What sold in Massapequa this year

The Market, Town by Town

What the Twelve Months Recorded

Closed single-family sales in Massapequa over the twelve months just ended, recorded by OneKey® MLS. These are transactions, not estimates.

Around the House

Around the House in September

The season turns fast here. Everything below is easier on a mild afternoon than it is the week after the first cold night.

Have the heat looked at before you need it

A boiler or furnace that sat idle all summer should be run and serviced now, on a warm afternoon. Service calls are answered the same week in September and not in November.

Get ahead of the leaves

Clear the gutters and the ground-level drains before the drop rather than after it. The fall storms tend to arrive before the leaves do, which is the order that overflows them.

Close the gaps the cold will find

Walk the outside of the house and look at where pipes, cables and vents pass through the wall. A few dollars of sealant at those points does more for a winter fuel bill than anything else you can do in an afternoon.

The Calendar

Dates Worth Knowing

One date in the year is worth putting somewhere you will see it again. Nobody sends a reminder about this, and most people find out they have missed it.

The window to challenge your assessment opens in January

In Nassau the filing period runs from early January to the statutory deadline of March 1, and the grievance goes to the Assessment Review Commission. The Commission has extended that date in recent years, to March 31 for the 2027/28 roll, but each extension is announced annually and is not something to count on. It costs nothing to file, and the work worth doing now is gathering what comparable houses actually sold for. Confirm the current date with the Commission before you rely on it.

Advisory

Pricing a Fall Listing

A house that comes out in September is read against a shorter memory than one that comes out in April. The people looking now watched the spring market close. They know what sold and for how much, and they can tell an asking price from a real one at a glance. That is the whole case for pricing a fall listing where the market is, rather than above it with a plan to come down later.

Coming down is the expensive part. Cutting the price three weeks in tells everyone who passed that they were right to wait, and it spends a season that only had ten weeks in it to begin with. Houses that sell in the fall usually sell in the first two weeks, to someone who had already seen everything else.

So the preparation that matters is unglamorous. Find out what comparable houses actually closed at, not what they asked. Fix the two or three things a buyer will price against you and leave the rest alone. Then pick a number you would genuinely take on the first weekend, because in this season that is often when it comes.

A Personal Note

A First Word

This is the first of these letters, so let me say what it is meant to be. Once a month you will get the real figures for your own town, a few practical notes on the house, and one thing worth knowing if you are thinking about buying or selling. Nothing sent just because a month has gone by.

If there is something you would rather read about, or a question the figures above do not answer, write back. It comes to me, and I read it.

Anthony Clemenza, Founder