Invoice line reads only fee as tenant pays 9400 dollars for a hallway, a code, and a sentence about the light
Manhattan Broker Charges 15 Percent Fee for Apartment He Has Never Seen and Cannot Locate
NEW YORK – A Manhattan real estate broker collected a $9,400 fee Thursday for facilitating the rental of an apartment he has never visited, cannot describe, and, when pressed by reporters, could not locate on a map, in a transaction industry observers called “unremarkable” and “Tuesday.”
The broker, Chad Wexler-Grimaldi of the firm Wexler Grimaldi Exclusive Living, earned the fee, equal to 15 percent of the annual rent, for services that a detailed reconstruction shows consisted of unlocking a door, standing in a hallway checking his phone, and saying the words “it gets great light,” a statement issued facing away from the apartment, which faces an air shaft.
Anatomy of a Fee
The tenant, speech pathologist Dana Okonkwo, 31, documented the entire transaction. She found the listing herself, on a website, using her own phone. She requested the viewing herself. She researched the building herself, discovering the pending facade work and the storied history of the boiler. At the fifteen-minute viewing, she asked the broker three questions, receiving, in order: “great question,” “the landlord handles that,” and “great question.”
“Then he sent me an invoice for $9,400,” Okonkwo said. “For fee. That is what the line item says. Fee. Not fee for something. Just fee, the way a toll booth doesn’t explain the bridge. I asked what the fee was for and he said it was the standard fee. I asked what the standard was based on and he said the fee. We went around like this for a while. It was like interviewing fog. Fog with a Patagonia vest.”
Wexler-Grimaldi, reached at a coffee shop where he was “showing remotely,” defended the charge with the practiced calm of a man who has never once lost this argument in eleven years. “People misunderstand what they are paying for,” he said. “They think they are paying for the apartment. The landlord provides the apartment. They are paying for access. I am the access. Could she have gotten the apartment without me? Physically, yes. The listing was public. The lockbox code was in the email. But then who unlocks the door? Who says the thing about the light? There is a value chain here, and I am the chain.”
The Economics of the Middle
A study released this month by the Institute for Rental Market Analysis quantified the broker fee economy, finding that New York tenants pay an estimated $700 million annually in fees for apartments the brokers were, in 68 percent of cases, “seeing for the first time alongside the tenant,” and in 11 percent of cases, “not present for at all, having sent a code and a thumbs up.” The study identified the sector’s core innovation as “the monetized doorway,” a business model it notes exists at scale in no other American city, “because no other American city would stand for it, and this one queues for it.”
Efforts to reform the system have followed a stable cycle, extensively chronicled in local coverage including at THE CITY and Gothamist: a rule shifting fees to landlords is proposed, the industry warns of chaos, the rule advances, rents rise by an amount closely resembling the fee, and the fee, like groundwater, finds its way back. One housing economist, asked to model a New York rental market with no intermediary extraction whatsoever, declined, saying the model “would not converge, and neither would my colleagues.”
Tenants Adapt
Renters, for their part, have developed folk expertise. Okonkwo’s viewing checklist, shared 40,000 times since she posted it, includes: run every faucet, check the cell signal in the back room, ask the neighbor in the hallway one open-ended question, and “assume the broker’s every sentence is weather from a different city.” A companion glossary translates listing language, defining “cozy” as “you will touch both walls,” “charming” as “the floor has opinions,” “sun-drenched” as “one hour, in June, reflected off a Duane Reade,” and “steps from the train” as true, “in the sense that all locations on Earth are steps from the train, given steps.”
The city’s tabloid press has covered the fee wars for decades with gusto, the New York Post maintaining what amounts to a standing broker-outrage beat, while the international satirical press watches with anthropological fascination, The London Prat noting that even London letting agents, “the villains of a nation,” blush at 15 percent, and the market-absurdity desk at Bohiney Magazine inducting the phrase “it gets great light” into its permanent archive of sentences that have moved more money than most banks.
Closing the Deal
Okonkwo paid the fee. This is the part of the story, she notes, that non-New Yorkers never understand and New Yorkers never question. “There were nine other applications behind me,” she said. “The open house was a coronation. You do not negotiate with the fee. The fee predates us. The fee will outlast us. You pay the fee, you get the keys, and you begin your new life, poorer and home.”
As of press time, Wexler-Grimaldi had listed the apartment across the airshaft, described in the new listing as “rarely available,” which is technically true of all apartments, at all times, until they are available, and the listing had, within four hours, 61 inquiries, a line out the lobby, and great light.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/