I decided to create a Valentine’s Day tribute to a great baby boomer small business person. This was a tough one. I thought about Warren Buffet, who is one of my favorite people, but he’s not exactly a “small business” person nor a baby boomer. Bill Gates is a boomer but not exactly in “small business.” And Ray Kroc, who discovered McDonald’s, is no longer with us. So who?

I would appreciate your help. Who is a great small business person (and born between 1946 and 1964)? It doesn’t have to be someone famous or rich. The person just has to own a small business and be a “boomer” and be “great” in any way you want to define that term.

Any and all recommendations welcome.

Tags: baby boomer, small business, valentine, valentine’s day

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By definition a crisis is something for which there’s no plan and preperation.  I’ve found that the organizations that respond best in these siutations are the ones who are well organized and have solid day to day operations.  These organizations function very well in their day to day environment.  They do not move from crisis to crisis.  A crisis is an unusal event.

The key to successfully handling a crisis situation is people.  Yes, it is good to have some sort of skelital plan with leadership designations and maybe some pre-staged resources. A crisis is generally an all hands on deck situation.  Everyone pitches in at full speed for as long as it takes.  That is why day to day operations cannot include crisis response.  You’ll burn out your people.

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Filed under: Estates

The architect Travis Price has created some truly breathtaking structures (check out Wade Davis’s writing studio on the website, it’s stunning) but I’m not sure if today’s home is one of his greater creations. This 11,000-square-foot, six-bedroom home in the Forest Hills area of Washington D.C.has four stories and an open and angular floor plan. The home is dramatic but still appears to be comfortable and livable with large shared rooms but also plenty of private spaces. The listing blurb invokes Frank Lloyd Wright but I’m not really seeing that here. It is listed at $5.495 million.

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Filed under: Estates, Celebrity Shopping, Sports

The latest celebrity victim of the foreclosure crisis is former NBA star Latrell Sprewell. Last summer, Sprewell’s yacht, the 70-foot “Milwaukee’s Best” was repossessed now his home is meeting the same fate. RBS Citizens NA, or Citizens Bank, has filed a foreclosure suit on Sprewell’s $405,000 home in River Hills, a suburb of Milwaukee. Sprewell bought the home in 1994 and owed $295,138 in outstanding payments plus interest. The documents say that Sprewell failed to make his mortgage payments of $2,593 per month since last September.

Sprewell, now 37, was once one of the NBA’s infamous bad boys, known for choking a coach during practice. He played 13 seasons total for three teams. Just a few years ago he turned down a hree-year,$21 million contract extension from the Minnesota Timberwolves saying, “I’ve got my family to feed.” At that time he was making $14.6 million a year. The yacht, which Sprewell bought for around $1.5 million was sold at auction for $856,000 to help pay off the $1.3 million he owes on the boat.

Sprewell is in some good company. Check out our gallery of other celebrity foreclosures below.

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Filed under: Estates, Celebrity Shopping

For a little while, frequently barechested romantic comedy start Matthew McConaughey has been living the real estate-less life in California. McConaughey sold off his three-lot Hollywood Hills compound toward the end of 2006 and then was spending most of his time in a couple of Airstream trailers in Malibu. He also still owns a 1.600-acre ranch in Texas. But last fall, McConaughey, who recently announced that his model girlfriend Camilla Alves is pregnant with their child, purchased a $10 million property in Malibu. The property is a little over an acre and includes a four-bedroom home that was built in 1949. When the sale was announced in November, Huge Time Listings mentioned that the 3,550-square-foot home has had some celebrity owners in the past such as Richard Page, the the lead singer of the 1980s band Mr. Mister (which had the popular songs ‘Broken Wings’ and ‘Kyrie’) who sold the home in 1996 to its most current owner for $1,260,000. As TMZ shows in a video on their website construction has begun on the home, expanding the home which is located on a deep lot just a few houses away from the ocean.

Matthew McConaughey is far from the first celebrity to spend a lot of money on a home that needs a lot of work or may even be a tear down. Our gallery below includes a few more examples of recently multi-million dollar buys bought for the land more than the home.

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Filed under: Estates

This contemporary home was designed by architect James Cheng and sits on a hill on Chartwell Drive in West Vancouver, Canada. The five-bedroom home is 8300 square feet and has ocean and city views. It has a limestone and glass exterior with a curved zinc roof, cherrywood accent walls and maple doors. It has an open living room and dining room, a Poggenpol kitchen and an insulated music room. I suspect the pictures of this one don’t do it justice at all. It is listed at $4.98 million Canadian.

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Filed under: Estates

Today’s estate is a slice of American history. Pheasant Hill Farm is located in Carversville, Pennsylvania. The 47-acre property is actually two separate parcels. The main home is on 10 acres and the other 37 are given over to farmland and wooded areas. The main residence is a cluster of frame and stone buildings. It is one of the earliest settlements in the area wit h public record showing a dwelling as early as 1704. The stone home is a country house with four bedrooms and it takes Americana collections to its cluttered extreme. The home and other outbuildings are surrounded by gardens and lawns and there’s a massive celebration room on the second level of the stone barn. It is listed at $6 million which is a really high price for the area.

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Filed under: Estates

Green real estate heads to Phoenix, Arizona in the form of the Aura at Camelback. The project will be a sustainable luxury-living development of 36 three or four-story townhomes. Each home will have a private elevator and a two-car underground garage as well as air-conditioned underground storage and a rooftop garden. The project will be completely solar powered. The development will certified LEED Silver and the solar system will generate all the electricity needs for the unit. The Aura will feature six floor plans ranging from 2,469 to 3,147 square feet. Homes will start at $900,000 and be as costly as $1.3 million and construction is expected to begin in Might.

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Filed under: Estates

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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Filed under: Estates, Celebrity Shopping

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 nearly 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 nearly 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 won’t 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 purchase 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 bought a home in the Belle Meade area of Nashville, Tennessee, several months after selling her home in Calabasas, California. In 2006 she purchased 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 house 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 agreed 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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