Times Ledger - Homeowners want to put end to unsolicited real estate offers

Tony Avella

December 8, 2014

They want the phone calls, the mail and the notes at the door to stop.

Homeowners in Queens are tired of receiving unsolicited offers to sell their homes from real estate agents, a headache that started in 2009 when the borough was no longer designated a “cease and desist” area, which allowed residents to be included in an “opt-out” list from getting these solicitations.

“We must have this protection and opt out,” said Ken Winslow, who lived in Jamaica Estates for the past 47 years. “This is just not proper.”

To tackle this problem, property owners reached out to state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside), who promised to introduce legislation next January to put an end to the unwanted real estate solicitations.

“For far too long, Queens residents have been inundated with mass amounts of real estate solicitations and ads,” Avella said.

“If someone wants to sell their house, it’s very easy,” the lawmaker pointed out. “They call a real estate and they can put their property on the selling list.”

Avella said the Auburndale Civic Association, for example, has more than 100 pieces of unsolicited real estate mail in its hands.

A state law provides for a “cease and desist” approach that allows only for certain neighborhoods to be included in lists where property owners have the option to opt out. The legislator’s bills calls for all Queens to be declared “a cease and desist area.”

“It is nice to live here,” said Michael Feiner, of the Bayside Civic Association. “We want to stay here, so why bother?” Feiner said he tried for years to add his name to the cease and desist list, “but I still get these annoying calls and mailings.”

“We have the federal don’t call list, why not have a similar list for homeowners?” asked Jerry Wind, president of the Bellerose Hillside Civic Association.

Michael O’Keefe, of the Creedmoor Civic Association, said he has been getting complaints from neighbors, who described these unwanted solicitations as an “annoyance.”

O’Keefe added, “We are in favor of having some mechanism to be able to stop unwanted solicitations, and the systems needs to be user friendly and able to be updated regularly.”

Avella agreed, indicating the databases “should be updated monthly, not yearly like it is now.”

The legislation will allow borough residents to add their addresses to the cease and desist list. The active period will be for 10 years.

“People get scared, and some owners sell their homes before they had planned to,” Winslow said. “I was asked once by a real estate agent when I was moving out, and I said never.”

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