Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

DIE IN THIS BUILDING

by Bert Stratton

When you have a dead body in the real estate biz, go in with the cops.  The tip-off is the smell in the hall.

One time a tenant died without any heirs, so the tenant’s estate lawyer practically begged me to take a few months’ rent.  It was free money.

I once put an ad on Craigslist captioned “50-year lease available. Die here.”  Craigslist spiked that one pronto.  My point: the building had three tenants who loved the building so much they had clocked more than 50 years each and were going to go out on gurneys.

Reality check: one-third of tenants move out in a year; one-third move out in 2 years;  about one-third stay 3-to-8 years; and a minuscule fraction stay longer than that.  Doesn’t matter what you do.

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3 comments

1 "Kenny G" { 06.25.09 at 9:35 am }

Very glad to know about the “free money” you got off the deceased individual. I trust you still have it; now you have some dough to purchase our Guide to Cleveland Architecture, 2nd edition, that my AIA Cleveland group spent several years on and for which I was a Principal Editor. Still close to 1,000 copies available and in some stores and local AIA office….

2 bert { 06.25.09 at 4:01 pm }

didn’t know Kenny G was into architecture.

3 Bert { 07.10.09 at 3:21 pm }

Thanks to reader SFU for catching “miniscule.” Just changed it to “minuscule.”

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