Pat Kennedy - Your Washington, DC Real Estate Connection

There are some amazing properties that come on the market here in Washington, often with lots of history for their agents to feature in the listing brochures.  Of the five highest priced properties for sale in Washington right now, two of them are historic enough be on the National Register of Historic Places.  For each of these properties, you may click on the address for a virtual tour.

1623 28th Street NW

OK, I could live very happily in the 3-bedroom gate house for the Evermay Estate, which sits on over three acres of prime Georgetown land, is listed on the National Register of Historical Places.  Dating back to the 18th century, it was originally constructed by Samuel Davidson, an international maritime merchant and "FOG" - that would be friend of George.  Um, Washington.  He also owned a bunch of real estate that is now the site of the White House, among others.  The main house has 9 bedrooms, 6 full and 5 half baths.  There is a dining room that will seat 40 and a ballroom for dancing the night away.  The property is extremely private, and from the upper levels has a view of the Washington Monument.  Oh, and did I mention parking - a must in Georgetown - for about 100 cars.  Evermay is listed by Long & Foster.  The price, originally at $49,000,000 is now reduced to $39,500,000.

3055 Whitehaven Street NW 

This 13,000 square feet Georgian home was built in 1930, almost new construction by Washington standards!  While it is close to downtown, it sits on a third of an acre on a tree-lined street and overlooks the British Embassy.  Oh!  And you needn't have any concerns about security, as the Secretary of State is one of the neighbors, meaning serious Secret Service protection 24/7.  The landscaping on this property in just beautiful.  Inside, you are welcomed into a beautiful marble foyer.  The living space is set up for entertaining, with a dining room that can seat 40 for a formal dinner.  The kitchen is thoroughly modern, there is a large wine cellar, and the elevator makes life easier for people like me who have terrible knees.  There are Throughout this property there are beautiful architectural details where the original charm and character has been preserved.  This home is listed by TTR Sothebys International Realty for $20,000,000.

3400 Prospaect Street NW

Halcyon House is another wonderful Georgetown property with a past.  Built on a hillside by James Stoddart (our first Navy Secretary) in 1787, it has a wonderful vista of the Potomac River.  The virtual tour says it all.  The restoration was an exhausting labor of love.  The home boasts a sculptor's studio, beautiful pool in the south yard with views of the Virginia skyline, 14-car parking, and a kitchen that is perfect for the caterers who show up to feed your guests.  The home is, in fact, a favorite venue for elegant Washington wedding receptions and other festive events.  This property is listed with  TTR Sothebys International Realty, reduced from $30,000,000 to $19,500,000.

2933 Benton Place NW 

Located just off Massachusetts Avenue near all of the embassies, this Mediterranean style villa was completely rebuilt in 2001.  There is a sweeping circular staircase coming down to the marble foyer.  The kitchen is amazing, and well set up for caterers.  The rooms are large and sunlit, and it is a perfect place to entertain guests.  It has 10 bedrooms, 10 baths and 3 half baths.  And of course, there is a beautiful pool in the beautifully landscaped back yard.  This home is listed by WC & AN Miller (Long & Foster) for $18,500,000.

1744 Massachusetts Ave NW

Built in 1890, this brick bay front would make a wonderful home where you could throw phenomenal parties.  It would also be a great place for a law firm, association or educational organization.  It's right downtown, just off Dupont Circle, across the street from Brookings and near Metro.  It has been amazingly renovated, and my personal favorite thing about this property is the railing with beautiful ironwork that goes up the circular staircase and around the second floor.  The home boasts two kitchens, one for the caterers downstairs, and one for the family up.  It is listed by TTR Sothebys International Realty for $14,900,000, reduced from $17,500,000.

If you are looking for a home in Washington, I would be honored to help you find it.  Call Patricia Kennedy at 202-549-5167.

Since 1937, Krispy Kreme has made what I consider to be the best glazed donuts.  And they may be responsible for at least a couple of inches of girth around my hips.

OK, my favorite therapist won't let me get by with that one.  I am responsible for the couple of inches of girth.  After all, I did eat the freakin' donuts!  Have you ever tasted a Krispy Kreme?  Can you at least empathize?

So imagine my surprise when I heard on the 11 o'clock news that Krispy Kreme is the target of a lawsuit.  Yep, Fairfax County has nothing better to do than to pick on everybody's favorite glazed donut baker!

Not only does Krispy Kreme make fabulous donuts.  They also have supported young entrepreneurs - including many Realtors® who got their start delivering these wonderful treats to their neighbors in their little red wagons.

Turns out that Krispy Kreme dumped some dough and yeast into the country sewer system, something the yummy baker vehamently denies.

OK, I know that dumping business, or I should say alleged dumping business, is not good, but the donuts are good enough that I'm tending to believe Krispy Kreme's denials.

OK, I have to start off by saying that I am a Washington, DC area real estate snob. 

Now, I might consider marrying for money to live in the Georgetown Ritz Carlton Condominium overlooking the Potomac River at Washington Harbor. Units here start at a couple of million dollars and go up from there.

But there is another Harbor upstart just south of our nation's Capital - National Harbor, overlooking the Potomac River and Old Town Arlington.  But this is what I've always thought of as downwardly mobile Prince George's County. 

Not so fast!

At a recent visit with a friend, I was skeptical.  And quite surprised.  Pleasantly surprised.

It's a community that includes resorts, convention centers, fancy retail tenants, a fabulous farmers' market with some very high quality produce and meat, and some fabulous condos, some with Potomac River views.

We started to check out the condos, and there was a fabulous building - one of the Fleet Street Condos.  We left the official open house itinerary and headed for the top floor penthouses.  And there was one with an unlocked door that had me mentally arranging my furniture - walls of windows overlooking the Potomac, interior walls that would hold my bookcases, fabulous kitchen, charming balcony, and a couple of thousand square feet of sun-drenched living space.

Now here's the catch.  The price tag for this amazing unit was $775,000.  I could sell my wreck of a house and  buy this without even the help of a rich husband. 

But it's Prince George's County!  And it's an awfully long ride to my totally cool offices at Evers & Company.   So for now, I'm staying in my falling down house in a fabulous upper Northwest DC neighborhood with fantasies about downsizing to a waterfront condo.  But if I worked anywhere in PG county or in DC downtown or Capitol Hill, this might be the place!

If you'd like to take a look, give me a call at 202-549-5167.  These places are, I think, one of the best values in the DC Metro area. 

A few years ago, I went on a reading binge on the Colonial period and all of the founding fathers and mothers.  And the player who fascinated me the most was Thomas Jefferson. 

So this Memorial Day weekend, my sweetie and I hopped into his really cute convertible and headed for Charlottesville, Virginia to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation. 

The ride down was gorgeous, with a detour down Skyline Drive, with it's amazing views of the Shenandoah Valley.  We had the top down, and while the skies were pretty blue over the Shenandoah, on the other side of the mountain, the sky was black with scary looking clouds.  Still, it didn't really rain on us!

When we got to Monticello, the tour started with a film about Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence.  But I was more interested in seeing the house where he lived.  That came next.

The plantation has been restored to much the village it was in Jefferson's time.  It housed over 200 people, including around 150 slaves, owned by the man who wrote about all men being created equal in the Declaration of Independence.

They wouldn't let us take photos inside the house, but you can find them on the gallery official web site .  Being in Jefferson's private rooms, with his books and surveying tools, and the bed with a cool clock at the foot, was a little voyeuristic, especially when I spotted his boots set against the wall. 

The kitchen was set apart from the living quarters, because Jefferson's father lost his house to a kitchen fire  years earlier.  The cooks and servers then had to run the food through this hallway, up a back stair, and then they delivered it to the guy who served it.  They did allow photos of the kitchen, the brewery (yes, the had a little micro brewery thing going) and the cooks living quarters. 

Then there were the gardens.  There were flower gardens and space for produce.  

And if you are a history buff, the gift shop has the best collection of books that I've ever seen on the revolutionary period.

So here are the photos of the kitchen and the gardens that I promised!

Our regional contracts call for listings to be "broom clean" and "free of trash and debris" at settlement.  I don't care to think about the time and energy some agents spend arguing about what, exactly, this means. 

In cases where the moving van shows up first thing in the morning, and the settlement is late the same day, it can get interesting.  The sellers' furniture is picked up and hauled away, exposing more than enough dust bunnies to knit a sweater!   And typically, the sellers are way too pooped from all of the packing and boxes to go through their old home and whip it into shape that will reasonably satisfy the buyers.

So this is my advice.  Hire a professional service to come in behind the movers and scrub your house down.  If you have a lot of trash left behind, you can have arrange for a special pick up in the District and most local jurisdictions, but your old trash is going to be at the curb or in the alley for several days after settlement.  And hauling services that will take it directly to the dump are often a good investment.

Your buyers will show up for the final walk-through, often on their way to the settlement table.  What they find will indeed set the tone for the entire process of exchanging your keys for their money.  If what they see is sparkling clean and beautiful, they will more than likely be comfortable as they sit down to sign their lives away. 

If, on the other hand, you've left the place dusty, the refrigerator and oven grungy, and left rusted out cans of old paint, cleaning supplies and other junk, you could help create a pretty unpleasant atmosphere.

And sometimes, the buyers, even their agents, behave like jerks even when the sellers leave the place impeccable.  I sold a condo in Alexandria that had been professionally cleaned, and the agent complained loudly that the windows had streaks on them.  I wanted to dump a bottle of Windex over her head, and my seller, normally a great guy, morphed into a total jerk when she tried to turn it into an issue.

So broom clean does not really require that you leave the place totally sparkling, but it's a nice, not to mention smart thing to do.

Crestwood is just about my favorite neighborhood in Washington.  It's where I've lived for the past 25 years.  And two favorite Evers & Company colleagues, Guy-Didier Godat and June Gardner, have just listed a wonderful home here.

It is a traditional Washington center-hall brick colonial, on a large lot backing up to the park like setting of "The Rocks", an aptly named large estate owned by Jay and Sharon Rockefeller. 

This house has 5 bedrooms and 3 1/2 baths on four finished levels.  But my favorite thing is the gigantic screened in porch at the back of the house, where you can enjoy fresh summer breezes.

The kitchen and baths were recently renovated, with granite counters and high end appliances in the kitchen.  The lower level is finished and can accommodate the nanny and a home office.

Crestwood is approximately three miles north of the White House, bounded by 16th Street on the East and surrounded on the other three sides by Rock Creek Park.  It is an easy walk to the concerts and plays at the Carter Baron Amphitheater and tennis stadium. 

This home is offered for sale at $1,475,000 and can be seen by appointment.

One of my colleagues was very happy to get a contract ratified for a beautiful condominium unit here in Washington.  Everything looked good.

• The buyer was a compulsive early bill payer with pristine credit and a great job - the lender loved him.
• The buyer was making a large down payment - a little over 20%
• The home inspection was totally non-eventful.
• The appraisal went through without a hitch.
• The building was about 95% owner occupied, so it more than met the lender's investor unit guidelines.
• The sellers had equity in the unit and were completely up to date on their mortgage and condo fees, so no problem there.

What, we wondered, could have gone wrong?

Well, there had been a couple of short sales in the building.  So this major lender decided they didn't want to finance units in that particular condo project.  They declined the loan at the last minute.

Huh?  The short sales were history, and whatever they sold for had to be reflected in the appraisal.  They had been included in the comparables, after all.  Yikes!

DC is not exactly Short Sale Central, and I have yet to list or sell a house or condo in this category.  But watching stuff like this unfold has created a new respect for those of you who have short sales and foreclosures as a major part of your business.

And I guess this is one more thing we have to look out for when we are helping our clients find a new home in a condo.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I have not mastered the art of brewing Google juice. 

When I started to blog on Active Rain two years ago, you had to go to Page 35 of the Patricia Kennedys to find me.  Then all of a sudden, I was on Page 1, and I stayed there for a long time. One of my goals on Active Rain is to make it easy for previous friends or clients who I might have lost track of to find me.  And it's worked well.

Yesterday when I Googled "'Patricia Kennedy' and 'Real Estate'", the top of the list was a blog site with a bunch of writers, with one writing about me, but no link to any of my blogs. Then I found that my nemesis and namesake, Patricia Kennedy the porn star was next, with a series of items about her new film with a name something like "Real Estate Sluts".  Again, not her own site where one might be able to learn where to purchase her magnum opus, but people blogging about her.

Then I want to pay my electric bill online, and I Googled Pepco for the link to their site.  What'd I get?  A bunch of sites about Pepco stock and blogs about annoying power outages in various neighborhoods.  I gave up and typed in Pepco.com and got lucky.

Next, I tried to find Bank of America online billpayer service.  A search for "Bank of America" yielded a bunch of links to articles about the doings of their Board of Directors.  So I Googled "Bank of Anerica online bill pay" and got some blogger's rant about the problems he had using their web site.

More and more searches that I do on Google no longer yield relevant links. 

Still,, I'm going to run over to spend a bunch of time this weekend figuring out the Google Juice thing.  But if I figure it out, will I get hits from a bunch of dirty old men looking for that other Patricia Kennedy?

Yesterday, I opened up a small house in Georgetown that is what we call a "condo alternative".  It has two bedrooms, two baths and is priced pretty close to what you'd pay for a comparably sized condominium in the neighborhood.  And there are two major condo buildings right across the street, and many of the people who came through my listing live in one of them.  In fact, my sellers lived there until they outgrew their unit.

Many of the condo dwellers were interested in the place because, among other things, it is not a condo.  There is no condo governing board telling them what color drapes they can hang, and there are no monthly checks to write for the condo fees, which are pretty hefty.

Every time I imagine down-sizing to a condo, I remember what it was like to live in one.  It seemed like there was always a lot of bickering about whatever the issues might be - renovating the dowdy lobby, budgeting for repairs for whatever needed fixing, and raising the monthly fees. 

The people who tend to get involved in condo governing organizations like to control stuff and be in charge of making sure the building is run "properly".  Well, in my condo that meant that the twelve control freaks on the board (myself included) had to see eye-to-eye on how the "properly" thing was to be interpreted, and that rarely happened.  The ones who agreed with me were the smart people, and the ones who did not were total idiots.  Let's face it, a condo is democracy at it's closest level, and it isn't always pretty! 

But in a house, you have similar issues.  You don't write a check for the monthly fee to cover your home's maintenance.  But over the years, I've written lots of checks to roofers, plumbers, electricians, lawn guys, and a housekeeper.  And finding competent professionals to to keep the place in order and the systems humming along can be a huge hassle. 

So bottom line, a house has more responsibilities that you cannot delegate to a resident manager and board of directors.  But you'll have far fewer arguments about how to keep the place exactly the way you want it.

Yesterday, I overslept.  Instead of being a good dog human and taking Willie for a nice long walk, I opened the back door and shoved him out. 

He got even.  Not that he dug up flower beds - there are none.  My back yard is like a virgin jungle.  Instead, he found a mud puddle and came in an incredibly dirty dog.  Then, he ran through the house leaving muddy footprints all over the place.

Bad Willie!

Um, Pat, you should have walked him.  There is no such thing as a bad dog, only bad dog humans!

So it's a Spa Day for Mr. Willie!  I took him to our local Petco where there's a woman who is just terrific with Labradoodles.  He got the treatment -  shampoo, cut, blow dry, pedicure, and they even brushed his teeth so he would have a nice smile!

And here is the "after" picture. 

Good boy, Willie!  And, yeah, we'll go for a walk!