Real estate auctions can bring fair market value quickly
April 18, 2011
By Jannette Pippin, Published in Jacksonville Daily News on April 11, 2011
Auctions are bringing buyers and sellers in the area together at a time when economic conditions make selling real estate in the traditional method a challenge.
Walter House of House Auction Company headquartered in Carteret County, said that more people have turned to auctions with the slowdown in the traditional market but there’s good reason people find the auction method a desirable one regardless of the market conditions.
“Auction creates a competition among buyers that no other method of selling duplicates,” said House, chief auctioneer and broker in charge for the auction company. “They like it because it’s timely and it’s accelerated marketing to a large target market area.”
Auction day, he said, is only one piece of the process that includes extensive marketing and advertising of the property before bidding ever begins. House has been involved in all types of auctions, including a 2009 auction hosted by the Onslow County Sheriff’s Office that was the largest auction of unclaimed property in the county’s history. But real estate auctions are his specialty; and he’s had clients turn to auction to sell property of all types, from single homes and waterfront lots to farmland, commercial property and old school property offered up by Carteret County. Click here to read the entire article.
A Country Home, by a Modernist at Play
April 14, 2011
By Zoe Blackler, Published in The New York Times
Photo by Randy Harris for The New York Times
“I’m not sure it’s at all your thing,” Alan Orenbuch remembers the real estate broker saying. “It’s modern, and pretty strange.”
But after a year of negotiations with the owner of a Victorian farmhouse in Millbrook, N.Y., failed to result in a sale, Mr. Orenbuch, an architect, and his partner, Bryan O’Rourke, an interior designer, were ready for something different.
The strange house, which had just come on the market, turned out to be a modernist gem known as the Plastic Tent House, designed in 1974 by the architect John M. Johansen, as his own residence.
Mr. Johansen, now 94, was a member of the Harvard Five, a group of young modernists associated with Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the postwar years. These architects, who included Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer, built a number of experimental homes that helped reinvent American domestic architecture, many of them in New Canaan, Conn.
The Plastic Tent, one of five so-called Symbolic Houses Mr. Johansen designed between the late 1950s and the 1970s, represented a departure from the modernism practiced by his colleagues. Drawing on the work of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, he incorporated elements symbolizing the various stages of life — cavelike rooms, bridges, towers, trees — into these houses, taking his work in a new direction. Click here to read the entire article.