Brokers. It’s like a code word. Whispered quietly (or maybe not so quietly) among the brave New Yorkers who must navigate a system built on power, prestige and money – just for a place to call home. “Who is your broker?” “Are they good?” “Did they bleed you dry?”
Maybe you’re calling your mom, grandpa, or close friend, and they pause you mid-conversation to ask, “what the hell is a broker? What did they break?” Just your heart, soul, and bank account, you think, as you gear up to explain this system, that somehow, even with immense googling, doesn’t seem to have clear origins.
The keeper of keys, or honestly, the gatekeeper of homes. One showing and application later, you’re out $4,500 on the broker fee alone, 15% of your monthly rent, maybe more, if you’re not living in a one-room studio apartment, where work, sleep, and yoga all happen in 300 square feet.
Sure, maybe the millionaires and billionaires on Park Ave and Madison Ave have no qualms frolicking through the real estate market eyes peeled for their perfect penthouse or brownstone to spend just a drop of their massive fortune, but for the rest of us, each dollar matters.
We painstakingly calculate backwards 40x our income, what can we really afford? And then add in first month’s rent, security deposit, and the bloody broker fee. For a studio apartment at $2,500, that’ll run you close to $10,000 that you have to have…in cold, hard cash. Sure, there’s always the option of no-fee apartments, often priced higher, because they know you’ll pay to avoid even more broker fees. But let’s be real, for most of us, where is $10,000 coming from at a moment’s notice? That’s months and months, maybe years of hard work to save.
We’ve been told, money gives you freedom. But let’s think about that critically, and tell ourselves the cold hard truth, that money can give you freedom, but more often than not, other factors, like race, ethnicity, religion, and any other lived experiences that can be perceived in-person and on paper, slowly close all the doors we’ve been promised.
I’m looking at you – New York brokers. The implicit biases, the internalized racism, the upholding of white supremacy, honestly, the list could go on and on. The random reasons that someone’s application might be placed in the discard pile, the entire process is unjust, unfair, inequitable, all the words that one might use to describe a system held up by a few in power.
Recently, I visited a rent-stabilized unit on the Upper West Side, hoping to get a glimpse at one of the infamous apartments where how much your rent can actually increase per year is controlled. Even these apartments, meant to give some semblance of affordable housing came with a hefty broker fee of 15% the annual rent, and GASP, had other prospective tenants clamoring amongst each other to offer an even higher broker fee in hopes of laying claim to the apartment. I walked away dejectedly, already visualizing my application at the bottom of the pile.
So what’s the answer? More affordable housing? Better policies on rent control? Stronger tenant protections? Check. Check. Check. But maybe one area that people never talk about, that somehow slides under the radar, or maybe because they are too afraid too, are the brokers of New York. Maybe, we need to be asking ourselves how in the world, in a city of almost 8.5 million people, did we allow 49,317 brokers to control us and our housing.
Erica Chung 