C. Wonder in Southampton

    C. Wonder, with a flagship store in SoHo, is opening a pop-up store at 5 Main Street, Southampton, and kicking off the season with a family-friendly weekend celebration.

    Those visiting the lifestyle store on Saturday and Sunday will be treated to temporary C. Wonder tattoos, a candy bar and balloons, a spin of the Wonder prize wheel, and, from 3 to 6 p.m. on Saturday only, an ice cream social.

    The store plans to hold events throughout the summer, including a book series, D.J. and dance parties, complimentary candy and balloon days, and it will offer an electric Smart Car delivery service.

Two Come to Saunders

    Saunders and Associates, a real estate firm, has added two new brokers to its roster, Sandra Griffin and Kimberly McElrath.

    Both were previously with the Corcoran Group. Ms. Griffin is a Southampton resident and an award-winning broker with 30 years of experience in handling deals throughout the South Fork.

    Prior to her work with Corcoran, Ms. McElrath spent 13 years at Prudential Douglas Elliman. She lives in Southampton Village and specializes in that area. Both new brokers will work out of Saunders’s Southampton office.

    Saunders now boasts 85 agents and more than $1 billion in exclusive listings in the area.

Barry’s Bootcamp

    Barry’s Bootcamp, a Los Angeles-based fitness company, will offer classes starting this weekend in Wainscott.

    According to its Web site, “Our incredible workout is enhanced by the most current music, easy to handle equipment, night club lighting, urban decor, and the most qualified trainers, who happen to look like movie stars.”

    The Wainscott studio can accommodate up to 40 “bootcampers” per class, and will feature a rotating schedule with some of the company’s best-known trainers from around the country.

    Individual classes cost $32, and there are discounts when packages are purchased.

East Hampton Babysitters

    Kevin Reynolds, a retired New York police officer and a massage therapist, has started a new business, East Hampton Babysitters. All candidates — and he has over 100, he said — are subjected to a thorough application and investigation process.

    “We offer tender, loving, conscientious care for babies and children, providing a safe and secure environment,” said Mr. Reynolds, who is the father of two daughters, Molly and Hunter, and lives in Springs.

    Potential clients have been encouraged to contact the company soon to set up their summer baby-sitting needs. A Web site, easthamptonbabysitters.com,  offers more information.

Pool Party

    The Southampton Inn is kicking off the season with a Memorial Day Weekend barbecue and pool party on Saturday.

    The inn will receive guests poolside from 3 to 5 p.m. with food and drinks prepared by OSO Restaurant on site.

    Visitors have been invited to explore the inn, at 91 Hill Street, and stroll through its five acres of gardens.

   What despises sunlight and garlic and feasts on meals of blood? The ghoulish and ubiquitous tick, and Brian Kelly of East End Tick Control, which has been in business for 15 years, is the area’s own personal Van Helsing.

    May is National Tick Awareness Month, and even as it draws to a close, the little parasites are kicking into high gear, according to Mr. Kelly. “It’s definitely worse after the mild winter,” he said. “In the last five or six years, the ticks have become really bad. It’s a constant, uphill battle.”

    In the old days, there seemed to be only big brown dog ticks around. But then deer ticks rode into town — on deer, of course — and brought the rampant Lyme disease, which last year infected over 2,500 New Yorkers.

    If not treated quickly, Lyme leads to a host of nasty ailments, starting with flu-like symptoms and progressing to paralysis and heart disorders, with many other ailments in between. The deer-tick nymph, which transmits Lyme disease, is microscopic in size and hard to find. People infected with Lyme sometimes develop a bull’s-eye-shaped rash around the site early on. But here’s the thing of it: Sometimes they don’t. That’s when the disease can progress and become more difficult to treat.

    Other ailments include human monocytic ehrlichiosis, with symptoms similar to Lyme. There is also babesiosis, a malaria-like disease spread by ticks. And only recently has the medical profession discovered that a tick’s saliva can cause an allergy to red meat, which may have gone undiagnosed for years.

    Now there’s a new bloodsucker to worry about, the Lone Star tick, which earned that designation by the small white dot on the female’s back. “It was discovered in Montauk a few years ago, and that’s the only place it was found around here,” Mr. Kelly said. “Now it’s in Southampton, Moriches — it’s unbelievable. They’re outnumbering the deer ticks.”

    The East End Tick Control Web site, which offers a woozy-making slide show of embedded and engorged ticks in various states of blood lust, features a “real-time tick risk-assessment” chart. The risk right now is high, since May is the time when adult ticks are “questing for a blood meal before laying their eggs.”

    According to Mr. Kelly, ticks mate and then lay eggs — 3,000 to 6,000 at a time — on deer. “A deer can carry thousands of ticks,” Mr. Kelly said, serving as a sort of singles bar that ends in orgies of blood-feasting and baby tick-making.

    Mr. Kelly’s company is the only firm of its kind, although many landscapers and exterminators now offer tick control services as an add-on. It’s not the same, he said. “They’ll say, ‘We do ticks,’ but they don’t have the same knowledge of where the ticks are. You can’t just spray the lawn. Ninety percent of the ticks are elsewhere on the property.”

    Although the products used by East End Tick Control are environmentally friendly, many of Mr. Kelly’s customers have been requesting an organic alternative. “It’s hard,” he said. “The organics just don’t work as well as the synthetics. But we’re trying.” In fact, he has been manufacturing a new product, called Tick Guard, which features a proprietary blend of natural oils. “The early tests are looking very good,” he said. Some organic oils that have worked, for ticks and mosquitoes, include peppermint and garlic. “They really hate the garlic,” said Mr. Kelly.

    Another new treatment, called the fourposter, is being tested on Shelter Island. Mr. Kelly described the deer-feeding stations in the pilot program. “When the deer goes to eat the corn, there are these rollers, like paint rollers, on either side of the bucket, and they spread a substance on the deer’s neck,” he said. “It’s like Frontline, but for a deer.”

    Surprisingly, Mr. Kelly himself has never had Lyme disease, so prevalent on the East End. “I get tested every year,” he said. 

    He recommends common sense to keep ticks at bay. “Keep your yard nice and clean,” he advised. “It makes a tremendous difference to keep the grass cut short and let the sunlight hit the yard.”

    Sunlight and garlic oil being used to control ticks? Can tiny wooden stakes be far behind?

    Whether they will travel, move in with extended families, rent a smaller space, or relocate to their second home, ’tis the season for many local residents to pack up their belongings and vacate their houses to generate rental income from those who wish to enjoy the South Fork for the summer months.

    “It is definitely inconvenient, but the financial gain is worth it,” said one such renter, who wished to remain anonymous because of tax issues. She explained the process and reasoning behind her family’s temporary move: In a month, she will bring in as much as she would make from working all year. Among other things, the rent she receives from uprooting her family enables her children to enjoy a summer of camp and tennis, which she wouldn’t have been able to otherwise afford.

    Most people who rent their houses for the summer prefer to work with a real estate agent, said Brendan Byrne, a real estate salesman with the Corcoran Group in Bridgehampton, because they have access to more clients. In the case of the Corcoran Group, those clients hail from New York City, Palm Beach, and even internationally. This clientele often gives homeowners a higher net after commissions than they would have gotten on their own. “It is customary for seasonal rentals commission to be paid by homeowners,” he said. Because many of those who rent are looking to travel, they can also easily arrange a rental for themselves at the same time.

    Others who rent for shorter terms take the project on themselves. In addition to the advertising, weekly or weekend rentals mean the owner has to arrange for cleaning between rental periods, and be there to greet and orient new renters.

    “It is enough work just to move out,” a single mother of two explained. “Every drawer must be emptied,” she said. She had a closet built in the basement to store personal items, photographs, and valuable mementos, along with winter clothing and other belongings that would not fit in the downsized space she will occupy while her own house is rented. She also purchased, as many do, a separate set of dishes for the renters. “You get better at it over time,” she said.

    There are additional benefits, she said. Since it is customary for high-end renters to pay all of the utilities, pool care, and landscaping, and to have a weekly cleaning service, she said she enjoys the lessened responsibilities as well as the walk-to-ocean rental she secured for herself. A major downsize from her four-bedroom house, she will pay one-fifth of the price she is receiving for the August rental.

    According to Mr. Byrne’s Web site, theeastendbroker.com, which links to Corcoran’s sales and rental listings, Tuesday showed 766 houses still available for seasonal and monthly rentals in East Hampton. With 10 rentals over $200,000 from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the highest priced listing for the season was $300,000 for a five-bedroom, five-bath pondfront house on 2.5 acres. The lowest rental listed on the site Tuesday was in the Clearwater area of Springs, and was offered for $3,000 for July.

    According to a report from George Simpson, president of Suffolk Research Service, on sales of properties on the East End, the first quarter of 2012 is still showing a downward trend compared to the numbers from the first quarter of 2011.

    Two of the most reliable market indicators, median price and dollar sales (the total sales in dollars), both showed substantial declines in the five towns of the East End from the same period last year. The median price was down 12.6 percent from the same quarter last year and dollar sales were down 10.6 percent.

    In Southampton, the median sales price of $650,000 was down 16.6 percent compared to the first quarter of 2011. In East Hampton and Shelter Island median sales prices were up — 12.6 percent in East Hampton to $895,000 and 47.2 percent in Shelter Island, with a median price of $795,000. However, the numbers on Shelter Island reflected only eight sales, so were “not statistically significant,” Mr. Simpson’s report says.

    Unit sales were up in Southold and Riverhead, stayed the same in Southampton, and fell in East Hampton and Shelter Island.    

    “The real estate market on the East End isn’t like the good old days,” Mr. Simpson said.

    Suffolk Research Service is the oldest and largest information and consulting company serving the East End real estate industry.

    “In all the years we’ve been in the business, our phone number hasn’t changed,” said Ernie Schimizzi, who, with his brother, Greg, has had a stronghold on the local television market for almost two decades.

    “We’re the last family-owned and run station on Long Island,” he added, referring to WVVH-TV, which can be seen as Hamptons TV on Cablevision Channel 78, on Fios at Channel 14, on YouTube, as a computer Web stream, and even on a smartphone through a recently available app, with an estimated 5 million viewers.

    “We’re now seen in millions of homes from Montauk to Manhattan,” said Ernie Schimizzi.

    The Schimizzi brothers grew up in Bensonhurst and were obsessed with the latest innovation — television — from a very early age. “ ‘The Honeymooners’ was supposed to be in Bensonhurst,” Greg Schimizzi recalled. “We grew up convinced that Jackie Gleason lived in one of the buildings on our block.” But it was a trip into the city with their father in 1957 that really sealed their fate.

    “It was 1957 on a Sunday,” Greg Schimizzi said. “We ended up at NBC Studios.”

    “A Sunday,” said his brother. “And the whole place was open.” After being allowed to wander around the vast production sound stages, they watched the filming of some of the shows, including the “Today” show with Dave Garroway, a legend from the golden age of television.

    “It was magic,” Ernie Schimizzi said. The photo of the two, standing in front of the studios at 30 Rockefeller Center, still hangs in their office in Wainscott.

    Their father died only five years later (“from his one and only heart attack,” said Ernie Schimizzi) at the age of 46, and it was up to Mrs. Schimizzi, a dressmaker, to raise the boys on her own.

    She worked with top designers of the time, like Oleg Cassini. “Jackie Kennedy wore a black cape with a red lining to the inauguration,” Greg Schimizzi said. “Our mom sewed that.”

    The Schimizzis made the money that they used to buy the station license and start their parent company, Video Voice, on a patent they obtained from inventing an anti-theft device for automobile trunks.

    The patent, which they had shopped at all the big auto companies in Detroit, was initially refused. However, when a friend bought a new Chrysler, it came with a version of the Schimizzis’ invention built in. In the case of patent infringement, the brothers came out victorious — and it led to what they termed a deep understanding of the integrity necessary in art.

    “You have to protect the artist,” Ernie Schimizzi said. “Our art happens to be television, and we’re mindful and respectful of the people we work with.”

    “We don’t know any other way to be,” Greg Schimizzi added.

    The brothers have been growing the Hamptons TV brand over the last decade, with new and expanded studios on Industrial Road, next to LTV. But the primary goal still is to stay local. “We don’t see the Hamptons as just a resort community, or even primarily a resort community,” Ernie Schimizzi said. “It’s about family, and small businesses, and history.”

    The brothers still like to be hands-on with their station. They invented a new form of live streaming for the Web which does not require any downloading, and were both recently certified as broadcast engineers. “If we owned an airplane, we would learn how to fly it,” Greg Schimizzi said with a grin.

    Some of the programs, like the morning show “The Daily Buzz,” are not generated locally, but many of them — “American Dreams,” “The Real Hamptons,” and coverage of the Hampton Classic Horse Show and Hamptons International Film Festival — are.

    “We now have the ability to do live TV,” Ernie Schimizzi said with no small amount of excitement. His brother was also enthused at the prospect.

    A link to the past or a link to the future? Only the Schimizzi brothers know for sure.

AMAGANSETT

D.S. Hampton Homes to M. and M. Vasarhelyi, 5 Beach Plum Court, .98 acre, March 26, $6,000,000.

J. Potter and J. Jennings to D. Koepp and M. Thomas, 3 Hamlin Lane, March 15, $3,850,000.

EAST HAMPTON NORTH

E. Simons Jr. to 162 North Main Street, 162 and 164 North Main Street, .5 acre, March 2, $925,000.

D. Astorr to D. Steckowski, 61 Cedar Street, .16 acre, March 16, $288,000.

J. Wilkinson to W. and N. Kelly, 16 Surrey Court, .81 acre, March 16, $1,255,000.

NORTHWEST

M. Sant’eufemia to R. Lewin, 661 Hand’s Creek Road, .93 acre, March 22, $545,000.

SAG HARBOR

A. Libutti to D. Magnolia, 86 Hampton Street, .22 acre, March 25, $1,850,000.

A.M.L. Development L.L.C. to M. Haslinger, 25 Windermere Drive, .18 acre, March 3, $885,000.

D. and T. Posnick to T. and S. Culver, 31 North Haven Way, 1.92 acre, March 9, $2,200,000.

WAINSCOTT

L. Svanberg to B. Kahne and Marvin-Kahne, 15 Broadwood Court, .95 acre, March 19, $1,650,000.

Voorhees and Westervelt to F.E.M. Building and Development, 2 Wainscott Main Street, .67 acre, March 15, $1,925,000.

Data provided by Suffolk Research Service of Southampton

   Seacoast Enterprises Associates Inc., an East Hampton firm that already manages Harbor, Gardiner’s, and Halsey’s Marinas — all located on Three Mile Harbor — has announced the purchase of the Three Mile Harbor Boatyard at the head of the harbor.

    Commonly called Story’s after its longtime owner Sam Story, the Three Mile Harbor Boatyard has catered to sailboats over the years with a boatlift hefty enough to haul them and a ship’s store offering sailing accessories. Harry Wessberg sold the yard to Robert Story in 1951. Sam Story bought it from his father in 1986.

    The marina section has 70 slips and a boatlift with a 40-ton capacity capable of hauling 65-foot boats.

    Peter Mendelman, a Seacoast vice president, said his company had been interested in maintaining its powerboat trade and attracting more sailboats to the harbor. He said the company was thinking about buying a bigger boatlift for Harbor Marina, but the purchase of the Three Mile Harbor Boatyard with its existing store and infrastructure seemed a better way to accomplish the goal.

    The ship store and boatyard staff will remain as is, and Mr. Mendelman said Harbor Marina’s service contacts and expertise will supplement those of the Three Mile Harbor Boatyard and vice versa.

    The boatyard’s 70 slips will be added to Halsey’s Marina’s 40, Gardiner’s Marina’s 40, and Harbor Marina’s 100 to lift Seacoast’s capacity to 250. Two other marinas, the Three Mile Marina owned by Don Van der Veer, and the East Hampton Marina owned by Jeff Briggs, remain independent, as do the Sunset Cove Marina and East Hampton Point Marina. The town maintains public slips at Gann Road and head of the harbor.

    “Improving the facilities takes the most effort. We have to be careful about what’s done. We have a good relationship with the town and trustees built over the last decade. But, no matter how good it is, to make major improvements could be two or three years away. In the meantime we plan to spruce things up as best as we can,” said Mr. Mendelman, whose sister, Lynn Mendelman, is a town trustee.

    To some degree, sailors’ lack of interest in making Montauk and East Hampton homeports or destinations was “purely lack of attention,” compared to ports like Sag Harbor, Greenport, and Block Island, Mr. Mendelman said. 

    He said the recent dredging of the Three Mile Harbor mouth to a depth of 12 feet would help attract larger boats, including sailboats, and there was hope that the county’s Department of Public Works would follow through on a plan to dredge the south end of the harbor, near the Three Mile Harbor Marina to a depth of eight feet. Eighty percent of the Three Mile Boatyard slips are home to sailboats. “It’s been an issue,” Mr. Mendelman said.

    “We’re seeing people leave this harbor for Connecticut or Rhode Island because they didn’t feel they could get what they needed. We’re hoping to change that perception,” he said, adding that a future yacht club was not out of the question.

    “We’ve been thinking about a local yacht club, but we didn’t have the scale. You need a critical mass of sailboaters.”

    “In the short term, we’re going to focus on keeping the same team and building on the team. We’re not planning a monopoly to raise prices. Sam had a reputation for offering value, and we want to build on that. In the long term, we want to create a facility boaters are proud of and the entire community is proud of,” Mr. Mendelman said.

Brokers Move

    Saunders and Associates has announced that Sandra Woodward Pullman, the former vice president of the Corcoran Group in Bridgehampton, has joined its ranks as the vice president of Saunders’s Bridgehampton office.

    In addition to her work in the real estate business, Ms. Pullman is a trustee of the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, and is currently the president of the Southampton Golf Club 9 Hole Association. She and her husband, Don, have three grown children, one of whom has earned both silver and gold medals in the Special Olympics.

    Saunders now lists a total of 83 East End brokers.

    Also, Hal Zwick, formerly of Halstead Devlin McNiff, is moving over to Town and Country Real Estate in East Hampton. Mr. Zwick’s strong suit, according to a release from the firm, is in the realm of commercial real estate, due in no small part to his former role as a business owner here. He used to own BookHampton, the Snowflake restaurant on Pantigo Road, which is now Bostwick’s, and the Paradise Cafe in Sag Harbor.

B.N.B. First Quarter

    Bridge Bancorp, the parent company of the Bridgehampton National Bank, has announced its first quarter 2012 income, and the numbers are promising.

    Net income was up 36 percent over the same quarter of 2011 at $2.9 million and 35 cents a share, while returns on average assets and equity were at .88 percent and 11.52 percent respectively.

    Total assets, at $1.39 billion, showed a 29 percent increase over March 2011, with a loan growth of $121 million or 23 percent over last year’s numbers.

    Quarterly dividends ran $.23 per share. “We increased revenue and income by leveraging market opportunities, increasing deposits, and carefully deploying these funds as loans for new and existing customers, while still delivering high levels of customer service efficiently,” said Kevin M. O’Connor, the president and C.E.O. of Bridge Bancorp, in a statement.

    “For over 100 years this has been our business strategy and we believe, if effectively managed, it remains a viable formula for a successful community bank.”

    First quarter reports issued from two local real estate companies — Town and Country and Brown Harris Stevens — show an increase in sales for the first quarter of 2012 compared to the same period last year, contradicting a report from Suffolk Research Services that showed a flat market or a marked decline.

    Brown Harris Stevens stated that the number of single family sales rose 32 percent on the South Fork compared to the first quarter of last year, but also acknowledged that 2011’s first quarter was lower than normal due to the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which led many owners of expensive properties to put their homes on the market before the end of 2010.

    Also, according to Brown Harris Stevens, the median sales price of houses on the South Fork rose 5 percent to $815,000.

    Town and Country showed a similar increase in its release, with a median sales price of $817,500 for all the South Fork markets combined.

    The Town and Country report said that sales of single-family homes under $500,000 showed the largest jump over first quarter of 2011, up from 49 sales last year to 73 this year, a 49-percent up-tick. Sales up to $1 million increased by only 2 percent. In the $1 million to $2 million range, the increase was more marked, at 17 percent. The $2 million to $3.49 million range showed no increase at all, with 22 sales being measured in both first quarters. The biggest gain was in the $3.5 million to $5 million category, with a 67-percent increase over the first three months of last year, up from 9 sales to 15. The above $5 million group was up 10 percent, which was reflected by only one additional sale. 

    The report from Suffolk Research Services, which tracks all real estate transfers in the county and draws conclusions based on those transactions, compared first quarters for the past five years. For example, in Southampton Town, the first few months of 2008 saw a median sale price of $800,000 and sales volume in the amount of $506 million from 255 sales. In 2012, the median price was $650,000, with a total volume of $319 million from 224 sales.

    East Hampton Town fared slightly better. The first quarter of 2008 brought 100 sales generating $174 million, with a median price of $975,000. There were 111 sales this quarter, with a median price of $895,000 and a total sales amount of $150 million.

    A simple year-to-year comparison between the first quarters of 2011 and 2012 by Suffolk Research Services showed 224 sales in Southampton Town in both years, with no change, and a drop from 115 sales to 111 sales in East Hampton Town from 2011 to 2012.

    Brown Harris Stevens and Town and Country Real Estate both base their statements on numbers provided by the Long Island Real Estate Report.

EAST HAMPTON

D. Blaustein to M. Meltzer, 24 Wooded Oak Lane and lot, .6 acre, March 26, $595,000.

R. Gilliam by executor to Z. and E. Properties L.L.C., 164 Springs-Fireplace Road, March 26, $395,000.

The Leisure Tech Group to S. and L. Sommer, 72 Gould Street, .46 acre, March 27, $2,275,000.

311 Further Lane L.L.C. to E. Tiernan Trust, 311 Further Lane, .82 acre, Dec. 21, $6,600,000.

EAST HAMPTON VILLAGE

J. Humiston to Middle Lane L.L.C., 93 Middle Lane (vacant), March 7, $4,625,000.

MONTAUK

G. Moore and P. Ciaston to H. Barber Jr., 105 North Greenwich Street, .35 acre, March 19, $475,000.

P. Clark and G. and J. Ciccone to L. and J. Opalinski, 236 Edgemere Street, March 12, $310,000.

Laux Family 2008 Trust to 41 North Surfside L.L.C., 41 North Surfside Avenue, .48 acre, March 23, $995,000.

G. SanLorenzo by executor to C.J.N.L. L.L.C., 50 Agnew Ave­nue, Oct. 31, $690,000.

B. Delahanty to D. and B. Henningsen, 24 South Endicott Place, March 23, $575,000.

NORTHWEST

J. Gerstner and J. Smith to J. Guichay, 55 Three Mile Harbor Drive, .68 acre, March 23, $525,000.

B. Salkind to M. Lowlicht and D. Geller, 1 Barclay Court, March 23, $1,100,000.

M. and C. Kuritzkes to S. and D. Novenstein, 5 Hardscrabble Close, 4.9 acres, March 21, $4,100,000.

SAG HARBOR

R. Lyles to P. Margonelli, 61 Redwood Road, .24 acre, March 26, $510,000.

124 West Henry Street to J. Wilson and K. Huberty, 124 West Henry Street, .28 acre, March 30, $2,800,000.

SPRINGS

A. and M. Giaquinto to M. Biles, 15 Chapel Lane, .33 acre, March 26, $645,000.

Data provided by Suffolk Research Service of Southampton