child, but she wanted ''a serious career'' in the suburbs. The high-tech embrace of Ms. Genovesi's team was perfect. ''Internet was just cranking up,'' Ms. Dodge says. ''That was a huge expense to take on as a sole agent. I was advertising, trying to get listings, staying up all night answering e-mails, writing ads.''

Signing on with Ms. Genovesi after a stint at another agency, ''I was just dazzled,'' Ms. Dodge says. ''Everything is smooth. I never do paperwork after I sell a house. They handle everything. And I can go out and sell another house.''

A few days after Ms. Genovesi's presentation to the couple with the 1730 home, she is sitting in a Westport Starbucks. Above the cellphone cacophony of other recaffeinating brokers, she confides, ''I got the listing.'' The aerial shots are done, the number is firmed up, the virtual tour is being shot. She is talking about the office buildings along the Post Road that she has been looking at for her expansion when a lawyer, Joseph C. Maya, strides over and says hello. She is friendly, but quizzical until he explains that she found him a house in 2001 when he wanted to move his family to a quieter, safer street.

Ms. Genovesi had forgotten Mr. Maya's first name, but she could summon the precise transaction details.

He is pumping her hand. ''Since then I've sent over 20 people to you,'' he says. ''I'll probably send 20 more.''

She thanks him with a big grin. ''Bring 'em on,'' she says.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: REAL ESTATE (91%); HOUSING MARKET (89%); RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY (89%); REAL ESTATE AGENTS (89%); SALES FIGURES (87%); SALES & SELLING (73%); TRENDS (72%); BUILDING RENOVATION (72%); MARKET INCIDENCE (72%); HOME BASED EMPLOYMENT (71%); HOLDING COMPANIES (70%); BANKING & FINANCE (68%); BRANDING (64%); CITIES (74%); BALLET (74%) Housing; Brokers and Brokerage Firms
ORGANIZATION: Michelle & Co
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (51%) Gerri Hirshey; Michelle Genovesi
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (79%) CONNECTICUT, USA (91%); NEW YORK, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (91%) New York City Metropolitan Area; Connecticut
LOAD-DATE: March 4, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: RURAL CHARM -- Michelle Genovesi, one of Connecticut's top real estate sales agents, at the entrance to Balanchine, a barn home and estate in Wilton that is on the market for $3,650,000. The property once belonged to the prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who had a home nearby with her husband, the choreographer George Balanchine. (Photo by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)(pg. 1)

BEYOND LOCATION -- While giving a sales tour of Balanchine to Will Aufderheide, a potential buyer, Michelle Genovesi showed off the home's spiral staircase (inside the silo in the photograph at right), and the center hall, below. ''Exceptional properties'' with listing prices of $2 million to $15 million are Ms. Genovesi's specialty, and most, like Balanchine, have names. Ms. Genovesi's team, Michelle & Company, includes her two buyer agents, flanking her at right: Suzanne Dodge, left, and Audrey Demetres. (Photographs by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)

(Photo by Douglas Healey for The New York Times)(pg. 8)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1072 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 4, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Coffee Puts Laid-Back Town On Edge
BYLINE: By PETER APPLEBOME.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

SECTION: Section 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front; OUR TOWNS; Pg. 27
LENGTH: 805 words
DATELINE: New Paltz, N.Y.
Many questions could be raised about the coffee war of New Paltz.

At what point does a small business become a giant chain? Just how much coffee can one little village consume? How often does a village trustee consider it an urgent public issue when a new coffee shop might compete with her favored one? A century from now will this be one of those places where it still feels like it's 1968?

And then there's the one Jim Svetz keeps asking himself. How in the world did a guy who started his first coffee shop on Staten Island six years ago and now runs five others in far-flung Hudson Valley towns become the moral equivalent of Wal-Mart and Starbucks? ''Well, it's now official,'' he announced last month on the Web site that promotes his Muddy Cup coffeehouses. ''I am now head of the evil empire.''

All this and more has become a wintertime diversion in this charmingly scruffy Hudson Valley duchy of vegan cuisine and multiple piercings that has gained a measure of continuing fame in recent years. First came the 2003 election, when the Green Party and its 26-year-old mayoral candidate, Jason West, took over village government with the support of students from the State University of New York at New Paltz.

The next came with Mr. West's 2004 decision to certify about two dozen same-sex marriages, the first in state history (the courts have refused to uphold their legality).

And now the talk of New Paltz has to do with something far more important than mere marriage -- coffee. More specifically it's whether Mr. Svetz is plotting an act of entrepreneurial imperialism by presuming to open one of his Muddy Cup coffeehouses next door to the ultimate green icon in town, the funky 60 Main coffee shop operated in conjunction with the nonprofit New Paltz Cultural Collective.

The collective, which supports arts and cultural activities in town and generally promotes the primal New Paltz vibe, shares a cheerfully makeshift space with the coffee shop on Main Street. Regulars view the shop and its diligent proprietor, Tobias Devor, with near-religious affection.

''We have ex-convicts and discreet millionaires who you would never know about,'' said Juli Castelbuono, one of the regulars. ''It's a place where you can hang out, play chess, talk issues, make artwork or valentines, where you can be a kindergartner again. It doesn't matter if you're a sexist creep or a feminist or whatever.''

Given prevailing winds in town it's safe to say that 60 Main attracts much more of the feminists and whatevers than sexist creeps. The shop wears its politics like a badge of honor from the organic coffee to the ''fair trade'' goods billed as free from exploitive labor or the ''No One is Free When Others are Oppressed'' bumper stickers.

All of this was sauntering along in an amiable R. Crumb sort of way until Mr. Svetz decided to open up a New Paltz Muddy Cup, next to 60 Main and down the street from the defiantly corporate Starbucks -- the ultimate evil empire in the 60 Main worldview. He says all his shops strive to be aggressively local -- in their architecture, in supporting local artists, poets and musicians, in taking part in local causes and civic affairs -- so it never occurred to him that coming to New Paltz would raise any issues.

Little did he know. As word filtered out he began receiving a blizzard of e-mail messages from 60 Main proponents, reacting to an urgent appeal from the collective. The messages threatened a boycott and told him to stay home. ''If we can stop Wal-Mart we can stop you,'' said one.

''We do not want to become yet another small town taken over by huge corporations,'' read another.

His landlord, Bobby Downs, said he was stunned when a member of the village governing board, Julia Walsh, confronted him, furious that he would put in a coffee shop next to 60 Main. A Facebook site immediately went up called ''Keep 60 Main Alive! Say No to Corporate Coffee in New Paltz!''

One item on the civic agenda is a proposal still being developed to limit or ban chain establishments in town, but Mr. Svetz said he did not think his little business could count as a chain and would not be affected even if the ordinance were in place.

Mr. Svetz is still stunned by the whole thing, particularly his sudden status as a giant corporation. He says that just as lots of bars coexist in town, several coffee shops can too. Maybe he's right. Maybe he's not. He's not Wal-Mart, but maybe it's fair to ask how many artist-friendly coffeehouses the village can support. But it's hard to argue when he says that even in New Paltz, businesses generally have to compete to survive, not find a way to build a Berlin Wall around town.

''When a community starts building walls and saying you don't belong here or you don't think like we do, that can't be a good thing,'' he said.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SMALL BUSINESS (89%); POLITICS (87%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); COFFEE & TEA STORES (78%); COFFEE & TEA (78%); REGIONAL & LOCAL GOVERNMENTS (77%); MAYORS (77%); POLITICAL CANDIDATES (73%); COFFEE (73%); US GREEN PARTY (71%); MARRIAGE (64%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (60%); GAYS & LESBIANS (50%); SAME SEX MARRIAGE & UNIONS (64%); RESTAURANTS (90%); RESTAURANT FOOD & BEVERAGE SALES (65%); BOYCOTTS (64%); MEAT FREE DIETS (72%) Restaurants; Boycotts; Restaurants
ORGANIZATION: Muddy Cup (Restaurant Chain); Sixty Main Street (New Paltz, NY, Restaurant); New Paltz Cultural Collective
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (50%) Peter Applebome; Jim Svetz

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