Thursday, December 13, 2012

My Flippin' Brother



So I am not even going to address the lack of blog posting. Disgraceful..I know. I do plan on posting sold info every week , so for those of you who have clamored for it, it will make its return. I will post it every Fri.
Once again the reason for my lack of blogging is the fact that I have been very busy. I am set to shatter my previous record for sales in a year, and this Dec. alone will beat what I made in my first two years of being an agent. Some has to do with the fact that the market has turned around, but a lot of it is simply because I have been doing this for longer now. I am better at it.  People know this is what I do, and refer others to me.  My sphere of influence has grown, and with it does my sales volume.  

But as the holidays approach, things slow a bit, and I have been able to catch my breath and try to resuscitate a stale (ish) website and blog.

So "My Flippin' Brother" made its premier on A&E on Saturday. This is a show about a local realtor/designer/house flipper Randy Florke who owns the Rural Connection. It is a real estate office based in Manhattan that sells second homes in Sullivan County. He also flips homes, and even tried a modular "green" line of second homes that I believe was not all that successful.

At any rate, Randy has been successful buying and selling real estate here in Sullivan County. He was one of the first to really start catering to the metro second home buyer pool, and his shabby-chic-farm-house-on-a-dirt-road line of inventory was a hit throughout the boom years. And something others have tried to emulate with varying success.

The show however,  was an unmitigated disaster. The "stars" of  the show are Randy, who unabashedly refers to himself as a cross between Martha Stewart and Bob Villa. His brother Ron, who although he has a pretty good reputation as a solid contractor here in Sullivan County, decided for whatever reason to let the show paint him as a complete imbecile, and Jesse Fescue who plays the tired part of the flamboyantly gay interior designer. Think Albert (Nathan Lane) in the Birdcage--which was a great movie, but I digress--meets Cameron from Modern Family, meets the interior decorator from Beetlejuice. All good roles, however it's been done, and the attempt at this character was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Perhaps it would have been less insulting to the veiwers intelligence if it werent being passed of as "reality" television. On the show it said Randy had just purchased the home they were flipping. In reality he has owned it since 2006. At the end the "buyer" (who never really bought it, the house sits empty to this day) wrote a check for 300K for the house. I can assure you that never happend.
I'm not even going to mention the fake water main break three inches below the ground. Pipes freeze unless they are below the frost line.
They made sure to add a fair amount of bickering and arguing. Put all that together with some contrived issues and problems that pop up as a deadline approaches and certain bank default and destitution looms, and you have a pretty bad hour of television. It is a shame, because I think that a real estate show in Sullivan County would have been nice.
 
There were 8 single family homes sold in Sullivan County in the last seven days. Click Here for Listings

 

8 comments:

  1. Minus the arguing and obvious phony story line I think Randy should have his own decorating show. Absolutely love his style.There are no shows geared towards those of US that have old homes. Please consider, he used common sense and simple design to create beauty. Debra Perugini

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  2. Debra, I agree. Perhaps in my haste to disparage what I felt was cheap bad television, I failed to give Randy more of his due. (Although I did mention his success with The Rural Connection.) At any rate he obviously has talent at design, and is a smart businessman. I suppose in some ways that is why the direction they chose to take the show made it even worse. I think there is an intelligent enough viewer pool out there who would be interested in watching what Randy really does. Instead we got Jersey Shore.

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