Streets in Mastic we have bought on
A three-bedroom on Stuyvesant Avenue. A three-bedroom on George Drive. A three-bedroom on Clinton Avenue.
We name streets rather than house numbers, because the people who sold to us are entitled to their privacy. Every one of these is a real purchase, which is a lower bar than it should be: a great many of the companies mailing Mastic homeowners have never bought anything here at all.
Why we only buy on Long Island
Most of the letters and texts reaching Mastic homeowners come from operations working dozens of markets from somewhere else entirely. They are not valuing your house. They are collecting a contract at a low enough number to resell to somebody local, which is why those offers so often change after the fact.
We work two counties. That is the whole footprint. It is small enough that we know what Mastic houses are worth and small enough that we are still here when something goes wrong after closing.
What we look at in Mastic, block by block
Not the town-wide average. What matters is what houses like yours, on your street or the two beside it, actually closed at recently, and what condition they were in when they did.
In Mastic that means paying attention to things a spreadsheet misses. Which blocks back onto Montauk Highway, which streets took water in the last bad storm, where the William Floyd Union Free School District boundary runs, and which stretches have had enough recent renovation to pull comparable sales up.
No street is off the list
Every block, every condition. We have bought houses in Mastic that nobody could get financed, that had not been entered in years, and that had open files with the town.
And if your house is in a neighboring town rather than Mastic itself, that is fine. We buy across Nassau and Suffolk, so the page you happened to land on does not limit anything.
What you do not pay
Every line below is a cost of listing a house the retail way that simply does not arise here.
- Agent commission
- $27,000 at 5% of the Mastic median none
- Seller closing costs
- About $10,800 on a $540,000 sale. We can cover these. none
- Repairs to make it listable
- Whatever it takes to make it listable, paid in advance none
- Cleanout and removal
- Paid per load, before a single buyer walks through none
- Carrying costs while it waits
- Taxes, insurance and utilities through the 72 to 87 days a listing takes to sell and close none
What happens to the Mastic houses we buy
Most of what we buy we renovate and sell. That is the business, and it is why condition is something we price rather than something that frightens us: the work was always going to happen, the only question is who funds it and at what cost.
We run millions of dollars of construction a year, which buys materials at contractor pricing and keeps crews scheduled rather than bidding job by job. The practical effect is that the same work costs us in the region of half what a homeowner is quoted, and that gap is what makes an offer possible on a house nobody else will take on.
What makes Mastic a market we work
Partly the housing stock, which is mostly ranch and cape cod of an age where boilers, roofs and electrical services are reaching the end of their lives. Partly proximity, which is what lets us schedule work without a premium for the travel.
And partly that Mastic is a place where people stay. Houses here are frequently owned for thirty or forty years and then sold by the family rather than by the original owner, and that particular situation, an estate or a move into care, is most of what we handle.
The boundaries and landmarks we work around in Mastic
Montauk Highway, Mastic Road, the Forge River. These are not decoration on a page. Proximity to each of them changes what a house is worth, and in different directions depending on which one and how close.
The William Floyd Union Free School District boundary is the other line that matters more than most people outside the area realize, because it moves values in ways that do not show up in a town-wide average at all. Two houses a few hundred feet apart can sit on different sides of it.
Common questions
Do you buy in every neighborhood in Mastic?
Yes. There is no part of the town we decline and no condition we decline.
My house is not in Mastic. Can you still buy it?
Almost certainly, as long as it is on Long Island. We work Nassau and Suffolk and nowhere else, but we work all of both.
Will you put my address on your website?
No. We name streets at most, and never house numbers. If you would rather we did not mention the street either, say so and we will not.