By Trevor Jones, Berkshire Eagle Staff Updated: 07/12/2010 01:30:26 PM EDT
Sunday July 11, 2010
Cultural attractions are still drawing renters to the Berkshires this summer, but the sagging economy and changing lifestyles have altered how, when and what they rent, area real estate agents say.
Rates are generally down from what they were five or 10 years ago, many say, as more property-owners try to rent their houses and more vacationers, watchful of their money, look for bargains.
Stays are more often for a week, than for a month or the season, as used to be the case. And many are using online sites like Craigslist to avoid agents — and their fees — altogether.
“There’s a general consensus that people are looking to do more short-term,” said Claudia Laslie, owner of Berkshire Rental Properties in Great Barrington. “People used to rent from Memorial Day to Labor Day and come up to the house when they could. I think people are definitely not able to do that as much.”
Still, she said, “[This season] has been fantastic. I have almost no product left.”
Laslie rents out 37 homes in the area, and says 85 percent of them are booked up for the season.
“It’s been a very good year,” agreed Scott Sawyer, head of rental sales for Stone House Properties, LLC in West Stockbridge.
Sawyer said homes he rents range from $4,000 to $30,000 per month and the majority have been rented out. One of the advantages in booking for the summer, he said, is the fact that many people reserve spaces months in advance.
Sawyer said he will begin prepping for next summer in September, and many of the most coveted homes will be booked as early as January.
Realtors say renters’ wants can vary, some preferring a downtown setting and others wanting to be more out of the way. But the biggest draw always seems to be proximity to cultural attractions like Tanglewood and recreational spaces.
But more and more, clients are putting modern-day amenities on their checklist, too; things like high-speed Internet access and air-conditioning.
“It’s kind of all in the presentation and putting the best foot forward,” said Sawyer, on what gets spaces rented the fastest.
Still, the economy has affected what vacationers are willing to pay. Agents say rental rates have been stagnant for years or even dropped. Laslie said a house that used to go for $10,000 for the month of July is now only fetching $8,000 to $8,500.
‘Don’t want to spend’
“People don’t want to spend their money,” said Beth Rinzler, who rents a small cottage on her property in Austerlitz, N.Y. “A lot of people will try to get a bargain [for the weekend] on Thursday night, and that didn’t seem to be the case five years ago; maybe they want to be more conscious of their spending.”
Judy lazan, a Realtor with Lance Vermeulen Real Estate in South Egremont, said summer rentals have been lagging for years.
“We had all these people back in the days of the early 90s when everybody was coming up here and renting,” said Lazan. “Now, everybody is just holding on and seeing what’s out there.”
Ease of online sites
One trend has been the rise and ease of using online sites like Craigslist or VacationRentals.com.
For potential renters, they provide a means to shop for lower rates or a last minute deal. For homeowners, they cut out the middle man.
“Since I can do it well online, why would I want to split a commission with a broker?” asked Rinzler.
Rinzler has been using the Internet to rent out her space for a decade, but even that has become more competitive, with dozens of homes listed on various sites.
Less for homeowners
And all the added competition, shorter rentals and lower rates translate into less money for homeowners. Some are barely make a profit because of the continuing costs of a mortgage, home insurance and electricity; all while finding another place to stay for the summer.
“They’re carrying everything,” said Laslie. “So really what they’re making, they’re offsetting the cost or making a small profit.”
Laslie said many homeowners take vacations or stay with friends and relatives to offset the cost. And despite the declining returns, many brokers say the number of people wanting to rent their home is on the rise.
“There’s a lot of people who want to rent their house because they’re carrying two mortgages or they’re trying to sell,” said Laslie.
But even with the changing rental landscape, homeowners like Rinzler believe what hasn’t changed is that cultural attraction and rural escape will continue to draw people to make a interim home of their summer stay.
“It’s not a terrible thing,” she said, “to share a lovely little property for someone dying to have some time with their significant other in this beautiful place.”
To reach Trevor Jones:
[email protected],
or (413) 528-3660.
The 20 Best Small Towns in America
From the Berkshires to the Cascades, we’ve crunched the numbers and pulled a list some of the most interesting spots around the country
- By Susan Spano and Aviva Shen
- Smithsonian magazine, May 2012
Accordion player Tor Stumo, 13, is in harmony with Great Barrington’s acoustic music tradition. (Jason Houston)
Big-city smart meets New England natural in an art-rich mountain setting.
You’ve got to slow down when Route 7 leaves behind the wide-open valley of the Housatonic River to enter Great Barrington. The road becomes Railroad Street there, right of way to pedestrians stalled in the crosswalk trying to decide whether to have sushi or chimichangas for dinner. Others carry yoga mats, bags of farmers market produce, books, CDs, double espressos and all the other stuff it’s hard to find in surrounding Berkshire Mountain villages like Stockbridge and Lenox.
Compared with them, Great Barrington (pop. 6,800) is like a big city where you can get anything you want, to borrow the chorus from “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” by hometown boy Arlo Guthrie. He was 18 when he wrote the satirical ballad about true events on Thanksgiving Day 1965, when he got arrested for illegally dumping some of Alice’s trash, ultimately making him ineligible for the Vietnam War draft. Trinity Church, former abode of the celebrated Alice, is now the Guthrie Center, a stage for folk music, starting point of the annual “Historic Garbage Trail Walk” and a place for interfaith spiritual exchange in a town where there could be something contrarian in the water.
Or in the food. At the forefront of the big-chain-grocery-store-defying, eat-local movement, Great Barrington is devoted to its family farms, farmers markets and co-op. Berkshire Grown, an organization that promotes the production and marketing of locally grown food, spreads the word with lectures by writers like Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma and most recently Food Rules).
Great Barrington’s latest unconventional endeavor is to mint its own currency, an experiment launched in 2006 aimed at getting people to buy everything—not just food— local. Almost 400 businesses in the area trade BerkShares bills; the 5 BerkShares note features W.E.B. Du Bois, the great African-American author and educator whose boyhood home just west of town is a National Historic Landmark.
Incorporated in 1761, around the same time as Stockbridge and Lenox, Great Barrington, too, attracted rich summer people who built Gilded Age mansions like Searles Castle, now a boarding school. But Great Barrington grew up as a mill and railroad center, its blue-collar ring never excised. About 125 miles from New York City, it attracts a hip crowd from the Big Apple, along with New Englanders and recent immigrants from Asia and Mexico.
“Great Barrington is a small, manageable, economically and ethnically mixed town. That’s what I love about it,” says locally renowned Northeast Public Radio director and commentator Alan Chartock, who proudly lives in a house once owned by one of the judges at the Lizzie Borden trial.
When passenger trains still stopped in town, they brought performers from New York, booked to appear at the Mahaiwe, a vintage 1905 vaudeville theater. Now lovingly restored, it offers a year-round schedule of jazz, rock, dance, lectures and HD broadcasts from London’s National Theater and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Executive Director Beryl Jolly, who came to Great Barrington from New York’s Public Theater, calls it the Mahaiwe Mix, no categories excluded, for the whole “big mix of people you see walking down Railroad Street.”
Early summer brings the Berkshire International Film Festival to the Triplex Cinema, and classical music performed on historic instruments to the Aston Magna Festival at the Bard College Simon’s Rock campus. Not to mention such famous cultural institutions as Tanglewood, Shakespeare & Company, the Norman Rockwell Museum and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival just a country drive away.
Then there’s the frame that nature put around the picture, with 1,642-foot Monument Mountain to the east and the rest of the Berkshires to the west—such cozy mountains! Orchards are sheer walls of pink in the spring, farm fields thick with corn in the summer. Fall leaf-peepers train cameras on golden oaks and crimson maples. Honking geese pass over ice-coated bogs and ponds in the watershed of the Housatonic River. All this, and bagels, too. Arlo got it right. — Susan Spano