When the 13-Year-Old Picks a $14 Million Condo

Max Srulowitz, 15, went house-hunting in East Hampton, N.Y., with his father, Jeffrey Srulowitz, rear, and Michael A. Schultz, an associate broker at Corcoran, foreground.

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A year and a half ago, Skye van Merkensteijn was shooting hoops with a friend who lives at the Aldyn, a condominium-rental hybrid on Riverside Boulevard with its own indoor basketball court, climbing wall and bowling alley.

Thirteen-year-old Skye was impressed — and envious. Well, his worldly pal told him, he just happened to know of an apartment for sale on the 21st floor.

Skye went home, jumped online and called up a video of the property in question — a 12-room spread with a hot tub and private 37-by-15-foot outdoor pool.

“When my husband, John, came home,” said Skye’s mother, Elizabeth van Merkensteijn, “Skye announced: ‘We’re moving and this is the place we’re moving to.’ ”

Mr. van Merkensteijn, an investor, told his son he couldn’t afford a $14 million apartment. As for Mrs. van Merkensteijn, if you wanted her to leave the family’s eight-room apartment at the Beresford on Central Park West, she said, you were going to have to carry her out. In a box.

Still, for a lark the couple strolled over to check out their son’s find, which, in addition to the pool and an expansive terrace, had bedazzling views of the Hudson and the Palisades. “We looked at each other and said, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” Mrs. van Merkensteijn recalled. “The idea that you could own a place like this in New York City was amazing.”

Skye came along to the closing a few months later.

In New York, teens and preteens are becoming savvy connoisseurs of real estate.

Perhaps it’s because they’re so utterly at home on the Internet. Perhaps it’s because they’re lured by online images of condo amenities like an indoor pool or a children’s playroom or because they’re fans of “Million Dollar Listing New York” on Bravo. Or maybe it’s because it’s become business as usual for children in certain precincts of Manhattan to participate in family decisions.

“They choose where they and their parents are going to have dinner or where they’re going to go on vacation,” said Stuart Moss, an associate broker at Corcoran. “So why shouldn’t it extend to where they’re going to spend several million dollars for a residence?”

Bonnie Hut Yaseen, an associate broker at Fox Residential, is used to the youth vote by now. “I’m seeing this trend where parents are coming in to look at my listings and proudly announcing that it was their son or daughter who found it,” she said. “They’re finding an unexpected resource in their children.”

Of course, there is cinematic precedent for all this. In the 1947 classic “Miracle on 34th Street,” a skeptical little girl will believe in Santa Claus only if he can arrange the acquisition of a house she saw in a magazine listing.

Ms. Yaseen said that in the past children saw their homes-to-be only when it was time for the parents to assign them their bedrooms. “Now, in some cases, the kids are coming on the first visit to an apartment because they want to know if it’s as good in reality as it looked online,” she said. “They’ll sometimes be there with paperwork, with a printout from a website.”

Their knowledge can be quite granular. “We had one teenager who knew the specifics of our floor plans. He knew that the C line apartments are 2,296 square feet and that the L units are 2,277,” said Justin D’Adamo, the managing director of Corcoran Sunshine, the marketing and sales team for River & Warren, a condominium development in Battery Park City. “He told his mother that the C line would be better because of his baby grand piano.”

Ultimately, he and his Steinway carried the day.

When Yovanka Bylander Arroyo, a widow with two children, began going to open houses, it was her son, Alexandre, 10, an HGTV and Zillow fan, who asked about square footage and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. “And I was like, ‘Gee, I don’t know,’ ” said Ms. Arroyo, the executive director of a financial services firm. “Maybe I should be going on Zillow.”

Katie Haggerty, a fashion designer, has worked as a real estate broker. Her mother was a broker, too. She and her husband, Sean, who works in finance, own investment properties. So it makes perfect sense that their three children, most particularly their daughter Patty, 14, have become interested in the ins and outs of the business.

When the Haggertys moved to New York from Chicago last year, they rented so they could get the lay of the land. Now that they’ve decided to buy, “Patty has made it part of her daily routine to go online and look up properties,” said Mrs. Haggerty, who is looking for a doorman building, preferably on the Upper East Side, with a live-in super, two or three bedrooms, a gym and, if possible, some outdoor space.

“When she searches, she shows us different square footage, amenities and the taxes,” Mrs. Haggerty said.

Patty’s frequent visits to the sites StreetEasy, Trulia and Zillow led her to Carnegie Park, a condominium on Third and 94th. “We looked at it and are still seriously considering it,” Mrs. Haggerty said; they are also mulling over 515 East 72nd Street, another condominium.

“I feel I’ve been a big contribution to the process,” said Patty, whose wish list includes “a view of Central Park.”

Michael Schultz, an associate broker with Corcoran, affectionately refers to 15-year-old Max Srulowitz as “the president.” That’s because last year, when Max’s parents, Jeffrey and Jennifer Srulowitz, were looking for a summer rental in East Hampton, N.Y., Max went online and found some prospects that had eluded Mr. Schultz, including the winning property.

Now, the Srulowitzes are hoping to buy in East Hampton, and once again, Max is playing a key role. Mr. Schultz even includes him in the emails he sends to Mr. and Ms. Srulowitz. “When I get listings,” Ms. Srulowitz said, “I print them out and before I show them to my husband, I’ll show Max. I take pride in his acumen, and he’s very mature.”

All this speaks to the evolving parent-child dynamic, according to Dr. Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist. “I think particularly in affluent areas, there’s now less of a separation in terms of what children are privy to and what privileges they get to have,” she said. “These parents aren’t saying: ‘We need to move and it’s your responsibility to find us a place.’ This is about children being helpful in ways that are fun for them.”

“Would it be more helpful for them to take out the garbage?” Dr. Saltz asked. “Maybe, but it’s not as much fun. And of course it’s easy for them because they’re Internet savvy,” she continued. “And I think it’s fun for some parents to feel that their child is their friend: ‘Oh, you found that great apartment. That’s cool.’ ”

Sometimes, as with the van Merkensteijns, the parents weren’t looking for an apartment, great or not, until the children clued them in to the possibilities. And in some cases, parents have fixed on a move and a budget only to discover that their offspring have grander notions.

“I had clients who were looking at places that were under $3 million, and their daughter, a high school junior, went online and found a visually stunning place on the Upper East Side that was $3.5 million,” said a broker who requested anonymity so as not to scuttle a deal in progress. “She got her parents to go look at it and they loved it so much they decided to raise their price point.”

In a few instances, children are doing everything but writing the check. “There are international buyers who want to buy a pied-à-terre or want to buy an apartment for investment purposes, but they’re not familiar with the New York market and don’t speak English very well,” said Bruce Ehrmann, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “They have their children who are in the United States in boarding school or college do their research for them.”

At the moment, Mr. Ehrmann has a Manhattan apartment in contract thanks to a college freshman who found a long-term investment property on the Internet for her Asian parents.

Sometimes the children apply the brakes instead of stepping on the gas. Ms. Arroyo recently went to check out an apartment in Midtown, Alexandre in tow. It had three bedrooms and everything else the family was looking for, and the building was great. “My son saw me getting excited and began looking at the sell sheet,” Ms. Arroyo said. “As I was asking the broker a few more questions, Alexandre was tugging at my sleeve and saying, ‘Mommy, Mommy. Look at the maintenance!’ ”

The number was astronomical, she said. “That’s why the apartment was so well priced. He had noticed and I hadn’t,” Ms. Arroyo added ruefully. “And I was like ‘O.K., broker, have a nice day. This deal is not going to happen.’ ”

While many parents are happy to indulge their children’s interest in real estate, they also want to educate them. The van Merkensteijns gave Skye and his brother, Jan, 17, a tutorial on mortgages, interest rates and bridge loans. Skye kept a flow chart that tracked the offers and counteroffers for the place at the Aldyn.

Meanwhile, thanks to her mother and father, Patty Haggerty now knows the difference between a co-op and a condo, and is learning about the advantages of buying versus renting, and vice versa. “Patty,” Mrs. Haggerty said, “feels this is the time to buy.”

But parents don’t necessarily want to share everything with their young consultants. “We don’t discuss our financial situation with Max and we didn’t discuss our budget,” said Jeffrey Srulowitz, while acknowledging that on his own, “Max realized that we were looking in a certain price range.”

When one Upper West Side woman began looking at apartments, her architecture-mad 10-year-old son “starting injecting himself into the process,” she said. “He found StreetEasy and then he started looking up where our friends live and he’d say, ‘You wouldn’t believe what so-and-so paid for their co-ops.’ I shut that down right away and told him he could only search the architects of the buildings his friends lived in.”

The boy’s mother requested anonymity because she did not want her friends to know what her son had been up to.

Elizabeth van Merkensteijn shrugs off such concerns. “You can’t hide the ball on these kids,” she said. “They hear the numbers. We talk about everything in front of everyone. I get it that the air is thin and that it’s rarefied. But it’s the reality of New York City.”

Copyright © 2015 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times. 

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