STROUGH ASSOCIATES, WWW.STROUGH.COM

1. Our client's interests always come first. Our experience shows that if we serve our clients well, our own success will follow.
2. Our assets are our people and reputation. We are dedicated to complying fully with the letter and spirit of the laws, rules and ethical principles that govern us. Our continued success depends upon complete adherence to this standard.
3. Our goal is to provide superior service to our clients, both buyers and sellers. Real Estate is a personal business dependent on personal relationships.
4. We take great pride in the professional quality of our work. We have an uncompromising determination to achieve excellence in everything we undertake. We would rather be the best than the biggest.
5. We stress creativity and imagination in everything we do. We constantly strive to find a better solution to a client's problems.
6. We make an unusual effort to work as a team on every transaction. Although our activities are measured in millions of dollars of transactions, each seller and each buyer is unique. We know that without recognizing individual needs, we cannot be the best firm.
7. We stress teamwork in everything we do. While individual creativity is always encouraged, we have found that team effort often produces the best results. We have no room for those who put their personal interests ahead of the interests of the firm and its clients.
8. The dedication of our people to the firm and the intense effort they give their jobs are greater than one finds in most other organizations. We think that this is an important part of our success.
9. We consider our size an asset that we try hard to preserve. We want to be big enough to undertake the largest project that any of our clients could contemplate, yet small enough to maintain the loyalty, the intimacy and the personal attention that we all treasure and that contributes greatly to our success.
10. We constantly strive to anticipate the rapidly changing needs of our clients and to develop new services to meet those needs. We know that the world of Hamptons Real Estate will not stand still and that complacency can lead to extinction.
11. We regularly receive confidential information as part of our normal client relationships. To breach a confidence or to use confidential information improperly or carelessly would be unthinkable.
12. Our business is highly competitive, and we aggressively seek to expand our client relationships. However, we must always be fair competitors and welcome the working relationships of other firms.
13. Integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business. We expect our people to maintain high ethical standards in everything they do, both in their work for the firm and in the work for our clients.

Testimonials

There's More To Some Agents Than Meets the Eye

First, we will have the nice-nice stuff. Some fun things about the people who handle your real estate-buying or selling-were submitted to "Full Disclosure" by one of the top real estate brokers on the South Fork. She did not need attribution, she wrote, so we will respect her wishes.

Nevertheless, these are things you might never have needed to know about the people who work in the industry. Still, it's nice to know they are or have been m o re t h a n what you usually see when you're sitting w i t h t h e m in their car, listening to their pitches or hammering out the details of a deal.

So, here we go.

Did you know that Angelo Piccozzi of Dering Harbor Real Estate farms oysters in his spare time? That Tom MacNiven of Prudential is a world-class triathlete , Miles Riley of Sotheby's is a professional ice skater, or John Christopher of Brown, Harris, Stevens is a songwriter and music producer?

It might come as a surprise that Lori Barbaria of Prudential Douglas Elliman is writing a book, or that Cee Brown of Allan Schneider Associates imports objects d'art from Bali. Joe DeSane of Corcoran is an actor/playwright, and coworker Greg O'Halloran is an artist. Speaking of art, Gioia diPaolo of Corcoran is an art collector. And Anja Breden of Corcoran is a calendar girl ...

June graduations, my unnamed contributor wrote, gave me this idea: the Real Estate Yearbook.

Most Popular : Gioia diPaolo (Corcoran), Cee Brown (ASA).

Most Likely To Succeed: Lori Barbaria (Pru), Gary DePersia (ASA).

Best Personality: Corey Bezerman (Pru), Myles Reilly (Sotheby's)

Best Athlete: Tom MacNiven (Pru), Anja Breden (Corcoran)

Prom Queen: Kathy Zappola (Strough Realty)

Prom King: Joe DeSane (Corcoran)

Most Versatile: Angelo Piccozzi (Dering Harbor), Amelia Doggweiler (BHS).

Class Clown: ????? (I'm accepting open submissions for the last category, so let's hear your suggestions.) In a similar vein, showing that real estate people are more than what you see, Jean Marie, the senior administrative assistant at Prudential Elliman's Bridgehampton office, tells us that, contrary to popular belief, real estate agents do have a life outside of work. And the agents of the Bridgeh a m p t o n o f f i c e o f P r u d e n t i a l Douglas Ellim a n h a v e been busy. Ja n e G i l l a n d He i d i Wood recentl y an h o s t e d art opening for local artist Kryn Olson. And a number of agents from Prudential Elliman's Bridgehampton, Southampton and Sag Harbor offices played baseball against a formidable Dan's Papers team. They fell short and lost, 11-9. A "get-even" game will be scheduled sometime in the near future. Now, perhaps for the more quarrelsome stuff.

I asked for input ("Oh, George, where are you?") when writing about Market and Country Real Estate repor t two weeks ago. I got that input from George Simpson of Suffolk Research Service and, to my mind, it serves the Insights, the Town

industry and therefore the public. "Here's what I have to say about ‘Market Insights,'" he wrote.

"1. The good thing about the Town & Country Real Estate ‘Market Research Report' is you can't read it. It is presented in PDF format on the Town & Country Real Estate site on a scale where the text is fuzzy, and the charts on quarterly comparisons of South Fork sub-market sales are so small you can't read them. When you print the report, it is worse. The text takes up only the middle 1/4 of the page, and you can't read anything.

"2. The ‘Market Insights' data comes from Suffolk Profiles (www. liprofiles.com), a transfer data provider which does not separate residential properties from land and other types of land uses. When ‘Market Insights' talks about Sagaponack, it says the median ‘home price' for the 1st quarter of '06 was $4.7 million. Their hard-toread graph shows a median price of about $1.3 million for 2005 (1st quarter) but quotes Forbes magazine with a price of $2.7 million for the year 2005. As I said, the Suffolk Profiles figures are for all properties, and not ‘home prices,' as ‘Market Insights' says they are. Look at our widely quoted data on w w w. Su f f o l k Re s e a rc h . c o m / m a rkets.htm and you will see that the Sagaponack 1st five months residential price for single-family homes (land use code 210) was over $5.6 million for 2006.

"3. In my opinion, the Town & Country document is not a market research report. It is mostly real estate listings and pictures of properties-a sales pitch for Town & Country Real Estate. There are a few pages of naïve and downright wrong analyses.

"[ Town & Country] should stick to selling real estate and leave market analysis to those who know what they are doing. A free market research report may be downloaded from our site www.suffolkresearch. com/report.pdf, published in April of '06. It is 21 pages of tables, charts and graphs on all five Eastern Long Island towns."

So, two things. What are your views? And, as I always say, East End real estate is a very strange business ...