A drive in the country with Real Estate Broker Ron Guichard is like a rolling history lesson. “This farm was… That barn… See that house up on the hill.… says Guichard between sips of water or buttons of chewing gum. “That’s the old firkin factory. They made the containers butter was sold in.” Of course, Guichard also knows when and for how much the properties most recently sold, and what larger plots of land they were once part of.

Guichard’s office is as unique as the man. Situated in the former First National Bank of Andes building, the office fills what had sat empty for some 60 years. He breezes through stories of a bank robbery there, and the bearer bonds that surfaced in New York City years later. He mourns the loss of the teller’s cages, which were salvaged for a community fundraiser than tossed as rubble years ago.

The restoration was a labor of love, for a man who got his start on the restoration side of the real estate spectrum. His start in real estate, that is….

“I started out in food and catering,” says Guichard, sitting back in an upholstered chair in his most eclectically furnished headquarters. “From there, I managed two animal shelters in Flushing and Jamaica (Queens),” he says. “From animal welfare, I moved to humans. I ended up at Prudential Life.”

But before those varied careers, Guichard would first fall for Delaware County. “I fall in love with many properties,” he says. “You have to. I fell in love with this building the first time I saw it, at 14 (years of age). I went to school here,” says Guichard of his office on state Route 28.

“My father was in the service, in the Coast Guard in the Pacific. My aunt had a farm here in Andes…and wrote to my mother and said ‘why don’t you bring the boys up.’ She took in boarders,” says Guichard, who quickly took to the move upstate from Queens. He worked on and around the farm, dabbling in renovation and more. He was always the one scrambling to the tops of the ladders.

Guichard enrolled in the local school and would have graduated here had his parents not pressed him to return to Flushing for his senior year. But after graduation, he returned to work on a home restoration project. When asked what brought him back, he told people he’d returned to finish a novel.

Folks didn’t know what to make of him, but liked the quality of his restoration work, and one job led to another. “I moved up here with my wife and kids in 1981 and sold real estate part time,” he says.

Three years later, at 42 years of age, Guichard found himself in a hospital for the removal of a cyst in his neck. Laying in the hospital bed, relieved at the news the cyst was benign, he asked himself “What do I want to do with the rest of my life? I was not 16 anymore,” he says. “A fellow I’d worked for had urged me to do it full time, and I decided that day to pursue real estate. That was the epiphany.”

More History…
“In 1973 there was an oil embargo. Rural real estate, the second-homeowner (market), died,” says Guichard. “It literally flat lined. Real estate agents would show some properties year after year. People were pulling their hair out trying to stay in business,” he says.

Around 1980, the average listing was $35,000 to $40,000, he says. “Around 1985 the Federal Government began buying farms. They called it the big ‘buyout.’ Farmers were given the option of selling their dairy herds and getting an education to do something else. That brought a hell of a lot of farm land to the market,” says Guichard.

According to an article in The New York Times, published on March 3, 1986, the agricultural depression that began in the Midwest in 1981 had gathered force and brought a farm crisis to this region with farmers facing hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. “In New York and New Jersey, hundreds of farm families are being forced to leave the land,” wrote Thomas Knudson. “Once a property sold for $90,000, that started to bring in professional clientele,” adds Guichard. “You had buyers who would buy an old farm house and bring in a crew to fix it or bring animals on. The $35,000 house in Westbury, Long Island was worth $140,000, and these telemarketing mortgage companies would call and say ‘We’ll give you $140,000.’ They would buy these lots up here, firemen and police living on Long Island.”

“It really moved along until the October, 1987 stock market crash,” says Guichard. “Then the overtime ended. The moonlighting jobs ended. The defense plants closed on Long Island. This caused a glut in the market. With the loss of income, many opted to finance the properties up here that didn’t have a mortgage. A lot went to foreclosure. A lot came on the market. By 1991 we were in a very depressed market.”

“I opened in August of 1987. The crash was in October,” he recalls. “(Many) real estate companies that opened in that period disappeared.”

“I have survived because of my uniqueness,” says Guichard. In the years between 2000 and 2006, those that persevered like Guichard have experienced a market with prices that have increased 80 percent. “Part of this so-called profession is to try to work with a seller is realistic or you find yourself slipping into a negative place,” he says. He successfully pursued a program through which stake holders contributed to the cost of appraisals, so that realistic asking prices could be set.

“We’re funky to a degree,” says Guichard of his four full-time agents and the entire Ron Guichard Real Estate Office. “At times, basically I feel I operate a real estate boutique.”

“If someone builds a house that they can sell easily, they’re smart,” he says of so-called “different properties” in general. “A lot of people build a house that’s do unique to them—that’s where I come in. I often get to list a property that’s quirky.”

“It’s an interesting profession,” says Guichard, who says it’s not uncommon to for his agents or himself to drive 200 miles in a day. “I basically spread my agency out,” he says, “to wherever those interesting listings were. We’ve gone as far as Rensselaerville. Most sellers will seek us out. ‘There’s a guy down in Delaware County, give him a call,’ they’ll say.”

“Then there are pocket listings, discretionary sales where the seller doesn’t want it known that they’re selling. That’s also been a specialty.”

Reflecting on some of the more interesting properties he’s handled, Guichard lists an 1790 mill, an old mercantile building/general store, a home in the Greek revival style, churches, properties beside waterfalls, and, of course, old schoolhouses. “If the conversion is really beautiful, they are dramatic,” he says of the latter.

“We have an exceptional property right now, built by an architect, on the basis of a school house on 53 acres,” he says That property, if it were nearer the Hudson River, would sell for between $1.5 and $2 million, Guichard estimates.

Nestled at the end of a quiet road in the western Delaware County town of Masonville, it is currently offered at $658,000. Including what Guichard calls a state-of-the-art renovation, the property now includes a three-bedroom home, with radiant-heated floors throughout, attached to the original one-room school house. Guichard believes the school house and barn date to around 1890.

Architectural features, from the massive black slate in the staircase (from Cooperstown’s famed Otesaga Hotel) leading to the second floor, windows and marble sinks found elsewhere, were salvaged from projects accessed by seller, an architect whose vision, combined with that of his artist wife, shaped the different design of the house.

A reinforced glass ceiling lets light onto the porch and through the front windows, and extensive use of glass throughout the addition illuminates the generous spaces within.

Three bedrooms on the second floor each feature built-in Shaker-style cabinets, and two share an central bath and shower. The third floor, envisioned as a master suite, was sometimes used as a library and studio. It features full size doors and airy screened-in decks on either end.

The first floor’s 11-foot ceilings seem to float above the walls on the ground floor thanks to glass panels that let in extra light, and built-in cabinetry runs the entire length of some walls offering much of the homes very generous storage possibilities. “They were apartment dwellers in Manhattan,” says Guichard, with a nearly audible wink.

The house is different, but striking, immediately welcoming and warm perhaps due to the extensive use of wood—including the woodpecker-drilled exterior of the schoolhouse that now greets you on the inside of the house at the food of those black slate stairs.

Fair Hills, as it’s called, sits in what Guichard describes as a “complex of wonderful structures.” He adds: “The couple that built this house looked for land for years. They found a place that had a barn and an old schoolhouse that had been used for a garage,” he says. “They fixed that up so they could use it. Then they decided to add this addition four or five years ago.”

The architect found room to work, and space for an office in the massive three-story barn, as did his artist wife. Their children found places to entertain and perform under the same roof, and while the efforts of the artist and architect have left their marks on this massive structure, the sheer size of the place spurs the imagination.

A one-room guest cottage with sleeping loft doubles as a writer’s retreat, and the couple also built an authentic Finnish cordwood sauna at the edge of a long covered dock leading to Fair Hills’ private pond. There’s also a potting shed, detached garage, old stone and concrete foundations, and and long stretches of stone walls to capture the imagination.

“I sell the ones I really want to live in myself,” says Guichard, who seems right at home walking through the structures and across the lawns here, and why not?

“I’ve lived in Delaware County on and off since I was a kid,” says the man who grew up in Queens, but quickly learned to love the rolling hills of Delaware County, its 1460 square miles equaling an area larger than that of Rhode Island, as his Web site points out.

For more information about this property or other distinctive properties offered by Ron Guichard Realty, log on to www.ronguichard.com.