NYC luxury real estate brokers reveal outrageous client demands

Yahoo

17 hours ago

If Bravo is to be believed, all it takes to sell the world's richest people the world's most expensive homes is pulling up in your Lambo, shaking hands and opening a bottle of Krug.
But there's a dark side to the glamor of closing deals that you won't see on TV, NYC brokers reveal.
'We're like a concierge service,' Peter Zaitzeff of Serhant told The Post. 'People want restaurant reservations. They want to know where to take their kids. We scrub toilets.'
A couple weeks ago, Brown Harris Stevens hotshot Lisa Simonsen had already wrapped her work for a client — selling him a roughly $10 million unit in one of the Upper East Side's 'good building' co-ops — when he called back up asking for more.
'He asked me to get them a last-minute reservation for 12 at Casa Tua,' said Simonsen of the Upper East Side private supper club, which is currently one of the city's toughest tables to book. 'He wanted it in the next two hours!'
The never-ending asks go well beyond mere favors, real estate marketeers kvetch.
In the hyper-competitive, high-end sales market, their ultra-entitled masters-of-the-universe clientele are used to getting their way — and they expect services normally reserved for domestic staff and expert specialists.
That means city brokers are routinely told to run for coffees, babysit and or walk dogs — while also acting as ersatz art advisors, interior designers, school consultants and even matchmakers. Those who dare say 'No' risk losing lucrative business.
'They are thinking, 'I just paid this person $10,000 for this rental. I want to make them work for it,''Zaitzeff said of clients.
Compass agent Vickey Barron recalled showing a loaded couple and their three young 'excitable' children apartments on the Upper West Side.
'They asked that someone on my team take their kids to Central Park. Over the next two and half hours, one sibling bit the other and the other wet his pants,' Barron told The Post. 'They were beyond wild. One climbed a tree and wouldn't come down. They were on some kind of adrenaline high. I thought I was going to lose my team member. Meanwhile, the mother had a meltdown.'
Nadine Hartstein of Bond has also been strong-armed into babysitting for clients.
'They were 12 and 13, very privileged, extremely wealthy, but extremely sheltered children,' said Hartstein of the offspring of a foreign buyer she dealt with. 'The mother said her kids should have American friends, and, the next thing I know, they are with my kids trick-or-treating. We had to take them to a house of horrors and then the mother made reservations for her kids to have dinner with us the next night. At least I have kids, otherwise it would have been even worse for me.'
Pets are another pressure point, according to Barron, who said sellers are often reluctant to remove pets for showings.
'I felt like a dog walker, but for a cat,' she said. 'The client says, 'I have these cats and one cat is wild, and he will freak out and escape. You have to make sure that my cat is safe.''
The moment the door opened for a showing, Barron recalled, the cat ran for it — making it out the door and into an open elevator about to go downstairs. After a building-wide search, she found the flighty feline in an apartment whose door was cracked; the cat was under a bed, hair raised and scratching for its life.
'I'm allergic to cats,' she said. 'And this was an ongoing issue. I was like, 'Where's my Benadryl?''
But even Barron has limits.
She spent three hours cleaning a client's apartment to get it ready for a photo shoot. But when the woman told Barron she better come back early before the shoot to re-clean her kitchen, the broker snapped.
'I looked at her and I said, 'It will look exactly like this to the T when I get here. Do not think that I'm going to get here early and do this all over again.' I had to set an expectation,' she said.
Nevertheless, most brokers agree that going the extra mile pays dividends.
'Nothing is beneath me,' said Zaitzeff. 'I tell people that we scrub toilets for a living part-time.'
He says he learned how to suck it up and provide service, no matter how demeaning, from Douglas Elliman's Madeline Hult Elghanayan, the real-estate broker wife of billionaire developer and TF Cornerstone chairman Tom Elghanayan.
'She's married to one of the wealthiest people in New York City — and we would do open houses and she'd be there scrubbing the floors,' Zaitzeff says.
So when difficult clients make outrageous asks — whether it's leveraging his Rolodex to get a client into an exclusive club or fixing their john — Zaitzeff said he's always down to help, because when they want to sell in a few years, he knows who they are going to call.
Still, that economy of reciprocity is also ripe for abuse.
'It's extortion,' says Vincent Pergola of the boutique real estate brokerage Elegran.
This month, with a deal hanging in the balance, the scion of a wealthy family that invests in properties across Manhattan asked Pergola to arrange what sounded like a celebratory business dinner.
'We secured a record-high rent for one of their units, and there was a chance the renter might also purchase the apartment — potentially resulting in two commissions. The client said, 'If you pull that off, you owe me dinner,'' says Pergola. 'I'm like, 'Absolutely, I would love to do that, anywhere you want to go. It's on me.''
But then the conversation took a strange turn: 'He texted me and said, 'Hey, instead of dinner buy me these $550 headphones,'' Pergola said. 'And I was like 'Sure — if the sale goes through.' He responded with outrage.'