Image of Richard Barenblatt

Richard Barenblatt of Guardhill Financial at StreetEasy’s Brooklyn First-Time Home Buyers’ Series.

On Saturday, Oct. 20, we hosted StreetEasy’s Brooklyn First-Time Home Buyers’ Series, our first event tailored specifically for Brooklyn home shoppers. Couldn’t make it to the event? Not to worry. We’ve got the recording of the entire program in this post.

The morning’s program was jam-packed, featuring:

  • Opening remarks from Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, which starts at 1:25 in the video.
  • An overview of the Brooklyn market packed with useful data and trends presented by StreetEasy Senior Economist Grant Long, starting at 7:30 in the video.
  • A tutorial on home financing from mortgage specialist Richard Barenblatt of Guardhill Financial, starting at 21:25. 
  • A rundown of various financial assistance programs presented by Tyrone McDonald of Neighborhood Housing Services of Brooklyn, which begins at 36:10 in the video.
  • A crash course on the home search and buying process presented by buyer’s agent Aaron Seawood of Compass. See his talk at 51:10. 
  • A deep dive on the legal pitfalls to avoid presented by real estate attorney Rosalind Ting Kwast Esq. of Kwast Law, PLLC. The video of her talk starts at 1:07:10. 

The event closed out with a Q&A with all five experts, giving the audience a chance to ask specific questions about the home buying process in Brooklyn. The video of the Q&A starts at 1:24:40. 

There were still dozens of questions that we didn’t have a chance to address in the Q&A, so we’ve tapped our experts to answer them all in this post.

If you have more Brooklyn buying questions for one of our experts, feel free to leave them in the comments below or submit your questions to askus@streeteasy.com. And if you attended the event, we’d love your feedback — please take our short survey.

Thanks to everyone who joined us at this event, and happy home shopping!



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