You wouldn’t buy a pair a shoes without trying them on, so why would you buy an apartment in New York without eating Chinese food in the kitchen at least once? Oh, because you have too much money and making your real-estate broker’s experience as painful as possible is pretty much what you’re paying them for.
“I had a celebrity client who insisted on eating dinner in every apartment he liked so he could imagine what it would feel like to live there,” recalls top agent Michelle Kleier. “He would make me call each owner and ask them to be out of their apartment. Then we’d head over, order in takeout and sit at the kitchen table. We did that at least 20 times.”
Don’t worry, it’s just as easy to torture your broker when you’re trying to sell. The easiest way, we’d imagine, would be to adamantly refuse to hide your collection of penis statues when the house is being shown.
At a prewar apartment on the Upper East Side, one client refused to take down his pornographic artwork. “There was a lot of nudity and photographs of little boys,” says Ian Kleier, “not to mention two dozen sculptures of penises throughout the apartment. We had this incredible nine-room, prewar apartment to show, but people couldn’t even look at it.”
Two dozen phallic sculptures over nine rooms isn’t more than two or three per room and, come on, prewar. This is not what we call giving the hard sell.
Realty reality of big-$$ brokers in ritzy & risky NY [NYP]
Related: I Really Didn’t Need to See That [NYM]
