Country dwellers and brokers return to city for Hurricane Sandy

NYC skyline
NYC skyline

With Sandy on its way, New Yorkers who primarily live in the country – and the brokers who sell their homes – are headed back to the city. Manhattanites seem to prefer waiting out the hurricane in apartments, townhouses and hotels, rather than risking a power outage miles from the nearest store, the New York Observer reported.

“I’ve been visiting all my unoccupied listings, making sure that everything is hunkered down and bringing planters and furniture in Off The Terrace,” top broker John Burger of Brown Harris Stevens, told the Observer. “Those planters and outdoor objects become flying objects when a storm hits.”

Kirk Henckels, an executive vice president at Stribling & Associates, made his way back to the Upper East Side from Millbrook with his wife, Fernanda Kellogg, ahead of the Category 1 hurricane, as did painter and Upper East Side socialite Michelle Marie Heinemann, who opted to leave her Connecticut country home.

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“The country is beautiful and we have a generator, but you never know and it’s a big house,” Heinemann said. “I’m totally prepared. I bought a ton of coffee and I have a lot of champagne here, so I know I’m stocked up.”

Elizabeth Ann Kivlan, the director of marketing and business development at Stribling; Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Lisa Simonsen and Brown Harris Stevens’ Paula Del Nunzio have all left their mostly ground-floor listings outside Manhattan to weather the storm in more secure surroundings. [NYO]Christopher Cameron