APRIL 15, 2019 VOL. 55, No. 15
westfaironline.com
Luxury rental market offers housing alternative INSIDE
RENTS CAN REACH $20K PER MONTH FOR A LARGE HOUSE BY PETER KATZ pkatz@westfairinc.com
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LUXURY SALES DOWN
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WOMEN IN BUSINESS
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lthough real estate developer and marketer Gary Hirsch, whose office is in Rye, is confident he could build 60-story apartment buildings if he wanted to, “It’s not what we choose to do,” he told the Business Journal. Nevertheless, Hirsch, who found a real estate niche 20 years ago and has been successfully serving that segment of the market in both Westchester and Fairfield, has been care-
fully branching out. “My wife Diane and I decided to start a business that had no real presence in the Westchester market or frankly throughout the country, which was to acquire and renovate and rent single-family homes for short-term rentals for as little as 30 days,” Hirsch said. “We would buy a house in prime communities like Scarsdale and Rye. We would renovate it, furnish it and advertise it.” Far from being flippers who’d buy, renovate and sell, they targeted people who needed
a place to live during their own house renovation, a place to live while waiting to close on their own house purchase and families of corporate executives, many with two or three children, who had relocated to Westchester and needed a short-term rental. Diane Hirsch served as president of Elk Homes LLC from the beginning and a few years ago added the title of president of a related company, Elk Homes Realty LLC. Gary Hirsch holds the title of chairman. “Basically, between 2000 and 2007 or 2008, we focused entirely on the short-term rental business,” he said. “Then, we came to understand that there really was a shortage of quality rental housing for those people who were looking for longer-term rental » LUXURY RENTALS
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The gourmet kitchen in an Elk Homes rental house in Greenwich.
FAIRFIELD COUNTY RECORDS 725,000 SQUARE FEET IN OFFICE LEASING DURING Q1 BY PHIL HALL phall@westfairinc.com
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airfield County’s office market kicked off 2019 with a bang, generating 725,000 square feet in leasing activity, according to data released by CBRE. The first-quarter leasing activity was 9.2 percent over the five-year quarterly average, and CBRE noted this was the strongest beginning to a year since 2015. However, the robust statistics were not driven by a countywide effort, but were instead dominated by a pair of major deals: WWE signing a 16½-year lease for the 415,000-squarefoot, three-building complex at 677 Washington
Blvd. in Stamford that was once the home to UBS; and Diageo’s relocation from its Norwalk headquarters to a 38,000-square-foot space at 695 East Main St. in Stamford. Tom Pajolek, executive vice president at CBRE’s Stamford office, observed that the first quarter is continuing “a trend from last year, with two or three very big deals dominating the headlines.” Pajolek recalled last year’s mega-transactions — Charter Communications’ third-quarter deal that covered 532,258 square feet at 406 Washington Blvd. in Stamford, FactSet’s 173,164-square-foot lease at 45 Glover Ave. in Norwalk during the first quarter and Reed Exhibition Cos.’ » OFFICE LEASING
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