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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