Archive for February 10th, 2008

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It seems that in Southern California saying a home was inspired by Richard Neutra is becoming the equivalent of saying a home is Frank Lloyd Wright influenced in other parts of the country. The LA Times Hot Property column brought my attention to this Bel-Air homed which was once owned by Irene Kassorla,”the psychologist and author once described by Merv Griffin as the ’shrink to the stars’” and is currently owned by another student of the mind, Dr. William Bondareff, a professor of psychiatry at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Bondareff and his wife Rita are headed up the coast to Carmel so this Neutra-inspired three-bedroom home is on the market. The home has beautiful outdoor space including a custom pool with a “wall of stone and water” which helps create a tranquil garden setting. The home’s rich wood interior includes a study/library. I like that it has maintained its 1960s-1970s sensibilities and it seems a lot cozier than most Neutras I’ve seen. It is listed at $2.195 million.

Continue reading Roscomare Road, Estate of the Day

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From the NY Post’s Gimme Shelter:
–Heath Ledger’s rental apartment in SoHo is already being quietly shopped around. Ledger had been renting the three-bedroom apartment for $22,000 a month and it is apparently being offered now for around $25,000.
–Clothing magnate Leslie “Les” Wexner, who founded The Limited and owns Victoria’s Secret, Express and Henri Bendel has picked up a four-bedroom condo at 15 Central Park West for $13.1 million.He and his wife have a $50 million, 1,000-acre estate in Ohio.
–Heather Randall, the widow of Tony Randall, is also moving into a similarly sized four-bedroom apartment at 15 Central Park West.
–A $32 million sale at the elite 740 Park Ave. co-op building. The estate of Mosler Safe heiress Janet Coleman sold the 14-room duplex apartment to David Randall Winn and his wife, Tamara Sarah Winn.

From the NY Observer’s Manhattan Transfers:
–New York City has presented finalists for its contest to design emergency temporary housing. The ideas include inflatable apartments, putting housing atop the sidewalk scaffold sheds that fill the streets of Manhattan, and lugging in buildings on tugboats. Ten were given $10,000 to further develop their designs.
–A peek into the life of Steven Green who in 1990 was named one of the NYC’s 10 worst landlords, and spent almost a month in jail after not providing Queens tenants with hot water.Green later moved to Florida, started a charter airline and early last year failed to get back a $780,000 divorce settlement from his partner, who cited cruelty. He was then sentenced to almost three years in jail for fraud and tax charges. In Might, a month before jail, he was leaving a West Side club when a hit-and-run put him in a coma. Green is recovering from brain damage, and won’t have to report to prison for another few months. His condo at the Essex House was sold off last month for $3 million. After using a a phony Social Security number to get a loan from Wells Fargo he was forced by a U.S. District Court to pay $4.11 million in restitution. So far he hasn’t paid anything but the Essex Home condo was highly mortgaged so likely the court will not get much money from the sale.
–Seagram liquor heir Edgar Bronfman Jr. bought his East 64th Street townhouse in 1994 for $4.375 million, and sold it to his Warner Music Group colleague Len Blavatnik, the oil magnate, for $50 million last October. Now he’s hoping for another flip in a much shorter time frame. On Jan. 18, he paid $19.5 million for an 11-room sprawl at 1040 Fifth Avenue. On Jan. 25, without having done any work, he listed the apartment for $24 million, $4.5 million above his buy one week earlier. Wow, if he gets it, that’s one heck of a payday. The listing is here.
–The chairman of the Metropolitan Art museum’s board, James R. Houghton, has sold his two-bedroom tower apartment in the Majestic on Central Park West last month for $4.9 million.
–Karen Assante, Armand Assante’s ex-wife, has sold her two-bedroom apartment at the 20’s-era co-op 118 Riverside Drive for $2.45 million.
–Listings for the Mark, the 1927 hotel at 25 East 77th Street, have hit the Internet. Corcoran shows 12 listings for the building including the $60 million penthouse, with 12 rooms, five bedrooms, eight baths, and a $35,477 monthly maintenance.

From the Nashville Post:
Singer/songwriter Michelle Branch purchased a home in the Belle Meade area of Nashville, Tennessee, several months after selling her home in Calabasas, California. In 2006 she bought a condo in Nashville’s Werthan Lofts.

From the Wall Street Journal’s Private Properties:
–The widow of author Sidney Sheldon has listed their Palm Springs compound for $7.9 million, plus a home across the street for $4 million. Sheldon and his wife, Alexandra, owned a total of four houses in the Old Las Palmas neighborhood. The Sheldons lived in a midcentury modernist seven-bedroom home and also owned a six-bedroom Mediterranean-style guest house. A four-bedroom home with a glass-enclosed indoor pool and a poolside kitchen is also for sale for $1.45 million. Brook Ashley, Scott Palermo and Jim Sanak, all of Prudential California Realty’s Estates division, have the listings (no photos yet).
–Owners have cut the price of two apartments at New York’s Plaza condominium, the redesigned Plaza Hotel. Fred Farago, the president of a fruit-flavoring company, is now asking $5.9 million for a one-bedroom apartment there, around the same amount he paid for the unit in July and Italian-born architect Teresa Sapey has trimmed $200,000 off the initial $10 million price for her 13th-floor unit which she purchased for $6.9 million in July.
–At 15 Central Park West, Evan Cole, who co-founded ABC Carpet & Home, has concurred to sell his 15th-floor three-bedroom apartment there for over $9 million (he paid $4.83 million). In the same building,Michael Holtz, a travel-agency owner, recently signed an agreement to sell an identical apartment for more than his $8.5 million asking price.
–Actor Rupert Everett has listed his Miami Beach pied-

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Ever have one of those days in your business? It seems like everything is going wrong. An employee quits, a major piece of equipment breaks, and there is a storm (the snow kind) on the horizon.

tornado crisisWe here at b5media had a crisis this past week - the systems kind, involving the servers that power the websites. A crisis by definition is “a situation of extreme danger or difficulty.” It can also be a “turning point, ” or a decision point.

Crises fall into three types:

  • Operations, like the one that happened to b5media this week.
  • Safety, like a storm or a fire or other Acts of God that threaten the physical safety of you, your employees, customers, and your location.
  • Reputation crises, like the one that happened to Johnson & Johnson (makers of Tylenol), back in 1982.

As someone once said, it’s not what happens to you but your attitude toward what happens that matters. What happens to you in a crisis? What do you do when you hear the tornado sirens and you have customers in your store? What do you do when a disgruntled ex-customer goes after you in the local media? What do you do when your personal “blows up”?

The origin of the word “crisis” is from the Midlde English back to the Greek, meaning “to separate or judge.” A crisis will certainly judge your character.

Some recommendations for dealing with a crisis:

1. Plan ahead as much as possible. Take a day and think of all the possible types of crises and plan what you’ll do. For example,

  • You know your computer might crash. Back up daily; do a full back up weekly.
  • You know what kinds of severe weather happen in your area. Plan what you’ll do in the event of an emergency.
  • You know that people sometimes go crazy. Decide how to handle this kind of situation.
  • OSHA requires you to have a “crisis management” plan for dangerous chemicals. Where is yours?

2. Write this stuff down. You will never remember in the middle of a crisis.

3. Get your employees together and talk about what to do in each of the situations you have laid out. They might be able to come up with others. Add these to your “crisis” plan book.

4. Put your “crisis plan” book where everyone can get to it swiftly and, most important, review it at least once every 6 months, so you and your employees don’t forget.

Other b5media bloggers are going to write posts about crisis management. I’ll share them with you. In the meantime, what are your recommendations for crisis management?

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Valentine’s Day is coming, and it’s about time we deal with office romance.  Here are some helpful articles on the subject:

Dealing with an office romance from AskMen

Office romances can be risky, rewarding from Work Relationships

5 Tips to Avoid Having an Office Affair at the Huffington Post

Workplace romance from AllBusiness

Advice for the couple in a romance at work from About.com

Surviving the workplace affair from The Reality Method

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PFRDA expects transfer of pension money to MFs by April 1 - Economic Times

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