Real Estate

In an annual rite known as Upfront Week, NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, and the CW just presented their lineups for the 2012-13 TV season to advertisers in New York. The ceremonies took place in some of the city's most august concert Halls (Carnegie, Avery Fisher, Radio City Music) over four days. The broadcast companies introduced only 20 new series for the fall (down from 27 last season). NBC led the pack with six new shows. Fox and the CW had half that many. Like it or not, an awful lot of familiar faces will be returning in the fall.

Pam Chandler decided to accompany her husband, Bob, to the extraordinary auction of an Ocean City, N.J., mansion Saturday to keep him from "going overboard. " But an hour after she toured the 7,000-square-foot Victorian-style house on the Great Bay, she was the one prodding him to stay in the frenzied bidding on the breezy bayside veranda. The Chandlers, who live in Rumson, Monmouth County, with their three children, won the auction, ultimately paying $3.9 million for a property that was listed at about $6.5 million two years ago. It is assessed at $5 million.

The housing market's continuing struggles have upset the retirement plans of millions of Americans, keeping more of them in their current homes, waiting for diminished equity to reappear. Others plan to move, but they appear to be demanding something much different from what they wanted before the real estate boom turned to bust: smaller, less expensive retirement houses they can afford with their reduced means. At the start of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, economists weren't anticipating that the long-term trend toward retirement living would be derailed.

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - Luxury appointments abound in the 7,000-square-foot, 12-year-old Victorian-style mansion overlooking Great Bay, such as a marble fireplace that once graced a Biddle estate mansion, a crystal chandelier that at the touch of a button lowers from the 30-foot foyer ceiling for cleaning, and boat slips big enough to berth a pair of yachts. A "smart house" system controls window treatments, lighting, heating, air-conditioning, and music. Slate-covered turrets, little secret gardens, and gingerbread-laden porches make the exterior look more like Cape May than Ocean City.

This may well be Temple's moment, even with slashed state funding and the search for a new leader. The university has soared in popularity, moving beyond being a commuter school to attracting students from across the state and nation, the tuition a bargain compared with that of private institutions. During the last decade, undergraduate enrollment exploded by more than a third, students spilling into the surrounding North Central Philadelphia neighborhood of handsome 19th-century brick rowhouses.

In the first few years of the last decade, a lot of assumptions were made about aging baby boomers, their parents, their children, and their housing needs. Boomers would begin downsizing as soon as the children flew the coop, starting at about 55. Boomers would move to communities filled with their own kind. Elderly parents would be accommodated in a casita — a part of the house — until they needed continuing care. The casita would then be converted to a crafts room.

Want to buy a house? Need advice on what to do now that you're moving for the first time? If so, the answers can be as close as your personal computer. Log on and link up to the LibertyNet, where cyberspace meets real estate. LibertyNet is a regional computer-based network with information about lots of things - community organizations, educational institutions, historic and cultural attractions, local government and business in the Philadelphia region. And real estate.

Selling a house can be like losing an old friend. The attachment between home and homeowner can run that deep because of the sense of history and familiarity. And when the owner is an older person and the history spans decades, the loss can be quite painful, real-estate agents say. Jean Brenner of Richboro, who has sold real estate for 23 years, knows this from personal experience. After selling her home of 18 years, she found herself getting weepy all the time. "I was depressed but didn't know why," Brenner said.

Flora K. Rubin cannot stand inertia. That's why she teaches ethics to real-estate agents, sells about $8 million worth of real estate a year, and works on a task force that is proposing revisions in real-estate law. It's also one reason why the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors recently chose Rubin, of Narberth, for its 1993 Outstanding Service Award. "She doesn't recognize the words, 'It can't be done,' " said Rubin's friend and colleague, Carolyn Eagan. It was Eagan, executive vice president of the Main Line Board of Realtors, who submitted Rubin's name to the 26,000-member state association for consideration for the award.

In a stunning move linked to a federal investigation, Vernon W. Hill II is leaving Commerce Bancorp Inc., which he founded more than 30 years ago and built into a $47 billion bank that helped change the face of retail banking. The Cherry Hill bank said today that Hill, 61, would immediately depart from its main operating subsidiary and would retire as chairman, president and chief executive of Commerce Bancorp on July 31. Commerce stock climbed on the news, as investors placed bets that the company will be sold.

Ray Ohler, a Philadelphia real estate appraiser who delighted in pointing out the inflationary excess of the mid-2000s — brokers firing professionals who failed to approve wacky prices, New York investors chasing Sale signs down Roosevelt Boulevard, out-of-town lenders airlifting money to semi-employed buyers who might as well have worn Foreclose Me tattoos — left town in 2009, when the market went limp. "It's dead," he told me at the time. "They finally killed it. " He went to coastal Florida, where he has family — and where real estate is the only business — and found things even more dead: "Down 50 percent.

This may well be Temple's moment, even with slashed state funding and the search for a new leader. The university has soared in popularity, moving beyond being a commuter school to attracting students from across the state and nation, the tuition a bargain compared with that of private institutions. During the last decade, undergraduate enrollment exploded by more than a third, students spilling into the surrounding North Central Philadelphia neighborhood of handsome 19th-century brick rowhouses.

I'm asked more home-improvement questions than questions about real estate, by a ratio of 4-1. When, in a "Your Place" column in a recent Friday Home & Design section, I requested help for a reader needing to replace a rusted dishwasher rack for less than the manufacturer's $200, I got 25 e-mails within two hours of the newspaper's hitting the front steps, and more are coming even as I write this. My every-other-Monday webchat on Philly.com welcomes all questions from noon to 1 p.m., but the 99 percent in this realm have to do with renovating, not selling or buying.

What kind of real estate agent is Mayfair broker Christopher J. Artur? Let's see what NeighborCity's AgentMatch, billed as a way to pair "the best-performing agents with the specific needs of home sellers and buyers," has to say about this veteran of more than 40 years in the business: "[Artur] is an elite Pennsylvania real estate agent, ranked in the upper 8 percent of his peers at the 92d percentile. He has completed at least 24 transactions with an average sale price of $76,000.

Immigrant millionaire Stephen Girard's 1830 will has benefited generations of Pennsylvanians: students at Girard College, the free North Philadelphia boarding school his legacy still supports, and the lawyers who have been fighting over the will and Girard Estate funds since his death. The latest challenge will go before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday. Lawyers for the Girard Estate, which is administered by the Philadelphia Board of City Trusts, are fighting to protect its state tax exemptions.

Construction is set to begin on a $50 million project to expand sewage service in undeveloped sections of eastern Camden County, including portions of the Pinelands, laying the groundwork for 10,000 new homes. The county plan - paid for with a low-interest loan from a state environmental fund - comes as the region wrestles with tight municipal budgets caused by the real estate slowdown and shrinking property values. "That part of Camden County that has remained stagnant because of water and sewer issues," said Camden County Freeholder Jeff Nash.

I don't usually write about commercial real estate, except when residential is a major component of it. What few people understand is that the only thing residential and commercial real estate truly have in common are the words real estate. If residential is Latin, commercial is Greek — the terminology describing aspects of each can be very different. Whenever I need a succinct explanation, I turn to economist Kevin Gillen, vice president at Econsult Corp. "Commercial properties are an investment product, like a stock or bond, whereas your home is primarily a consumption product, like a consumer good," he said.

WHAT A BUNCH of deadbeats. How else can you describe Michael, Yechiel and Nahman Lichtenstein, the New Yorkers who habitually collect and neglect real-estate properties in Philadelphia, including the enormous Thomas W. Buck Hosiery building, destroyed in a blaze Monday that took the lives of two firefighters. City officials said Tuesday that the Lichtensteins owe a stunning $385,665 in unpaid real-estate taxes from 24 of the 31 properties that they own either directly or through various companies.

When John D. Stewart caught a 50-pound bass a mile north of Barnegat Inlet on Nov. 7, 1961, it was celebrated as a world record. It was not Mr. Stewart's first remarkable achievement. During World War II, Second Lt. Stewart earned a Silver Star for saving much of his battalion on Nov. 23, 1944, during the battle of the Huertgen Forest. Mr. Stewart, 90, of Cinnaminson, a former Northeast Philadelphia lawyer and real estate broker, died Thursday, March 29, of heart failure at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

In the Region Pa. slot revenue sets record Pennsylvania's 11 casinos pulled in more than $233.1 million in gross slot machine revenue last month, setting an all-time monthly high since the state's first casino opened in November 2006 and cementing the state's status as the nation's second-largest gambling market. The slots totals released by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board include revenue from two test nights and one day of operations at the state's 11th casino, Valley Forge Casino Resort, which opened Saturday.