Tuesday, Feb. 5, marks the beginning of the the Lunar New Year and Year of the Pig, which means Queens will be exploding with lively events celebrating this ancient Asian tradition.
As predicted, some brokers aren’t buying into this Agent Spotlight business. StreetEasy plans to launch the new service next month, which will allow brokers — who pay $333 per month per listing — to avoid Premier Agent and appear as the exclusive rep on a listing. StreetEasy is also simultaneously rolling out a back-end listing platform called Listing Tools, which is supposed to encourage brokers to manually input listing info (which is required when participating in Agent Spotlight).
Several top brokerages, including Stribling & Associates and Warburg Realty, have already said that they don’t plan to switch to Listing Tools, E.B. Solomont reported. They feel like it will pit agents, who’ve already competed to get the exclusive on a listing, against each other. StreetEasy’s parent, Zillow Group, stresses that all listings still feature the pictures and contact info for brokers. They just have to pay up if they want to have their face be the only face potential buyers see.
But brokers feel like they are being shook-down, forced to pay StreetEasy to get rid of a feature the company foisted on them in the first place.
“It just reeks of blackmail to me,” said Jed Garfield of townhouse brokerage Leslie J. Garfield. “It’s a blatantly horrendous choice they’re forcing brokers to choose between.”
The number homes that were on the market in Queens took a sharp increase at the end of the year, according to a recent report.
StreetEasy recently released their Q4 2018 Market Report, which tracks the real estate trends throughout the city. According to their findings, the number of homes for sale in New York City as a whole grew at double-digit rates, particularly in Queens, which saw a 30.8 percent annual increase in 2018. Continue Reading ›
The band is comprised of four musicians twin brothers Josh (vocals) and Jake Kiszka (guitar), both 22, younger brother Sam (bass/keys, 19), and longtime friend Danny Wagner (drums, 19). Although they are young, the boys were raised on their parents vinyl albums which influenced their high-energy hybrid of rock’n’roll, blues, and soul.
“Our parents had a lot of vinyls laying around,” recalls Josh, so we grew up listening to that and really liked playing with the vinyl albums – putting them on the turntable and speeding them up and slowing them down. But, yeah, I really liked the blues and the soul and the funk – Wilson Pickett is the big one, and Joe Cocker, those kinds of things”.
NEW YORK — Oh, post-Christmas tree, how dry and flaky are your branches. New Yorkers may find their indoor evergreens less charming this week, with the presents gone and needles covering their floors.
The city makes it fairly straightforward to get rid of unwanted Christmas trees. But those eager to do so have to wait until the new year before their trees can be recycled and reincarnated. Continue Reading ›
Now that the confetti has settled and the buzz from new year’s parties has worn off, it’s time to start looking ahead to many important events in Queens in 2019.
Jan. 1 marks the start of new terms in government for statewide offices. Governor Andrew Cuomo begins his third term in office today; joining him are incoming Attorney General Letitia James, the first African-American woman to hold statewide office, and State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who also starts his third term in the post. Continue Reading ›
