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This NYC Couple Wants to Drive Car-Less House Hunters Around New Jersey

By Amy Zimmer | August 21, 2016 11:40am | Updated on August 23, 2016 4:46pm
 Washington Heights couple Maria and Jay Hassler are launching Town Hopper Tours to take house hunters to five New Jersey towns in 3 hours.
Washington Heights couple Maria and Jay Hassler are launching Town Hopper Tours to take house hunters to five New Jersey towns in 3 hours.
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Hasslers

Washington Heights couple Maria and Jay Hassler have been devoting most of their weekends to driving around New Jersey in rented cars searching for their elusive dream: a home under $300,000, near great schools and with an hour train commute to Manhattan.

Maria Hassler noticed they kept flip-flopping on zip codes, likely frustrating their real estate brokers, so she Googled for some sort of tour to take that could answer all of her questions — like school ratings (even though the couple doesn’t yet have children), gym reviews, the lowdown on libraries and comparisons of property taxes from one town to the next.

When she couldn’t find such a tour, she decided to start one herself.

This week, the couple launched Town Hopper Tours, where they will take about a dozen carless New Yorkers like themselves around in a luxury mini-bus to see five Jersey towns in three hours.

“It’s like home seekers showing other home seekers around. We want this to be accessible and approachable,” said Hassler, an author who lives in a two-bedroom rental in Washington Heights with her classical musician husband.

After their own nine-month search, they haven’t yet figured out what or where they’ll buy, but they still think their insights can be useful. Their company joins a burgeoning cottage industry of boutique services aimed at driving around Type-A New Yorkers and arming them with reams of nitty-gritty information about suburban towns.

“Our agenda is to help people clarify their agenda," Hassler said. "We just want them to know what their options are."

The first trip is scheduled for Sep. 17 and will cost $149 per person, hitting Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Maplewood, Montclair and South Orange.

Hassler claims the tour can save house hunters $802, based on her estimates of car rental costs, gas and tolls, and the amount of time she spent researching, using the minimum wage as her pay scale.

But in her calculations — based on about 25 hours worth of research — she downgraded the actual amount she put in, which she estimates was closer to an “obsessive” 200 hours.

“That doesn’t take into account the driving around and getting lost, and yelling at Siri, and trying not to snap at each other when we were lost,” Hassler added.

The couple hopes to discuss things like whether the areas are quiet enough or busy enough and whether parents feel comfortable with their children walking around unaccompanied. They’ll talk about whether a family would need one or two cars and how long the commute to Manhattan would likely take. They’ll discuss coffee shops and grocery stores.

They are not real estate brokers and don’t plan to connect tour goers with brokers.

In fact, they won’t even show current listings during the tour — just homes that have recently sold, showing people what fetched $250,000 or $500,000 in the different areas.

The tour won’t even stop, except for a midway stretch.

Hassler hopes that tour goers — who will be given binders full of the couple’s research and will continue to have access to the site’s curated content of school reviews and other materials for six months — can then be laser-focused when they do reach out to a broker.

The tour leaves from Newark Penn Station, Hassler noted, because she registered her company in New Jersey to avoid more complicated legalities of having a Manhattan pick-up.

Hassler previously ventured into similar territory in sharing her lengthy research to help others, as the author of “InvestiDate: How to Investigate Your Date,” written under her maiden name Coder, which acts as a guide for online daters.