1. NEW JERSEY REALTOR
®
• October 2013 • www.njar.com • 11
In the week that followed Superstorm Sandy, Monmouth
County Tourism Director Jeanne DeYoung helped residents
find clothing, relocation services, food and pets.
“It didn’t matter what your ‘real’ job was after the storm. The
county offices were closed for a week, but it was all hands on deck.
People were pulled from various departments to assist,” DeYoung says.
She was almost too busy to think, but in driving past the Sea Bright Beach
Club that hosted her daughter’s wedding in 2010, the magnitude of Sandy
hit hard. The club was gone. Lockers, floating in the water, served as one of
the few tangible links to the past. In that moment, DeYoung questioned
if things would ever be the same. “There was so much damage.
I wondered if we would be able to become whole for the
next tourism season,” she says.
With more than $36 billion in damage, 117 deaths,
and 365,000 homes damaged or destroyed,
Gov. Chris Christie cited Sandy as the worst
storm to strike New Jersey in 100 years.
In the past year, the government has worked to
support storm survivors. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency has registered assistance claims for
261,817 people as of July; 126,797 housing inspections
have been completed; $3.5 billion in total National Flood Insurance
Program payments have been issued; $351 million has been provided for
housing assistance; and more than $403 million in FEMA grants have been
approved for residents.
By Michelle Hofmann
As Sandy’s anniversary looms, New Jersey
REALTOR® magazine examines the impact
on tourism and housing; new challenges
facing homeowners and practitioners; and
the steady fight to restore, rebuild, and rise
above the storm.

2. 12 • NEW JERSEY REALTOR
®
• OCTOBER 2013 • www.njar.com
Tracking Tourism
Tourism and hospitality, the state’s third largest annual
economy, experienced a slow start in many areas with school
closures delaying summer holidays, the wettest
June on record since 1895 and above average rainfall in July.
By August, DeYoung said Monmouth County summer
visitations were tracking close to the 2012 numbers.
“With all things in perspective and the amount of damage
Sandy did to Monmouth County, all of the sand is back on
the beach, the boardwalks are open, the beaches are open,
the water is clean, the restaurants and shops are back open.
And we are seeing the visitors come,” she says.
Bill LaRosa, director of the Hudson County Office of
Cultural & Heritage Affairs, says the Hyatt Regency Jersey
City has the highest occupancy rates in the company,
“except for the Hawaiian hotels.”
In Cape May County, home to 50 percent of N.J.’s second
homes and rental properties, travel is down 20 percent over
2012. Diane Wieland, director of the Cape May Department
of Tourism, says the weakened economy, not the storm, is
the overarching issue. Accordingly, vacation planners are
looking for deals and discounts, and restaurants are
restructuring menus and offering less expensive entrées,
early bird specials, and prix-fixemeal packages.
Jeff Vasser, president of the Atlantic City Convention & Visitors
Authority, says new venues like Resorts Casino Hotel’s $35-
million Margaritaville Complex, which opened with a free
concert by musician Jimmy Buffett before a crowd of 75,000
on Jun. 15, keep visitors coming back. “It has been a rough
nine months since the storm. But Atlantic City has come out
OK,” Vasser says.
Hope and Loss on the Higher Ground
Despite a decrease in mid-week rental demand, Ocean
County Tourism Director Jeanne DiPaola says weekend
vacation rentals are strong, especially in good weather. She
anticipates a more typical rental season in 2014.
DiPaola says the pace of payments from FEMA and insurance
companies have impacted Ocean County’s rental housing
stock. The $60 billion federal Sandy relief package designed
to help rebuild communities came to a congressional vote in
late December and passed Jan. 28. In contrast, Congress
passed a $51 billion relief bill within 10 days of Hurricane
Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast in 2005.
New rules regarding flood base elevations and Flood
Insurance Rate Maps under the July 2012 Biggert-Waters
Flood Insurance Reform Act continue to cause confusion
for brokers and consumers [See “As Waters Rise, So Will
Flood Insurance” on Page 20.]
“All of this has a lot to do with risk changing. Sandy was
not the worst-case scenario. It was not the one percent . . .
storm. Our studies were based on the history of many
storms. It was a bad storm. It was a confluence of weather
patterns . . . People want to look at it as the one. But that
is not how we looked at things in the study,” FEMA
Spokesperson Mark Rollins says.
In 2008, Congress directed FEMA to study and revise
outdated flood insurance rate maps, digital maps based
on historic climate information and science that provide
information about flood hazards for each community and
the area structures. When Sandy hit, the FIRMs were in
progress, so FEMA released advisory data. Rollins says the
advisory maps were deliberately conservative so that people
who rebuilt right after the storm had the insight about how
to build with best practices.
“There are some communities where there are only three
houses standing, and those were the three houses that
were built . . . with best practices. There are structures
that survived the storm that were built to code . . . So we
know that when people adhere to these building codes . . .
the structures survive,” Rollins says.
Preliminary maps have been released in many New Jersey
areas, but Rollins says the final maps will not be officially
adopted until approved by Congress in 2015. Rollins says
FEMA is working hard to educate people. Still, he
understands how difficult it can be for the real estate
community and homeowners.
“I took a call earlier today, and the fellow is in a V-zone
[high flood risk] in the current existing map. In the
revision map, he is taken out of the V-zone and put in
an A-zone [lower risk]. Now that’s not the norm . . . But
he is going for his insurance right now and has to pay
based on the current effective [the V-zone]. . . I have to
explain that there is a statutory process that we have
to go through,” Rollins says.
To show how higher elevation equates to reduced risk and
lower premiums, FEMA uses a single-family home model
and a $250,000 flood policy. Build four feet below the base
flood elevation (the level water is expected to rise to in a
storm), and annual premiums top $9,500. Elevate the
home to the base level and premiums drop to $1,410. Go
three feet higher, and the premium drops to $427. New
flood guidelines call for some houses to be elevated 10
feet or more. But Mark Grimes, a broker-manager and
sales associate with Prudential Fox & Roach, REALTORS®
in Ocean City, N.J. says most of the building officials in
town are allowing people to go two feet higher.
To offset compliance costs, the NFIP pays eligible
homeowners up to $30,000. Qualified structures
must be located in a special flood hazard area, and
the cost to repair the structure must equal or exceed 50
percent of its market value prior to the flood damage.

3. NEW JERSEY REALTOR
®
• October 2013 • www.njar.com • 13
Bill Rossi, owner of Rossi General Contracting in Toms
River, says every township is different. “Engineers are
confused from town to town. Some homeowners are
irate. Others are doing what they have to do. But since
the storm, lots of out-of-state contractors are coming
to New Jersey. So people need to be careful when hiring
someone to elevate a home,” he adds.
For practitioners looking to help customer find
contractors to lift a home, Rossi suggests checking the
contractor credentials with the State Department of
Consumer Affairs, newjersey.mylicense.com/verification.
Jeff Lamm, a spokesperson for the State Department of
Consumer Affairs, says the state had 42,000 registered
home-improvement contractors in December 2012.
By August, the number topped 47,000, with 1,000
newly registered contractors coming from out of state
following Sandy.
Rossi has been working on N.J. homes for 18 years. He
says home elevation jobs have jumped from one or two
a year before Sandy to one or two a week.
When it comes to cost, Rossi says, every lift is different.
“Every foundation is different. You have to factor in the
size of the home and build everything to code. But I have
yet to see one that’s $30,000 start to finish,” he says.
Even with reputable builders, elevating a home can be
easier said than done. And things can go wrong. A Little
Egg Harbor Township shore home damaged by Superstorm
Sandy collapsed while being elevated Jul. 10, injuring three
workers, according to the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration. OSHA officials, who have up to six months
to complete an incident investigation, said ECO-Friendly
Builders, the Middletown firm hired to raise the home 10
feet above ground, had no prior OSHA violations.
With so many unknowns, Justin G. Leach, vice president
of sales for the Ocean's Six Group with RE/MAX Real Estate
Ltd in Brick, N.J., says a lot of buyers are in a holding
pattern. “I have one house where the client lived on the
water. The house is not damaged. But he just got a letter
from township that his flood insurance was going from
about $1,000 to $4,400. So the house is just sitting,”
Leach says.
Leach, who had approximately 22 waterfront listings
in August, says that a lack of realistic comps and
uniform restorations, and a rising insurance premiums
are adversely affecting values.
“On any given street you have three houses that are fast
forward and redone, and in the very next block it looks
like a war zone, houses are leveled to the ground. And
that’s affecting values,” he says.
Meanwhile, homes in areas where flood insurance is not
at issue are moving off the market quickly. Leach says a
4-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot colonial in Toms River
listing sat on market for four months at $399,900. “Prior
to the storm, I had not gotten an offer higher than $315,000.
After the storm, I got three offers: one for $355,000 and
two for $375,000,” he says. The house closed for $375,000
six weeks after the storm.
In addition, Leach says properties in adult communities
that were priced at $70,000 before the storm are selling
for $120,000. “I had a buyer who put an offer in on four
different adult community houses and was outbid every
time by multiple people with cash offers,” Leach says.
Last summer, Leach sold a unit in Lions Head South
for $163,000. In June, Leach listed a smaller unit in the
same Brick, N.J. adult community for $163,000. “That
unit would normally be in the $130,000 to $140,000
range,” he says.
Grimes says sales are not off by much. “Last year Ocean
City sold about 785 homes. Right now [August] we are at
about 550 homes sold. We are on target to sell about 730
homes in 2013. The market is strong right now because
of interest rates. People are concerned about what is
going to happen but not as concerned as they were six
months ago because they are hearing through the
grapevine and public officials that FEMA is going to
relax the V-zones a little more than what was previously
proposed,” he says.
He adds that many people who have held homes for
50 or 60 years and were affected by water are selling to
developers. “In Ocean City, you don’t have a lot of
people walking away from homes, because the land is
worth more than the house,” he explains.
Jack Binder, a broker-sales associate with Ferguson Dechert
Real Estate Inc. in Avalon and Stone Harbor, N.J. has been
selling real estate since 1986. He says the rental market in
his area is tracking even with 2012. But segments of the
housing market are short of inventory.
“We are excited because there was a lot of misinformation
floating around to people that sleep in our communities
that New Jersey’s shore points were all in the same pickle.
And that was not the case,” Binder says.
Admittedly, there’s still work to do. But as the one-year
anniversary of the Oct. 29, 2012, storm approaches,
practitioners say the fear that once gripped the Garden
State has been replaced with a determined drive to rise
above the storm and get on with the business of selling
real estate. n
Michelle Hofmann is an award-winning real estate writer.
She can be reached at michellehofmann@earthlink.net.