30 Years in, and Every Day Is Different
“I just can’t wait to get to work,” Htun Han of Hamptons Realty Group in Amagansett said last week, “because one day is different from the other. There are so many things to learn in real estate.” Every day is a challenge, said Mr. Han, even after more than three decades of experience.
On Wednesday, Mr. Han will mark a rare accomplishment in the South Fork’s competitive and sometimes volatile world of real estate. That day is his 30th anniversary in the same location, at a business he launched with Peter Garnham in 1984 under the name Garnham and Han.
Mr. Han had already traveled many miles and through a great diversity of experiences when he and Mr. Garnham started the business. A native of Rangoon, the city now known as Yangon, in the country of Myanmar, formerly Burma, he left for England soon after graduating from college. An eight-year association with the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, followed, “but I was just affiliated with them,” Mr. Han said. “I spent all the time at a government lab on the eastern coast of England.”
Mr. Han studied fisheries, particularly fish farming, “which was what brought me to this area.” Arriving in the late 1970s, he expected to quickly find work in that field, but a faltering economy made that a difficult proposition. He was offered, and accepted, a position at the New York Ocean Sciences Laboratory in Montauk, where he replaced Bob Valenti, who had left to establish Multi-Aquaculture Systems at Promised Land in Amagansett. At the lab, Mr. Han worked with Anthony D’Agostino, who was experimenting with blue lobsters, and George Noyes, who worked with shellfish. “I was in charge of finfish,” Mr. Han said.
It was not to last. In the 1978 campaign for governor of New York, Hugh Carey defeated Perry Duryea Jr., “who was our patron,” Mr. Han said. Funding was eliminated, and “the lab died over?night.” But Mr. Han and his wife had grown attached to the area and wanted to stay. “It was not easy finding a job in the late ’70s. So I decided to change career and came into real estate in 1979.”
For five years, Mr. Han worked for Jack Douglas Realty in East Hampton. “I worked my way up to becoming the East Hampton office manager,” he said, before partnering with Mr. Garnham.
One of a few remaining independent real estate offices in the Town of East Hampton, Mr. Han is happy to be “local, small, and nimble,” taking pride in a large number of sales to first-time homebuyers. “The compensation may be a tad lower,” he said, “but the satisfaction is a lot greater in selling to local families.”
“We always figured that if you did the right thing all the time, even if it lost you a deal, it would come back to you some way or another,” Mr. Garnham, who left the business around 1994, said of Mr. Han. “That was the principal that we ran on, and Htun still does.”
Mr. Han’s is a business that certainly has its ups and downs, “but isn’t that so in most aspects of life? One has got to know how to go with the flow and roll with the punch,” he said. Over the last 35 years, the financial crisis that began in 2008 was “the most severe, the deepest, and the longest lasting.” An average loss of 30 percent in value, he said, has yet to be regained. “There are certain bright spots, and Amagansett and the Lanes is one area that’s doing quite well,” while “real estate remains the best investment, bar none.”
Mr. Han has also served the community as a member of the Amagansett Ambulance Squad, now in his 29th year. He is less active than he used to be, he said, owing to the economic downturn. “It reached a stage where I had to put in a lot more effort to earn a living. In the meantime, quite a few new recruits have come on board, allowing a few old-timers among us to start slowing down. But I’m still an active member, and I still have deep feelings for the ambulance and want to see it remain successful.”
Mr. Han, a Buddhist, has often returned to his native country, in part so that his daughter, who was recently married, would be “well grounded in the proverbial roots,” he said. “Burma is on the way out of the self-isolation it put itself in and it’s now joining the world’s ranks.” He encourages travel to Myanmar before its old-world attributes disappear.
Back in Amagansett, he reflected on 30 happy years in what he called the three spheres of his life — family, work, and the ambulance squad. “A lot of times they intersect, but I manage to compartmentalize these aspects of my life,” he said. Of his work, he said that real estate has afforded him both continuity and daily challenges. “Having good people around me helps a lot,” he said. “I’m looking forward to many, many more years, still being in the business and serving clients.”
“I can say with all honesty, I think he’s probably the best person I’ve ever met,” Mr. Garnham said. “In the real estate business, that’s rare indeed.”