Real-estate for-sale sign swept away during Hurricane Sandy lands on French beach this month

WALL, N.J. — The firm Diane Turton, Realtors, needs no bottle to get its message out across the globe.

As it turns out, its signs are seaworthy.  

A for-sale sign swept away from a waterfront home in nearby Brielle during Hurricane Sandy made to a beach west of Bordeaux, France about 5½ years later, according to the real-estate firm based in Point Pleasant Beach.

"Having our signage wash up in France on the beach truly proves that Diane Turton, Realtors is a global real-estate company," Perry Beneduce, the firm's marketing director, said with a bit of a wink.

The company has more than 300 brokers and agents in nearly 20 offices in Jersey Shore towns, according to its website. And that home for sale was in Brielle, about 40 miles south of New York City, not Brielles, France, about 175 miles southwest of Paris.

The story of the seafaring sign began two weeks ago when email came into the company's marketing department claiming one of the signs that agents plant in front of listed properties ended up on a French beach, Beneduce said. The beach near Bordeaux is about 3,600 miles east and a little north of this area.

He did some digital detective work to confirm the story, exchanging emails with Hannes Frank, the man who found the sign in France, and obtaining photos of the sign.

Beneduce checked the metadata on those photos for longitude and latitude of where it was taken to confirm it was, indeed, France. The GPS information shows a location about 90 miles northeast of Bordeaux, which is about 300 miles southwest of Paris.

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That's not beachfront, but not a New Jersey prank either.

Company officials know the sign, really about two-thirds of a sign, is from the superstorm Sandy era because they changed the design of their signage soon after the storm that hit here Oct. 29, 2012.

They were able track the sign, whose phone number came from the Wall office, to the home that lost it about 5 miles away.

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At the time, the office had only one waterfront listing, a four-bedroom home on Cedarcrest Drive that has "unobstructed panoramic views of the water from almost every room of the house." That waterfront is Debbie's Creek, about a mile from the beach.

For French readers looking to purchase this gem: Sorry, you're out of luck. The 2,500-square-foot home sold in May 2013 for $625,000, public records show. The Monmouth County Assessor's Office values it about the same today.

Follow Susanne Cervenka on Twitter: @scervenka

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