All In A Day's Work
Agents and brokers share thier tales of deals gone (almost) outrageously wrong
SO, WHAT DID YOU DO AT WORK TODAY? Got a contract signed in the ICU by a man who'd just briefly flat-lined during emergency heart surgery? Wrangled your way into an apartment by climbing up the fire escape? Helped bring to a close one of the longest-running civil suits in New York State Supreme Court?
No? What's that? You didn't do any of those things? You spent two hours swapping cat GIFs over Slack and then went to lunch for the rest of the afternoon? Oh. O.K.
We've all at some point in our personal New York City real estate odysseys wondered what exactly agents and brokers do that's worth their commission check. (Typically this thought occurs just as we're about to write said com-mission check.) And, no doubt, there are on occasion deals so easy and hassle-free as to scarcely warrant forking over a month's rent or 6 percent of the sale.
This is not a story about those deals. This is a story about the other kind of deal. The kind of deal when-as, for instance, happened to Warburg Realty's Lisa Larson-you walk into an apartment to prepare for a showing and find someone doing naked yoga in the middle of the living room.
The seller had vacated the place, leaving it in the hands of various friends and acquaintances. "People would just crash there," Ms. Larson recalled. "I never knew what I was going to find when I got there."
One day, having just finally negotiated a sale after more than 100 showings, she found a gas leak. She called her seller, who called ConEd, who called the fire department, who arrived and promptly pried open the building's front door, went down to the basement, and shut off the apartment's gas.
H turned out the leak was due to the unit's decades-old appliances, and to replace them would require renovating the entire kitchen. "I was like, 'Oh my God, what am I going to do? I just got this deal accepted. Now I'm going to have to redo the kitchen: " Ms. Larson said. Short version of a long story: She found a con-tractor to do a super-cheap renovation, convinced the buyer and seller to split the costs, and supervised the entire month-and-a-half-long job herself. Naturally, once they were finally ready to close, Hurricane Sandy blew into town, which delayed the deal by another week and a half".
But what's a month or so of renovations compared to 13 years of litigation between a co-op board and homeowner over an alleged infestation of toxic mold? When Stribling broker Ross Evangelista ventured with his buyers into the middle of said dispute last year, it was then the second-longest running lawsuit in New York State, he claimed.
Having sat empty for more than a decade, the l,80o-square-foot Midtown duplex was in disastrous condition (though the price was definitely right, at $1.2 million). More daunting than the anticipated renovations, though, was getting the owners and co-op board to finally settle their suit so the apartment could be sold.
The property had beaten back a number of would-be buyers in the past, Mr. Evangelista noted, including real estate writer extraordinaire Michael Gross, who'd taken a stab at the place a few years back only to be defeated by the ongoing legal wranglings.
Extensive negotiations were required before the building's board would even schedule an interview with his buyers, Mr. Evangelista recalled. "There were a lot of opportunities for this deal to have died. There were lots of fingers in the pie."
Legal troubles of a different sort threatened several years ago to submarine a deal for Corcoran broker Nicolle Nowitz. Her buyers, a couple with two teenage children still living at home, were on a tight budget but were determined nonetheless to find their dream apartment: something sizable enough to fit the four of them, in a building that would allow their two large dogs, and with-and this point was entirely non-negotiable-Chrysler Building views.
Miraculously enough, they managed to find a place that met all of these criteria (the building actually allowed only one dog per apartment, but-happily? sadly?-in the middle of negotiations their eldest pet died from eating a sock), but when contract time came, things started to get strange.
For reasons Ms. Nowitz said were never entirely clear, the owner had put the apartment in his accountant's name, meaning the accountant needed to sign for the sale to go through. Said accountant, however, was in North Carolina undergoing emergency open-heart surgery during which, in fact, he flat-lined , (inspiring Ms. Nowitz to begin researching what's typically done when a seller dies in the middle of a deal, she says). Ultimately, the accountant signed the contract while recovering in the ICU.
But even then, Ms. Nowitz noted, the drama was just beginning. After signing the contract, she and her clients learned that the accountant had previously pledged the apartment to the Securities and Exchange Commission as collateral in a settlement of a civil stock fraud case. He'd also been evading taxes, leading to IRS liens on the property in both New York and North Carolina. It took another several months and additional thousands of dollars before they were able to close.
And then there are the deals that are less a matter of liens and lawsuits and more about feats of strength. For instance, the time Mirador agent Jeffrey Hannon climbed a fire escape to get a couple into an apartment after an uncooperative super refused to open up.
"We're there, everything has been arranged, the leases are at my office ready to be signed, his clients have their money," Mr. Hannon said. "It was one of those beautiful Art Deco apartments with the fire escape in front, probably about 10 feet up going right to the apartment. I can see the damn window. I know it's open."
Taking advantage of his 6-foot-2-inch frame, he jumped up, grabbed hold of the fire escape, and pulled himself up. His clients "were ecstatic," he recalled, "talking about my core, asking me where I worked out. It was really funny." Capping things off, a week later, the woman, who worked at Coach, sent him a bag as a thank-you gift.
But even when you go the extra mile, satisfaction is never guaranteed. Last year, Pinkwater Select founder Royce Pinkwater helped a pair of longtime clients buy Bruce Willis' apartment at the EI Dorado. After closing on the three-bedroom, though, her buyers realized it wasn't quite big enough, and so Ms. Pinkwater embarked on a search for an adjacent apartment they could purchase for a combo.
Eventually, she said, she managed to convince the owners of the unit directly below to sell on the condition that she find them another apartment in the EI Dorado, which she did. And everyone lived happily ever after...for a few months anyway.
Her clients, Ms. Pinkwater said, had purchased in the building to be closer to their children who were in school uptown at Columbia. "But it turns out the kids didn't want them to be that close," she said.
The apartments are currently being prepped to go back on the market. Her clients are headed to Chelsea .