East Village as a theme park in Las Vegas, well that says it all. Why doesn't Hilly go there? If he doesn't, some actor playing him will anyhow!
From the NY Times today: Mirroring my struggle all summer... you think you have a decently large enough limit on rent, and the real estate mavens just laugh at you. THE REAL TERRORISTS IN NEW YORK CITY ARE THE REAL ESTATE AGENTS!!!!
I like how she breaks down the types ---
The New York Times
August 21, 2005
Seeking the Holy Grail
By ALEXANDRA BANDON
MY low point came the day I stood on Charles Street berating a real estate agent I had just met two minutes before. "This is not a town house!" I snarled, looking up at a six-story yellow brick apartment building. "Why did you call this a town house?"
The agent, a sweet-faced young blonde in large sunglasses, gamely took my abuse in front of two colleagues. Her defense was weak. "I didn't lie," she said. "I said it was on a town house block."
"No, you said it was a town house," I practically screamed. "I came all the way down here on my lunch hour to look at a town house floor-through. This is a tenement!"
I was insane. I knew it. But not because my face was beet red and my eyes were bulging - or because I kept saying the words "town house" - but because when the agent asked me if this meant I didn't want to go inside and see the apartment, I said: "No. Of course I'll look at it."
Desperation. I had sunk so low that I was willing to trust anyone who claimed to have the perfect property. I was halfway through a five-week hunt for the holy grail of West Village apartments: a one-bedroom in a town house with a separate kitchen, west of Seventh Avenue between 10th and 13th Streets, for $2,600 or less. (Yeah, my friends rolled their eyes, too, and tended to say I had better start acquainting myself with Brooklyn.)
[NOT THAT BROOKYLN HAS ANYTHING CHEAP THESE DAYS!!]
For several weeks, I had tried the no-broker route, sending out mass e-mail messages and calling all my neighborhood contacts.
But this is New York. Landlords don't go begging for renters. They get a broker to do it for them, then let the renter pay for the privilege - anywhere from one month's rent to 15 percent of a year. Or they raise the rent on a "no fee" apartment to make up for what they paid the broker. The reality is that apartments in Manhattan rarely move without the aid of a professional, and even when a landlord lists a place "by owner," good luck finding the ad before a broker co-opts it.
{PRECISELY!!!]
After two weeks with no success, I succumbed to the siren song of the broker. And let me tell you, I dealt with a lot of them. Dozens, in fact. Some I spoke to only on the phone. Some I met in person. Many were not actually brokers, but mere agents. (Both are licensed, but brokers have logged more hours and have taken a second licensing exam while agents must work under the supervision of a broker.)
Soon it became clear. Brokers and agents are all alike, really. Or can at least be neatly compartmentalized into personality types. So if you're getting ready to search for your perfect apartment, here's a cheat sheet to help you deal with New York's real estate rental professionals - from the good, to the bad, to the downright nasty.
The Bully
Most rental listings don't go on the market until a month before they're available, which means renters can't seriously begin searching until then. So a lot of agents and brokers capitalize on the panic that comes from that 30-day countdown to homelessness. They hit on your worst fears by sneering, "You'll never find anything in that price range" or "Apartments like that just don't come on the market that often."
Bullies are actually easy to spot because they answer questions with questions. "What exactly are you looking for?" they say when you ask about a listing. Gee, I think, I'm looking for something kind of like this ad I called you about. "When do you have to move?" they ask. Oh, I don't know, I'm in no rush.
I encountered a Bully when I answered an ad for a "$2,690/2br - HOT, HOT, HOT WEST VILLAGE STEAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (Caps lock and exclamation points are very important to the Bully.) "Have you been looking only at no-fee apartments?" he scolded. "That's why you're having a bad experience. No fee apartments are awful."
"But, um, this apartment is no fee," I said.
"That one's rented," he said. "I have a better one on 10th Street. It has a fee."
Ah, the classic bait and switch. Call about one property, and the Bully will tell you either it doesn't fit your criteria or it has already been rented. Then you'll hear about another, better, place, which just happens to require a fee.
Take it from me: the moment a broker answers your question with another question, just hang up. If he's not focused on the ad he listed, he probably doesn't really have that property.
The Confidante
There are times, I have to admit, when an agent's rap was so good that I shut off my scam detector. That's what had happened with the woman on Charles Street. We had talked on the phone and she had listened. Listened - and told me I shouldn't look at the apartment I'd called her about because it wasn't right for someone of my maturity and sophistication. Instead she had the perfect place, on one of my favorite blocks. Yeah, girlfriend!
Then while we waited to meet up with the listing broker, we exchanged gripes about clueless agents. "I got into this business," she said, "because I was dealing with so many brokers who didn't know what they were talking about." My new best friend!
The Confidante uses empathy to gain trust. "Oh, you're going through a breakup? How horrible! You've only dealt with sneaky, stupid brokers? I hear you!" This woman was good, but she made one big mistake: she lied. Turns out she couldn't tell a town house from a doghouse.
In the end, the apartment was actually decent. But it wasn't good enough to justify the fee, which couldn't be negotiated down from 15 percent because it was a "co-broke," a deal shared between a listing broker and an agent who brings in a client. And I wasn't about to lay out that kind of money for a girlfriend who had betrayed me.
The Tourist
A Tourist is an agent who's just getting his or her feet wet in a neighborhood and dabbles in its geography, architecture, history and culture. But he hasn't quite learned his way around, which can be frustrating for a local like me. More than one broker I worked with didn't even know how to get to the addresses they were showing me.
[I DEALT with one "agent" who didn't know what "MIDTOWN" meant. She thought West 28th Street was the West VIllage.]
Matthew Mediatore from K&O Realty was a Tourist when I met him. Our first encounter ended without my seeing the property because Matthew had gotten the cross streets wrong and we'd missed the appointment. The next time I saw him, he tried to impress me about a place - which was, mind you, three blocks from where I lived - by telling me "Gwyneth Paltrow lives right over there." Yes, I know. And Liv Tyler lives there, and Sarah Jessica Parker lives there, and Hilary Swank is just up the street. Anything else you want to tell me about my neighborhood?
Over the next few weeks, however, Matthew shed his Tourist status. He made sure he showed me only town houses, not brownstones. (While a native New Yorker means a house when he says "brownstone," brokers use that term for any building sporting real brownstone on the facade. Many of them are actually tenements.)
He also didn't patronize me. Instead he was professional and honest, probably because he had owned a personal training business for 10 years before becoming an agent. Agents with life and work experience interact better with clients, because they already understand the value of working hard at good customer service.
The Scavenger
If the Tourist is a hard worker, the Scavenger is the laziest. The Scavenger trolls newspapers and Web listings, finds an ad for a great place and then relists the place as his or her own. Often, the same apartment will show up five, 10 times in a row, all with different brokers' contact numbers.
[THIS IS WHAT YOU'LL FIND A HUNDERD TIMES if you use Craig's List!!]
It's not their fault, really. Because of the strong sales market, there's a glut of brokers and agents. In fact, New York's Department of State, which administers the real estate licensing exams, recently ended its walk-in test-taking policy in several locations, including New York City, because the lines to get in were snaking around the block.
I met my first Scavenger when I answered a "no fee" ad on the Craigslist Web site for an apartment down the block from me. It was listed for $3,175, but I took a chance that the landlord might come down on the rent for the right tenant.
I never actually met that agent because he sent a co-worker in his place. When we sat down with the landlord, I jumped right in. "Look, I have to be honest - I love it, but it's more than I can afford," I said. "But I hope you'll consider lowering the rent if I promise to take care of ..."
She cut me off. "The price is firm," she said. She turned to the agent and asked him, "What about you? Do you work?"
Puzzled, he answered that he was a broker with a neighborhood agency.
"I don't know who that is," she said. Then she looked at me and smirked. "You could have just looked in The Village Voice," she said.
Suddenly it all made sense. The guy who had put the ad on Craigslist didn't even know this woman; he had just seen her classified ad in The Voice and relisted it. That's when she and I exchanged glances. "Who did you think was going to pay you?" we both asked the agent.
He had no idea, because his colleague had set him up. Needless to say, the landlord never came down on the price, and the next day I picked up The Village Voice. There was the ad, a tiny three-liner, listing the apartment for $2,995 - $180 less than the ad on Craigslist. Perhaps the agent's plan had been to pretend he was getting the landlord to come down on the rent in exchange for the renter's paying the fee.
But listing the property in the first place was unethical, according to the code of ethics of the Real Estate Board of New York, an industry trade association. The code states that "without the prior knowledge or consent of the owner," no member shall "offer, or cause to be offered, such property for sale or lease."
From then on, I looked in the paper myself.
The Veteran
It was a newspaper ad that caught my eye: "G.Vill 1BR $2,150; Private 20x22 backyard, Bright EIK, Full Sep Bth. Grt Nabe. Avail IMM."
West Village, eat-in kitchen and private backyard at that price? Too good to be true. I called the number and spoke to Michael Marino, the sole proprietor of Marino Real Estate in TriBeCa, and found out the place was several blocks south on Hudson - still in the Village, but below my geographic cutoff line. I decided to see it anyway.
The apartment was great. It had a nonworking fireplace, a good-sized bedroom, closets galore, a new bathroom, and it really did have a backyard, complete with flowering roses. And Michael knew just how to handle me. Laid-back, soft-spoken, he didn't push me with the hard sell. He just showed me the place and we chatted for a while. After 22 years in the business, he knew the deal would either happen or it wouldn't.
His ad, it turns out, had appeared only in the paper, not online. Michael said he's old-fashioned and thinks people who are looking for an apartment will check the paper first, so it's not worth paying extra to put the ad online. Once I started reading the classifieds in print, I realized that a lot of Veterans followed this logic, and that I'd been missing quite a few listings by searching only online.
Mary A. Vetri, a senior vice president at William B. May on Hudson Street, is herself a 17-year veteran. "Rentals are my bread and butter," she says. To her, even the smallest studio rental could add a client to the Rolodex who someday will bring back a multimillion-dollar sale. For that reason, the Veteran rarely lies or even goes for the hard sell, because he or she wants to establish a lasting relationship.
Case in point: when I asked Michael if the apartment was in a town house, he said: "Oh, I don't know. Maybe it could have been a town house at one point." Turned out it was, built in 1842. But Michael was probably the only broker I dealt with who didn't jump at the chance to tell me that.
The Genuinely Nice Person
Though I knew I was interested in the Hudson Street apartment, I actually put Michael off for as long as I could while I made sure there wasn't anything better in my immediate neighborhood. In a last-minute surge of phone calls to real estate companies, I came across a true broker rarity: the Genuinely Nice Person.
Tim Taylor works for Citi Habitats, which doesn't always have the best reputation among apartment hunters. But Tim was attentive the first moment I called him. I took a chance and was honest, letting him know that I had an apartment lined up but wanted to keep searching for another week.
Telling Tim I had a place already was a risk - he could have just stopped calling. But the Genuinely Nice Person doesn't work that way. Tim told me about every listing he found that I might have liked, even going so far as to break a broker's taboo and give me building addresses so I could save us both time with a preliminary walk-by.
To be honest, I don't know how they make any money. The Genuinely Nice Person seems to spend an inordinate amount of time searching listings on behalf of clients who may or may not ever pay him. Tim and I met only once, at a really nice two-bedroom on 12th Street, but he spent a good week working on my behalf, including over a holiday weekend. When I rejected the apartment because it required too much money up front, he just said: "I'm so sorry. I didn't know. They should have put the two-months' security in their listing. I'm really very sorry about that."
A broker apologizing? Unheard of. What a nice guy.
In the end, I signed the lease on the Hudson Street apartment and Michael and I negotiated the fee: more than a month's rent, but less than 15 percent. I think I got a pretty good deal."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/realestate/21cov.html