Category Archives: Home & Real Esate

By Jennifer Farnsworth
Carmelo Vines and Harold Baldwin hope to bring home design to a new level in Saratoga Springs.
At VRED, the pair is bringing years of real estate experience and combining with a passion for designing. Vines said what may begin as an affordable fixer-upper property can become a dream home with the right amount of planning. He said he always wanted to design and has always had an eye for what a property could be when it comes to owning a home and loving it.

By Susan E. Campbell
A group of four Capital District real estate agents is offering personal safety awareness instruction specifically designed for real estate agents—but with a kick.
The idea for Personal Safety Services started to take root about two years ago when Bruce McClellan, a recently retired Realtor and founder of Pinnacle Realty Saratoga LLC, had a minor health setback that “caused him to pull away a bit” from his busy real estate practice, according to the group’s operations director and instructor, Genevieve Suguitan of Signature One Group Malta.

By Jill Nagy
Real estate broker Ferdinando Bruno is owner and broker of Re/Max Solutions in Clifton Park.
His office, at Town Plaza, 800 Route 146, is the third new Re/Max franchise to open in the Albany area in the past two years.
Although relatively new to Re/Max, Bruno has been in the real estate business for 18 years. He headed the Rubinger Team, made up of family members, at RealtyUSA/Howard Hanna before opening his own franchise with Re/Max.
He said the move to Re/Max gave him the flexibility to grow a business as an independent owner. He was also attracted by the overall brand recognition of the company and the tools it makes available to its franchisees.

By Christine Graf
Coldbrook Resort Campground, an RV park located off Northway Exit 16 in Gansevoort, was purchased for $1.85 million by real estate holding company Coldbrook at Saratoga LLC.
The campground has 280 sites and is open from May 1 until Oct. 16. According to campground general manager Glen Slaymaker, approximately half of the sites are rented for the entire six-month season.

By Jill Nagy
Karen Totino closed the doors of Green Conscience, her shop on Church Street in Saratoga Springs at the end of March to devote herself full-time to a growing real estate business.
Green Conscience was a mattress, furniture, and home products store dedicated to providing quality and education to people who seek a healthy, safe, and sustainable lifestyle.
She is a licensed real estate agent who will work out of her home and at the new Alexander Monticello Real Estate office in downtown Saratoga Springs at 511 Broadway, specializing in serving clients over the age of 50.
Totino owned and operated Green Conscience for 10 years. As she developed her real estate business, she thought she could do both but, she said, “I have discovered that I am not Superwoman. Ten years in retail is enough.”
So, she sold the last of her stock and the store furnishings.

By Maureen Werther

As Jeff and Deane Pfeil prepare to transition out of their commercial real estate and development careers and into their new lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington state, they have a lot to be proud of and a lot to be grateful for.

The husband-and-wife team created Pfeil & Co. Real Estate and moved to Saratoga Springs from Westchester in 1994. Both were commercial real estate brokers and they started out managing shopping center developments, moving into doing historic restorations and adaptive re-use apartments. Deane was born and raised in Troy, while Jeff comes from the small town of Carmel, in Putnam County.

Looking back on their careers, Deane recalls that there was no internet when they first began and it took a lot of cold-calling to develop a client base, something at which she excelled.

“We liked to joke that I would get them on the line and Jeff would reel them in,” she said.

The Pfeils first major project in Saratoga Springs was the office building at 340 Broadway.

“The property had been sitting vacant since 1969, and we kept asking ourselves why nothing had been done with it,” she said. Deane zeroed in on Eddie Bauer and “barraged” them with flyers, mailings, and information about Saratoga Springs.

By Jill Nagy

Insulated concrete forms (ICFs) that fit together like Lego blocks form the skeleton of the Net Zero energy-efficient homes built by Halfmoon Construction of Clifton Park.

The company’s president, Andy Ellis, explained that the forms, called Lodgix Blocks, are set and filled with concrete.

“It gives us a really good base for an energy-efficient house,” he said.

The blocks serve three functions. Ellis said they replace the plywood on the outside, replace the wall insulation inside, and go in place of the framing of a traditionally built structure.

The cost is 8 to 10 percent more than traditional construction but, he said, the cost is recovered in less than three years because of the resulting energy savings. The houses he builds can be finished with any type of siding on the outside and traditional wallboard on the inside.

Currently, the company is building a “100-year house,” with corrugated metal siding and a metal roof.  “It won’t need any repairs soon,” he said.

The result will be a house with 12-inch walls, about double the traditional width. Windows and doors are set-in more and better defined and windows have wide sills. Otherwise, the house will not stand out from its non-sustainable neighbors.