About us

An architect, a farmer's son and two rented rooms

For over 15 years Fieldstone & Finch has been helping people buy and sell houses, farms and land in the Hudson Valley. This is how it started, and how we still work.

How it started

In the fall of 2008, Nadia Finch was a licensed salesperson, studying for her broker's license, with a reputation for showing up to open houses with a flashlight. She had spent most of her career as an architect in Brooklyn, working on row houses and brownstones, and after moving to Beacon full-time in 2005 she had drifted into real estate by way of friends who wanted someone to tell them whether an old house was worth saving. She was working for a large regional office at the time, and she was frustrated: the listings were written by people who hadn't been in the basement, and the training was about scripts, not sills.

Walt Fieldstone was at the other end of his career. He had grown up on a dairy farm in Ulster County, milked cows until he was twenty-two, and then spent nearly thirty years selling farms, land and country houses on the west side of the river. He knew every back road between Kingston and the Shawangunks, which wells ran dry in August, and which farmers would sell to a neighbor for less than they'd sell to a stranger. He met Nadia when they were on opposite sides of the sale of an 1820s stone house in Hurley, and he liked the way she argued about the foundation.

The market was in freefall that winter. Most people thought it was the worst possible time to start a brokerage. Nadia and Walt thought it was the best: nobody was buying anything they hadn't looked at carefully, and careful was what they were good at. In March 2009 they signed a lease on two rooms above a hardware store on Ferry Lantern Street in Beacon, bought two used desks, and hung a sign Nadia had drawn herself, a fieldstone and a goldfinch, which is still more or less our logo.

That first year they sold eleven houses. The second year they sold thirty-four and hired their first two agents. By 2012 they had moved downstairs into the storefront at 212 Ferry Lantern Street where our Beacon office still is.

Along the way

2009
Nadia Finch and Walt Fieldstone open Fieldstone & Finch Realty in two rooms on Ferry Lantern Street, Beacon. Eleven sales the first year.
2012
We move into the ground-floor storefront at 212 Ferry Lantern Street. Eli Brandt joins and starts learning the land business from Walt.
2015
Rosa Delgado and Theo Marchetti join the Beacon office. We pass 100 sales in a year for the first time.
2017
The Kingston office opens at 48 Stockade Row, in a stone building on the edge of the Stockade District. Marcus Oyelaran, a former client, joins in Beacon.
2018
June Takeda-Ross joins in Kingston, and we start the first-time buyer evenings we still hold every spring and fall.
2019
Priya Raman joins in Kingston, and our work in Rhinebeck, Red Hook and Hudson grows. Hollis Greer arrives to turn a filing cabinet of rentals into a real rental desk.
2020
The year everyone moved upstate at once. We launch Fieldstone Prep, coordinating pre-listing repairs paid at closing.
2021
Walt retires from daily sales and becomes "of counsel." He is still in the photos.
2024
New rules on buyer agreements take effect nationally in August; we rewrite all our buyer paperwork in plain English and hold open sessions to explain it.
2025
Fourteen agents, two offices, about 210 sales a year, and twelve homes under management.

How we work

We read the house. Every listing agent here walks the house top to bottom before writing a word about it: attic, basement, mechanicals, the roof from the ground with binoculars. We'd rather tell you about the 1974 septic in the listing than have your inspector find it.

We're plain about money. We'll tell you the property taxes in dollars, the transfer tax and the mansion tax if they apply, and what we're paid. Commissions are negotiable and not set by law; we talk about ours at the first meeting, not the last.

We describe places, not people. Our listings talk about the porch, the train and the rail trail. They never tell you who the house is "perfect for." Fair housing isn't a footer link to us; it's how we write and how we show.

We stay small on purpose. We could have grown faster. We'd rather have fourteen agents who all know each other's listings than forty who don't.

The Kingston office, a stone storefront with the Fieldstone & Finch sign — Our Kingston office at 48 Stockade Row, opened in 2017.

In the community

Each year we give a share of every commission to local causes chosen by the agent: a food pantry in Beacon, a land trust in Ulster County, a youth running club, a community garden in Midtown Kingston, a scholarship for a graduating senior who wants to go into the building trades. We sponsor a Little League team in Marbletown (Eli's), host a free old-house repair clinic every March, and lend our Beacon storefront window to local artists for a month at a time.

None of this makes us special. It's what a business on Main Street does.

About the name

Walt's family name is a fieldstone wall's worth of Ulster County; Nadia's is a small yellow bird. When they were drawing the first sign, Walt said the stone should be on the left because it had been here longer. Nadia said the bird should be on top because it could see farther. The sign has both, and the argument never ended.

Licensing

Fieldstone & Finch Realty is a Licensed Real Estate Broker in the State of New York. Nadia Finch is the principal broker and is responsible for supervising every agent and transaction. We are an Equal Housing Opportunity brokerage. Read our Fair Housing Notice and our Standard Operating Procedures.