KATY HINE
New York
Katy Hine Delivers,
Whether she’s managing properties in Tribeca or the
Upper East Side, Katy Hine has you covered.
For Katy Hine, there is no home management project she—and
her team—haven’t handled. As a luxury concierge specialist,
she’ll arrange for the most detailed repairs and high-end
renovations for her clients, as well as provide personal assistance,
from coordinating detailed travel arrangements to running
errands around Manhattan. Read on as this hands-on home
concierge tells you more:
What is one thing your clients have in common?
They don’t have time to deal with the little idiosyncrasies of
running a fine home. I’m on call when they need me: I specialize
in working for people who don’t always need or want a full-time
manager.
Sounds like no day is the same.
That’s what I love about my work. Just today I was looking
for a tiny decorative screw for a door handle that somehow
disappeared. Now, I’m on a rooftop taking photos of holes
that some carpenter bees made in a pergola, and I just finished
a conference call with a landscape architect about replacing
garden lights for another client.
Is there one thing your clients don’t know about you?
After college while still in my early 20s, I started as a housekeeper.
I’ve been a member of a household staff, so I’m able to come
in and easily work with a homeowner’s current staff. It will be
a smooth, seamless transition because every one of us is on the same team.
We all want happy homeowners!
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JULY 2016- AVENUE MAGAZINE
Tending to an Estate, but It's Not Your Own
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As the owner of Exclusive Estate Service and Yacht Detailing, Katy Hine, 32, of Hampton Bays is a roving caretaker and house watcher. She oversees 10 properties from Westhampton to Water Mill. On Mondays, after her clients leave for their primary residences, Ms. Hine checks to see if the doors and windows are locked and whether they have left a note listing problems that need to be fixed.
Ms. Hine slid into her work when she got a job parking cars on a nine acre oceanfront estate in
Southampton after graduating from Southampton College in 1994. ''It ended up morphing into a six year stint,'' Ms. Hine said.
She washed cars, weeded the garden, arranged for ice cream carts on the beach, increasingly
taking on more responsibilities as part of a staff that also included nannies and housekeepers.
When the estate manager quit suddenly, she was asked to take over, often working from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. She learned when she needed to whisper, tiptoe or take the back stairs.
Three years ago, Ms. Hine started her own caretaking company, catering mostly to two and
three-acre properties on an as-needed basis. Beyond repairs she can do herself, Ms. Hine has a list of service providers that includes orchid distributors, chefs, bartenders and helicopter pilots for getting clients on and off the Island quickly.
''Clients will even call me for medical emergencies,'' Ms. Hine said.
Ms. Hine said she thought it was easier for a caretaker than a homeowner to get things done.
''I act as a liaison between the client and the service,'' Ms. Hine said. ''It's a wonderful thing to call up the plumber at 10 o'clock on Sunday night and say, 'Hi, this is Katy, I need a favor.'''
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/nyregion/long-island-journal-tending-to-an-estate-but-it-s-not-your-own.html?pagewanted=all
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10/26/ 2003
Meet Katy Hine: Property Management Expert
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By MARC BUSSANICH
November 19, 2020 at 11:15 AM
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New York, NY—She got her start in property and estate management when right out of college she worked for a high-end family along picturesque Dune Road in Southampton as a housekeeper. Over 20 years later, Katy Hine now is one of Manhattan’s leading and go-to professionals in the business.
She remembers fondly her early beginnings on the East End. She said it was absolutely thrilling, because she never thought she’d be driving Quincy Jones in a Rolls-Royce or picking up her employers in a brand-new Mercedes-Benz from a helicopter pad to bring them home.
“My employers were in the concert promotion business, so they would host numerous parties with Jimmy Buffett there, as well as Rod Stewart and Tina Turner. That was an incredible experience for a kid who’s 21 just out college,” said Hine.
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She eventually moved up through the ranks of management until she became estate manager for the client, and then multiple clients as well. Then in 2012 she moved the operation to Manhattan.
“I’m very lucky and privileged that I was able to land that job [in Southampton], and then have a career spun off of that job where today I’m still able to access these gorgeous homes and these amazing people that I work for, Hine said.
“They’re kind, and they’re incredibly intelligent and I just feel honored and privileged I’m able to assist them. I’ll take care of the details, I’ll take care of the grunt work, and I’ll take care of all the annoying parts about homeownership in Manhattan.”
Hine’s day-to-day entails facilitating all the necessary repairs and maintenance of high-end Manhattan homeowners by hiring high-end vendors who are licensed and insured so that the work is always warrantied.
So, whether the HVAC system is not performing properly, a room is too hot or too cold, the client is having a problem with an appliance in the kitchen, the roof is leaking, or the client needs a cleaning service to come in, she arranges all those services.
“We take that burden off of our clients, all they have to do is give us a quick text or a phone call or email and let us know what’s going wrong in their home,” noted Hine.
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Hines and her colleagues will meet the vendors on site to make sure they do the proper job, and then escort them out. She gets their bill, checks it over for accuracy and the bill goes to the client, so they pay the vendor directly, while she bills her services separately for her time making all the arrangements.
“Clients may use us once a week, once a month, once a day, it really depends on their needs, we are there when they need us, no more no less,” Hine said.
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One of the perks of the business is that she gets to see the interiors of some of Manhattan’s prime real estate. But as she likes to say, custom homes mean custom problems. The customization in the high-end apartments is so extensive, Hine notes, that there literally could be only one plumber in the entire country who can service a particular custom bathroom, or there is one manufacture in Germany who only finishes shower faucets a particular color once a year.
So, Hine’s job is to pinpoint and locate vendors and technicians to deal with these custom problems that are only in custom homes.
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“Everything in a custom home has generally been perhaps not installed per manufacturer recommendations, and so that brings up a host of challenges because you can’t just bring in a traditional plumber or a traditional electrician to deal with a lot of these problems; things have been installed in a way that the architects and designers have decided was visually appealing but sometimes very difficult to maintain,” Hine said.
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Obviously, her business took a hit financially during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic because clients did not want any vendors or technicians entering their homes. But as New York has undergone four phases of reopening, her business has rebounded, and just in time for Election Day two weeks ago.
She was fielding a lot of audio/visual issues because clients wanted to make sure that, in some apartments, their nine TVs were working properly because they didn’t want to miss a minute’s worth of news coverage.
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“They wanted to make sure that everything was checked out no matter where they walked into the house so that they could listen to and see what was happening at all times. Honestly, I’m still getting a lot of that,” said Hine.