When I first met Kim and Matt Cozza and their teenage daughter Sydney, I knew I would enjoy helping them find a home because they said they would consider an historic one and, as a realtor, I had developed a specialty in historic homes, having studied early American architecture at The College of William & Mary in Virginia and having interned at Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts, with the intention of becoming a museum curator. But, somehow that profession and my more gregarious personality didn’t seem to match up, and I ended up in the more “out there” fields of public relations, then real estate, instead.
However, I have enjoyed owning and restoring two historic homes which has greatly enhanced my living experience, and I have been fortunate to be called upon to list and sell a good number of historic homes since I entered the field. Currently I have several such homes on the market, and the one purchased by the Cozzas more than two years ago offers a particularly exciting opportunity for some lucky buyer to visit the future while stepping back into the past because of the vision demonstrated by this couple in the home’s renovation.
While searching for the Cozzas’ home, I had to be on my toes because Kim had been a realtor upstate, working on the commercial side of the business, and Matt was the vice president for development and construction for a major supermarket chain. Kim would check everything new on the market each day before I got around to it, and I can’t count how many houses we looked at before we came to the wonderful 1726 colonial they decided to buy, coincidentally on the very same road on which my historic home is located in Yorktown Heights. Kim eyed it up and down and I could see her mind working in terms of the work it needed.
“When buying a house, I think about what it needs in terms of investment and what additional value it will bring to the house when we go to sell it,” she said recently when readying her house for re-sale, necessitated by Matt’s having taken a job in a new location. “We look at the roof, the heating system, the windows, the siding, water heater, the kitchen and bathrooms…the expensive things to deal with…everything else is relatively minor in bringing a house up to where it needs to be.”
In the case of their home in Yorktown Heights, “the exterior had already been done in top quality no- or low-maintenance materials like Azek trim, HardiPlank clapboard siding, and ‘lifetime’ roofing, but the heating system needed to be replaced, along with the kitchen and windows,” Kim said, “and because we intended to stay here for a long time, we decided it was worth it to make this major investment.”
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Bill Primavera is a Realtor® associated with William Raveis Real Estate and Founder of Primavera Public Relations, Inc., the longest running public relations agency in Westchester (www.PrimaveraPR.com), specializing in lifestyles, real estate and development. His real estate site is: www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com and his blog is: www.TheHomeGuru.com. To engage the services of The Home Guru and his team to market your home for sale, call 914-522-2076.
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