What would
Christmas be without a story about cockroaches.
I watched “Home Alone” for the BaZillionth time last night, and my
favorite part of the movie is still when the kid puts the tarantula on the
burglar’s face. So back in the 80s…when
I was young and fearless, I made my first real estate purchase. It was a studio apartment in a Pre-War
building turning coop in Brooklyn Heights.
When it turned coop we decided to renovate the building and hired a
contractor. I was on the board, “The
Treasurer” I think…scary right?
One day the
contractor needed us to go down into the sub-basement to check out some work
that needed to be done on the sewer pipe.
No problem I thought. So when
they said this building was pre-war, I thought maybe pre-WWI…it was Pre-Civil
War. To get down into this sub-basement
you needed to climb down this thin metal latter that was bolted to the brick
wall. Like way down. It gets better…there’s no lighting. Its pitch black…like being in the bottom of a
coal mine. The contractor has “a” flashlight. We’re all assembled now and the contractor
begins to shine the flash light along the sewer pipe, I want to say it’s about
12 inches in diameter. He gets to a
point in the pipe where it’s cracked and leaking…just lovely. But what made it extra special was that there
were about a dozen cockroaches feasting on the waste. They also must have been part of an atomic
experiment, because each cockroach was not less than 5 inches long. So I’m staring at this horror show and a
couple of thoughts race through my mind:
One, the contractor has done a very nice job of selling his
services. I’ll pay any amount of money
to fix this situation. The next and more
important thought was, I wondered if any of the other guys down here were
faster than I was.
The
contactor makes some comments about the correct way to fix the broken pipe…we
all cut him off before he can finish and just tell him to do whatever is
required. With that, the flashlight
leaves the small predators and what comes next is an episode of the Three
Stoogies. There is an immediate case of
the hebe-geebees where everyone is imaging the cockroaches are attacking. There’s a race to the latter, or at least
where we think the latter is. There’s a sense
of urgency probably similar to what goes on when a ship is sinking. The last thing I remember is wishing I knew
how to fly… as someone was using my shoulders as a latter rung.
So my real
estate expertise is very similar to my stock trading motto of buy high and sell
low. I bought the coop for $75K. After owning it for less than 6 months I
could have sold it for $100K. Stock
Market crashes and coops get obliterated…I wind up giving the coop away for
$25K. Roll forward 20 years…my daughter
and I are spending the day in Brooklyn Heights in September. We walk past a real estate office and a saleswoman
comes out and asks if she can help us. I
say, “Just for kicks, what does a studio apartment on Columbia Heights go for
these days?” ----- They start at about $450K.
