Three real-estate professionals dish on dealing with confrontational people living next door to a listing
3 min
Q: Have you ever had to deal with a nightmare neighbour while showing a home?
Arthur Greenstein, broker associate, Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Dallas
In April 2022, I showed a four-bedroom duplex unit in University Park, near Dallas, to one of my clients. From the second we arrived, I knew there was going to be a serious problem because the next-door neighbour, who lived in the other half of the Midcentury Modern house, was nosy and angry. She would barge into the unit each time I was there with my buyer, trying to find out who her neighbour would be, and she would stand outside the duplex yelling at us about how we parked our cars. She was retired and had a lot of time on her hands, and she acted like she was the mayor of the block. It was difficult because I didn’t want to be confrontational with anyone when showing a house, and she was being intrusive. After she did this a few times, I tried to convince my client not to buy the property because I’ve seen in other situations what an unpleasant neighbor can do to the value and enjoyment of a property. But he purchased it anyway because that area had limited inventory and great schools. After the closing, the problems continued. The neighbour shut off my client’s water and electricity and put a lock on the water meter. He had to call the police to get the utilities turned back on. Over the past year, things have not calmed down. My client is involved in a lawsuit now with the next-door neighbour and the previous owner for not disclosing the adverse condition of having a nightmare neighbour living next-door.
Tom Stuart, associate broker, The Corcoran Group, Brooklyn, N.Y.
In June 2020, I listed a two-bedroom co-op in Brooklyn. This was during Covid, and the neighbour next door was very angry that buyers were coming in and out of the building. At the very first open house, when I was buzzing individual buyers into the building one by one, a buyer informed me that there was a note taped to the door of the apartment. When I went to look, I found a piece of notebook paper taped to the door that said in scrawled handwriting: “Don’t buy this! Rats and Bugs!” I had no idea how many people saw it. The neighbour also called building management and my manager to complain, but everything was being done properly. He started posting signs on the walls of the hallway that said things like “You are being watched!” and “Area under surveillance.” More than once, I caught him with his door cracked open, peeking through, which spooked potential buyers. My sellers were perplexed, but didn’t want to confront him. I was eventually able to sell the apartment, but he didn’t do himself any favours since his efforts certainly meant it took longer to sell the property and, ultimately, more people came through than might have without his interference.
Melvin A. Vieira, Jr., real-estate agent, Re/Max Destiny, Boston
In October 2019, I sold a two-bedroom, Cape Cod-style home in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of Boston. I was representing the seller. Every time I would go over to the house, the seller would yell, “Melvin, close the door, close the door!” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then he would shout, “It’s too late. She’s there!” And then, his next-door neighbour would appear, a middle-aged woman who was nice, but quirky. She would just walk into the house and start talking about everything going on with the house and the neighbourhood. My client said she was just making it up. It got to the point where I had to sneak into the house. It became a game, almost like an episode of “Mission Impossible.” I would pull up, check for her car, and if I saw it, I would park my car down the block and then walk to the house and go in a side door just to avoid having her see me and come over to interrupt a showing. My client told me she was doing that because she didn’t want him to move. He had lived there since 1996, and she didn’t like change, so she was trying to kill the deal. My strategy was to become friendly with her and have conversations with her away from the house. If I knew someone was going to show the house, I would stop her outside her house and talk to her to distract her. The market was strong, and the house sold within a few days of being listed, so she didn’t slow anything down. And, ironically, she and the new owners get along now.
—Edited from interviews by Robyn A. Friedman
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What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
3 min
Many luxury hotels only build on their gilded reputations with each passing decade. But others are less fortunate. Here are five long-gone grandes dames that fell from grace—and one that persists, but in a significantly diminished form.
A magnet for celebrities, the Garden of Allah was once the scene-making equivalent of today’s Chateau Marmont. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner’s affair allegedly started there and Humphrey Bogart lived in one of its bungalows for a time.
Crimean expat Alla Nazimova leased a grand home in Hollywood after World War I, but soon turned it into a hotel, where she prioritised glamorous clientele. Others risked being ejected by guards and a fearsome dog dubbed the Hound of the Baskervilles. Demolished in the 1950s, the site’s now a parking lot.
The Astor family hoped to repeat their success when they opened this sequel to their megahit Waldorf Astoria hotel in 1904. It became an anchor of the nascent Theater District, buzzy (and naughty) enough to inspire Cole Porter to write in “High Society”: “Have you heard that Mimsie Starr…got pinched in the Astor Bar?”
That bar soon gained another reputation. “Gentlemen who preferred the company of other gentlemen would meet in a certain section of the bar,” said travel expert Henry Harteveldt of consulting firm Atmosphere Research. By the 1960s, the hotel had lost its lustre and was demolished; the 54-storey One Astor Plaza skyscraper was built in its place.
In the 1950s, colonial officers around Africa treated Mozambique as an off-duty playground. They flocked, in particular, to the Santa Carolina, a five-star hotel on a gorgeous archipelago off the country’s southern coast.
Run by a Portuguese businessman and his wife, the resort included an airstrip that ferried visitors in and out. Ask locals why the place was eventually reduced to rubble, and some whisper that the couple were cursed—and that’s why no one wanted to take over when the business collapsed in the ’70s. Today, seeing the abandoned, crumbled ruins and murals bleached by the sun, it’s hard to dismiss their superstitions entirely.
The overwater bungalow, a shorthand for barefoot luxury around the world, began in French Polynesia—but not with the locals. Instead, it was a marketing gimmick cooked up by a trio of rascally Americans. They moved to French Polynesia in the late 1950s, and soon tried to capitalise on the newly built international airport and a looming tourism boom.
That proved difficult because their five-room hotel on the island of Raiatea lacked a beach. They devised a fix: building rooms on pontoons above the water. They were an instant phenomenon, spreading around the islands and the world—per fan site OverwaterBungalows.net , there are now more than 9,000 worldwide, from the Maldives to Mexico. That first property, though, is no more.
The Ricker family started out as innkeepers, running a stagecoach stop in Maine in the 1790s. When Hiram Ricker took over the operation, the family expanded into the business by which it would make its fortune: water. Thanks to savvy marketing, by the 1870s, doctors were prescribing Poland Spring mineral water and die-hards were making pilgrimages to the source.
The Rickers opened the Poland Spring House in 1876, and eventually expanded it to include one of the earliest resort-based golf courses in the country, a barber shop, dance studio and music hall. By the turn of the century, it was among the most glamorous resort complexes in New England.
Mismanagement eventually forced its sale in 1962, and both the water operation and hospitality holdings went through several owners and operators. While the water venture retains its prominence, the hotel has weathered less well, becoming a pleasant—but far from luxurious—mid-market resort. Former NYU hospitality professor Bjorn Hanson says attempts at upgrading over the decades have been futile. “I was a consultant to a developer in the 1970s to return the resort to its ‘former glory,’ but it never happened.”
