Priced to Sell
BY NAOMI NOVIK
“I’m over getting offended,” the vampire said despondently. “I just want to stop wasting my time. If the board isn’t going to let me in, I don’t care how much they smile and how polite they are. I’d rather they just tell me up front there’s no chance.”
“I know, it’s terrible,” Jennifer said. No co-op board was going to say anything like that, of course; it was asking for a Fair Housing lawsuit. “Have you thought about a townhouse?”
“Yeah, sure, because of course I’ve got a trust fund built on long-term compound interest,” he said bitterly. “I’m only fifty-four.”
He didn’t look a day over twenty-five, with that stylish look vampires got if they didn’t feed that often—pale and glamorous and hungry—staring into his Starbucks like it was nowhere near what he actually wanted. Jennifer wasn’t too surprised he was getting turned down. Right now she was feeling pretty excellent about the garlic salt she’d put on the quick slice of pizza that had been lunch.
“Well,” Jennifer said, “maybe a property in Brooklyn?”
“Brooklyn?” the vampire said, like she’d suggested a beach vacation in Florida.
It took him five minutes wrapping up to leave the café: coat, gloves, hat, veil, scarf, and a cape over all that; Jennifer was so not envying him the rush-hour subway ride home on the Lexington Avenue line.
She walked the five blocks uptown and poked her head into Doug’s office to report. The vampire had been bounced over to their team from a broker at Black Thomas Phillips, with blessings, after getting rejected by a second co-op board.
“Try him on some of the new condo developments, where the developer is still controlling the building,” Doug said. “What’s his budget?”
“A million two,” Jennifer said.
“And he wants a three bedroom?” Doug said. She winced and nodded. “Not a chance. Show him some convertible twos and see if the amenities make him happy.”
“I was thinking maybe if we could shake something loose in the Victorian, on Seventy-sixth?” she said. “I could send around postcards to the current owners.”
“Keep it in your back pocket, but I wouldn’t start there,” Doug said. “The board there won’t mind he’s a vampire, but they’ll mind that he’s less than a hundred years old.”
Tom knocked on the door and looked in. “Doug, sorry to interrupt, but you’ve got that two-fifteen with the new client at their place on Thirty-second and First.”
Doug didn’t really know the building; it was a rental, and not a good one: near the Midtown Tunnel traffic, no views, and only an aggressive goblin minding the door, who scowled when Doug asked for 6B. “Six B?”
“Yes?” Doug said.
“You … friend?” the goblin asked, even more suspiciously.
“He’s expecting me,” Doug said diplomatically: Some tenants didn’t want their landlord knowing they were apartment hunting.
Unbelievably, the goblin went ahead and poked a foot at the watchcat sleeping under the front hall table. It raised its head and sniffed at Doug and said in a disgruntled voice, “What do you want from me, it’s just a real estate broker.”
“Broker?” the goblin said, brightening. “Broker, huh? He moving?”
“You’d have to ask him,” Doug said, but that wasn’t a good sign. Bad landlord references could sink a board application quicker than vampirism. He was starting to get doubts about the client anyway. Anyone who really had a $3-million budget, living here?
The IKEA furniture filling the apartment didn’t give him a lot of added confidence, but the client said, “Oh, it’s … it’s in a trust fund,” blinking at him myopically from behind small, thick-glassed, round John Lennon specs. Henry Kell didn’t seem like a candidate to piss off goblins: He was a skinny five foot six and talked softly enough that Doug had to lean forward to hear him. “I don’t like to spend it, and … and I don’t have very many needs, you know. Only … well … I think it would be best if, if we had our own property, and I think he’s come around to the notion.”
“Okay, so we’re looking for a place for you and your … partner?” Doug said. “Should I meet him, too?”
“Er,” Mr. Kell said. He took his glasses off and wiped them with a cloth. “You very likely will, at some point, I would expect. But perhaps we could begin just the two of us?”
Kell didn’t care about prewar or postwar, didn’t care about a view. “Although I would prefer,” he said, “not to look directly into other apartments”—and only shrugged when Doug asked about neighborhoods.
“Okay,” Doug said, giving up. He figured he was going to have to take Kell around a little to get some sense of the guy’s taste. “I can show you some places tomorrow, if you have time?”
“That would be splendid,” Kell said, and the next morning he set Doug’s new personal-best record by walking into the first place he was shown, looking around for a total of ten minutes, and coming back to say he’d take it for the asking price.
Not that Doug had a deep aversion to getting paid more for less work, but he felt like he wasn’t doing his job. “Are you sure you don’t want to see anything else?” he said. “Honestly—the ask here is a little high, the place has only been on the market a week.”
“No, I…” Kell said, “I think I would prefer, really, to tie everything up as quickly as possible. The apartment is quite excellent.”
Not a lot of people would have called it that: It was an estate sale, the kitchen and the bathrooms were original, and the late owner had committed crimes against architecture with a pile of ugly built-ins. But nobody could deny it met Kell’s criteria for privacy—three rooms facing into blank walls, another one into a courtyard, and the bedroom had a little slice of a view into Riverside Park. The neighborhood was quiet—the elves at Riverside kept it that way—and it was a condo.
“How soon can we sign a contract?” Kell asked.
“I’ll get your lawyer in touch with the seller’s lawyer,” Doug said, and called Tom to cancel the rest of the viewings, shrugging a little helplessly to himself.
“Wow,” Tom said, when Doug got back into the office.
“Yeah, that was really something,” Doug said. “I think I get bragging rights for easiest commission ever made on this one. How did it go at Tudor City?”
Tom shook his head glumly. The Tudor City apartment was a beautiful place—view of the UN, formal dining room and two bedrooms, renovated kitchen, new subway-tile bathrooms, and priced to move. Unfortunately, it had come on the market as part of a divorce settlement, and before moving out the owners had gotten into a knock-down, drag-out screaming fight that had ended in dueling curses in the living room.
People weren’t even getting to the master suite. They came in, stuck their heads into the big entry closet, walked into the living room, saw the long wall swarming over with huge black bugs, and turned around and went right out. Sometimes they screamed, even though Doug always warned their brokers beforehand. But it was a tough market right now, and no one wanted to give up a chance for a sale.
The potential buyer this afternoon hadn’t screamed: She was a herpetologist, and Tom had really thought that was going to be perfect. He’d pitched it to her as free food supply for her snakes. “But apparently they don’t eat beetles,” he said.
“Well, you win some, you lose some,” Doug said. “Let’s see if we can get the clients to put up the fee for another eradicator. It’s breaking my heart to see that place list for half a million under market.”
The real estate market in Manhattan was always an adventure: everyone wanted to live somewhere in the city. The elves fought tooth and nail with Wall Street wizards over Gramercy Park townhouses and Fifth Avenue co-ops; developers tried to pry brownies out of abandoned industrial buildings in Greenwich Village so they could build loft conversions for rock stars and advertising execs; college students squeezed in four to a one-bedroom with actors and alchemists trying for their big break.