Chapter Ten
3:15 p.m.
Katie Battle rang the doorbell first, just to be safe, and then slipped the key into the lock. She enjoyed a mental sigh of relief when she felt the familiar tumble of the interior pins. She couldn’t count the number of times she had schlepped a client to a showing, only to learn that the seller had left the wrong keys with the doorman.
‘Hello?’ she called out through the cracked door. Another annoyance avoided; the sellers were out of the apartment, as promised. ‘So this one’s just over eleven hundred square feet, which means you could easily convert it to a two-bedroom.’
Her clients today were Don and Laura Jenning, who were looking to purchase their first New York City apartment. Some clients came to Katie with a sophisticated understanding of the market, formed through countless hours perusing the New York Times real estate section and the plethora of Web sites devoted exclusively to property listings.
The Jennings were not that type of client.
‘Wow,’ Laura said. ‘This is so much nicer than the other ones.’
‘I wanted you to see it, just to give you an idea of the difference it can make if you’re willing to stretch.’
Katie, of course, was not surprised that the apartment – a large one-bedroom condo just off of Madison Park – was more impressive than the six other properties she had already shown the Jennings earlier in the day. After all, the entire purpose of this day’s viewing tour was to lead them to this apartment. Today was what Katie called a We Can Do It tour.
Like many of her clients, the Jennings had leaped into the fluctuating New York City real estate market with unformed and unrealistic expectations. ‘We don’t really know what neighborhood we want to be in: downtown ideally, but the Upper West Side’s fine, too, or even the Upper East.’ Already, that first sentence from Laura had been a giveaway. To a person who considers downtown her ‘ideal’, the Upper East Side is definitely not fine. Either Laura didn’t know Manhattan – unlikely, given she’d been renting in Chelsea for six years – or she just wasn’t being honest about her preferences.
And then there was the budget. ‘We want to stay under 700. We’d love to get a two-bedroom, but know we may have to get by with a one-bedroom-plus to start.’
It was a so-called compromise that Katie heard all the time. The reality, though, was that a true ‘one-bedroom-plus’ – a one-bedroom with a separate space for an office or a crib – was the same square footage (and price) as a small two-bedroom. And neither could be had for anywhere near seven hundred thousand dollars, no matter what people heard about so-called bargains in the down market.
If Katie believed the Jennings’ budget cap to be real, she would not have wasted her time on a We Can Do It tour. She instead would have arranged a Come to Jesus tour. In a Come to Jesus tour, Katie would drag a couple like the Jennings to six nice (and, ideally, overpriced) two-bedroom apartments. When the clients finally realized they could not afford apartments of that size, she would lead them to a nice, reasonably priced one-bedroom. It would be time for the clients to Come to Jesus: either get into the market with a small place or rent for the rest of their lives.
But the Jennings didn’t need a Come to Jesus tour. They needed the We Can Do It tour, designed not to persuade the clients of what they could not afford, but instead to convince them of what they could afford.
Katie knew from the Jennings’ mortgage application that quiet, petite Don pulled in a quarter mil a year as a ‘director of credit risk policy’, whatever that was. Since shacking up with Laura, he was living month to month, but in the decade before he’d met her, he’d managed to save an entire year’s salary. Laura was a jewelry designer who sold her wares at open fairs and to a few small boutiques. Lucky, lucky Laura – whom Katie tried not to resent – had never made more than twenty thousand in any individual year from her craft, but had her father – and now, Don – to fall back on.
The Jennings could afford more than they knew. They just had to put away their existing notions of a dollar and to start thinking, We can do it.
Katie knew that this generously sized one-bedroom would be a good candidate for convincing the Jennings to ‘stretch’, as she liked to say, but the apartment was even more impressive than she had imagined. The seller had followed all of the rules: clean surfaces, no unnecessary clutter, even the welcoming fragrance of a warm pan of brownies, still cooling on the stovetop. And absolutely no photographs; the apartment should feel like it already belongs to the potential buyers.
‘Now this one’s one-point-one-two-five,’ Katie said, as if the extra four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was chump change, ‘but my guess is that there’s some softness there.’
Don winced at the number, but his wife did not. ‘Wow, Don, look at this kitchen. We could actually cook if we had this kind of kitchen. Think of the money we’d save in the long run.’
And then Katie knew she had an ally. Crossing the million-dollar threshold would be a leap for Don, but now Katie could see that Laura had been there all along. She felt a twinge of animosity toward the woman for so willingly spending her husband’s hard-earned money, but then reminded herself that she needed the commission. Given Katie’s standing in the hierarchy of her agency, it wasn’t often she had a shot at selling above the million-dollar mark.
‘Feel free to open the cabinets,’ Katie urged. ‘They’re Italian. High-gloss lacquer, top of the line.’
Katie checked her BlackBerry while the Jennings made their way through the apartment. She preferred to give buyers privacy so they could imagine life in their new apartment, without the watchful eye of a broker, but last year a couple posing as buyers made off with a hundred thousand dollars of jewelry and collectibles at various open houses across Manhattan. Now Katie kept one eye on her clients, even while she read her e-mail.
She could have used some good news. Instead, the incoming messages brought her more headaches with no corresponding revenue. The purchaser of a Tribeca studio under contract was bickering over a hundred-dollar difference in the negotiations over a built-in wall unit. Katie used her thumbs to type her most comforting words, even as she rolled her eyes in frustration.
Another e-mail delivered far worse news on the business front: a client who had been on the fence about making an offer for a West Village one-bedroom had climbed down on the wrong side. That he delivered the news to her electronically was not a good sign. On the phone, she had a chance of persuading him otherwise, or at least lining up the next showings. A terse e-mail like this one told her that the guy had written off not only this particular apartment, but his commitment to purchasing anything at all.
The message she received from Marj Mason, a caretaker at Glen Forrest Communities, was even more upsetting. Katie had seen the assisted living center’s telephone number pop up on her vibrating BlackBerry as she had stepped into the elevator with the Jennings. As Katie had requested a few months earlier, Marj had followed up with an e-mail. It was easier for her to check written messages than voice mails when she was with clients.
Katie’s mother had fallen again. According to Marj, there were no breaks this time – only bruises, and of course even more fear now of walking on her own. There was no way around it: Katie was going to have to increase the intensity of her mother’s care.
And then there was the final message: a text message that Katie
