REAL ESTATE

INSIDE STORIES BEHIND AREA REAL ESTATE DEALS

Editor's Note: This essay by Scoop Drummond is solely his opinion.

Rentals—no further to fall—derailed early this year, taking a grave detour from a healthy forecast so divined by the experts. Though some brokers say their rental business was brisk, I don't buy it. For Rent signs are everywhere, a hearty symbol of realism in an artificial world.

The very best of the good houses found takers easily enough as they always do. But a spate of grimly acceptable dwellings had little allure, even to those who in the past spent it anyway just to be here.

In our special world where the entry level for a rental is about $75,000 to $100,000 for the season, it's no wonder the marketplace is questioning the standard of flinging riches to rags. Many of these houses are not up to snuff for the price. Why bother driving hours from the Upper East Side or a leafy suburb only to arrive and be hurled into a house best left in Hackensack?

The typically luxurious rentals that cost $200,000 to $400,000 for the season do offer brighter accoutrements. Still, the market for these dandy domiciles was a mixed bag this year.

One house, for example, in prime Sagaponack and only two blocks from the ocean, has not rented yet. It's got all the toys: a shingle-style edifice with a humongous, magazine-photo-shoot-quality kitchen, double-story living room, a great room, six bedrooms, sumptuous master suite, tennis court and ocean views from the upper floor. At $400,000 it remains empty. Had it been put on the market at last year's $350,000 price tag might it have rented? Who knows? Maybe it's the luck of the draw. Another house that came on the market late in the season was offered for July through Labor Day. It enjoys a prime spot in East Hampton, steps from Georgica Beach. Newly built, stylishly furnished it was being offered at $300,000 for the period. And wouldn't you know? It rented immediately. With a Bentley—this year's "it" car—in the driveway and help in uniforms, hardly visible were the signs of a depressed real estate market or economy beckoning.

So what happened? Did the imploding financial markets also deck our big spenders, those arbiters elegantiarum now a bit scruffy around the collar? Or are the offspring of the Me Generation progenitors finally at a tiresome impasse, scratching and scrambling to pay for this year's high-priced entitlements?