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Buying homes isn’t just for the stuffy, old and rich anymore.
But if you’re young, artsy, cool and fashionable — in short, a hipster — you still need help.
Real-estate agent Eve Levine’s kind of help.
The promise of learning the cold, hard realities of today’s housing market is what brought more than a dozen skinny-jean-wearing, tattoo-sporting members of Williamsburg’s art and music scene to Hugs bar last month to attend Levine’s first “Hipster Mortgage Night.”
It’s the latest version of a marketing campaign Levin first began as mere barroom lectures.
“There is so much information people just don’t know,” said Levine, a musician and artist herself who created the event not only as a tool for marketing her own business, but also a means of supplying financial and home buying know-how to a group of people she bluntly describes as “the opposite of Wall Street.”
Members of that group, frankly, agree with that assessment.
“Figuring out how to buy a home in New York City is like climbing Mount Everest,” said Margaret Raimondi, who attended the event with her fiancé, Brad Augustine.
“Hopefully, ‘Hipster Mortgage Night’ will make it more like climbing Mount Rainier,” she added, referring to the much-shorter mountain in Washington State.
So while a band played in the background, Levine and mortgage broker Rob Slifer doled out advice on how to clean up damaged credit, get mortgages and find the right house, condo or co-op.
Raimondi and Augustine came to Hipster Mortgage Night interested in buying a house, but after meeting with Slifer and Levine, the couple decided something smaller was all they could afford.
“Now we know a one-bedroom is best,” said Augustine. “It was a really informative experience, but it kind of crushed my dreams.”
Levine will be hosting another Hipster Mortgage Night on April 22 at Union Pool (484 Union Ave., between Skillman Avenue and Conselyea Street). For information, visit www.myspace.com/homebuyingforhipsters.
©2008 The Brooklyn Paper
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