Real Estate Market Along Coast Upended by Hurricane

But that was before Mr. Vento and his wife watched from the top floor as 10 feet of water ruined the home in which they had raised their three children. Last week, he sold it for $279,000, less than half his original asking price, unable to wait for a better offer.

“I was fortunate to get what I got,” he said. “I’m 72 years old. What am I going to do? Wait until I’m 82? By that time I’d be living in a nursing home.”

The real estate market along the New York and New Jersey coastlines has been as upended by Hurricane Sandy as the houses tossed from their foundations. In places where waterfront views once commanded substantial premiums, housing prices have tumbled amid uncertainty about the costs of rebuilding and the dangers of seaside living.

Homeowners have had to decide quickly whether to sell out or pour more money in to fix storm-damaged homes, as the real estate speculators who have descended on these areas make offers that would have been preposterous just two months ago.

Some owners have indignantly balked and even gone so far as to take houses that were already on the market off, waiting for values to rebound. But many others who lack the means or the desire to rebuild say they have no choice but to try to get out from under these properties for whatever they can.

“They’ve had enough,” said Steve Kaplan, 49, an investment banker from Long Beach, on Long Island, who has been buying damaged properties there since the storm. “They are going to move on, they don’t want to deal, they don’t want to redo their house.”

“There’s an opportunity here,” Mr. Kaplan added, “that you can buy houses for cash because they want to move on very quickly.”

Experts are divided on whether the effects of the storm on property values reflect a new reality for waterside areas or whether prices will come back stronger, as they did in Lower Manhattan, where prices tumbled after the Sept. 11 attacks. Real estate agents are urging patience, worried that entire communities are hemorrhaging value.

In the meantime, a range of real estate prospectors have arrived. A truck advertising a company that buys distressed homes for cash started patrolling the waterlogged neighborhoods along the Rockaways, in Queens, almost immediately after the storm. Signs offering the services of similar companies have cropped up like crab grass in front of supermarkets on Long Island.

And there were so many paltry offers for properties on Craigslist that one person posted: “Real estate is high enough and many are trying to suck the life out of people who have lost homes, cars and all their possessions. Where are your hearts and consciences?”

But the cash-in-hand these companies offer may be too desperately needed for some homeowners to pass up.

Ryan Case, a partner at Seaside Funding, a national “flip company” that often offers 60 percent to 70 percent below market rate for properties, acknowledged that would-be sellers would be wise to ignore his agents’ offers.

“We are not your best option,” he said.

Yet those who find bargain-basement offers tough to swallow — compared with the value their houses had before the storm — sometimes find themselves with little alternative. Mr. Case recounted how one New Jersey woman reacted with outrage at his company’s offer. “She said, ‘I’ll burn the house before I sell it to you guys to make a profit,’ ” he said. But she called back a week later to see if the offer still stood.

There have also been amateur speculators, who see a chance to realize the dream of owning a second home or an investment property.

Mr. Kaplan and his friend Bob Gregor talked for years about buying houses in Long Beach, their hometown. But it was not until a few weeks after the hurricane that they finally went shopping.

Cara Buckley contributed reporting.

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Tepid Sales of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Point to Shaky Market

Not this time. Windows 8, the latest edition of Microsoft’s software, failed to pack shoppers into a Microsoft store in a mall here last week, at a time when parking lots in the area were overflowing. The trickle of shopping bags leaving the store with merchandise was nothing like the steady stream at a bustling Apple store upstairs.

Claude Ballard was among the customers at the Microsoft store who tried out Surface, a new Microsoft-designed Windows tablet. Mr. Ballard, who described himself as a “semiretired” computer systems manager for a real estate firm, said he was intrigued by the eye-catching design of Windows 8 — but not enough to scrimp to buy a new computer this year.

“It’s economics, really,” he said. “It’s going to be a better year for my mechanic than it is for me.”

Weak PC sales this holiday season suggest that the struggles of Microsoft and other companies that depend heavily on the computer business will not abate soon. Plenty of consumers already own PCs and seem content to make do with what they have, especially in a shaky economy in which less expensive mobile devices are bidding for a share of their wallets.

While there are also many tablets running Microsoft’s new, touch-friendly Windows, they have so far failed to emerge from the shadow of competing products from Apple and Amazon and other devices that are being snapped up by holiday shoppers.

Emmanuel Fromont, president of the Americas division of Acer, the world’s No. 4 PC maker, said sales of the company’s Windows 8 PCs had been lower than expected. He said one factor was the system’s unfamiliar design, which appeared to be making consumers cautious.

“There was not a huge spark in the market,” Mr. Fromont said. “It’s a slow start, there’s no question.”

The clearest evidence of Windows 8’s disappointing introduction comes from the research firm NPD, which estimates that sales of Windows machines have actually dropped from a year ago.

According to NPD, stores in the United States sold 13 percent fewer Windows devices from late October, when Windows 8 made its debut, through the first week in December, than in the same period last year.

Those figures do not include sales in Microsoft’s own stores, which were the only place to buy a Surface tablet during that period, but because the stores are scarce, analysts believe it is unlikely they made a big difference.

“I think everybody would have hoped for a better start,” said Stephen Baker, an analyst at NPD. “The thing is, this market is not the same market that Windows 7 or Vista or even XP launched into.”

Those earlier versions of Windows all came out during periods when the PC’s status as the center of computing seemed far more secure. In the intervening years, smartphones and tablets have become much more serious rivals for a share of consumer spending on technology. Sales of PCs have been declining for much of the year.

While most people are not getting rid of their PCs altogether in favor of mobile devices, analysts believe they are postponing purchases of new ones.

“What you’re seeing is not a retirement of PCs, but a push-out in the replacement cycle,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “If people used to buy PCs every four years and are now buying them every five years, that could lower PC sales by 20 percent over time. That’s substantial.”

Mr. Sacconaghi predicted that global PC shipments would be down 3 percent in 2012.

The shift in spending to tablets is one reason that Windows 8 is so critical for Microsoft’s future. The company overhauled its operating system with a radically different, tile-based interface that is easier to navigate on touch-screen devices. Microsoft intends the software to be flexible enough that it can still be used on conventional laptops and desktops, including newer models with touch screens.

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