Just How Far Will a Broker Go to Close a Deal?

Texting from the operating room, scouring graveyards, and other extreme measures. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Courtesy of Mary-Jean Gianquinto Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Courtesy of Mary-Jean Gianquinto There’s something amorphous about real-estate agents’ work. Sure, their job exists to help you buy, rent, or sell a property, and in exchange they get a cut of the proceeds (and, if things go exceptionally, a role on a reality-TV series or advertising med spas on TikTok). But, as any broker will gladly tell you, they’re also apartment-staging directors, unpaid therapists, chauffeurs, and much more. Some end up working as part-time dog walkers, babysitters, house cleaners, or reservationists, all in pursuit of a happy client and a closed deal. “It’s extortion,” one agent told the New York Post last year, describing the amount of attention sellers sometimes demand. Which, of course, gets at the issue of boundaries on the job or the lack thereof; one friend told me about his real-estate-agent sister, who apparently sold a $3 million home from a hospital bed while in labor. An hour after she landed the sale, he said, “a baby was yanked out of her.” Ask real-estate agents about just how far they’ve gone for a sale, and the stories pour out. What these conversations largely reveal is that if a deal is on the line, “just about anything” isn’t an exaggeration for what they’ll do. No ask is too demeaning, no self-sabotaging client too difficult. “Us real estate agents, we’re nuts,” Ashley Reidy Quinn, an agent with Coldwell Banker Warburg, tells me. Mary-Jean Gianquinto, Corcoran “I was representing buyers for a townhouse in Carroll Gardens. The owner, who had passed away, probably had been in his 90s. Two weeks before the closing, the title report came back with an issue. The deceased seller’s parents’ names were still on the deed. These people would have been over 130 years old. I explained to the listing agent and the title company that the parents are clearly deceased, or else they are vampires — but the title would not clear without proof of their deaths, and no one could find the death certificates. It was newly post-COVID, so you could not go to the Health Department for a copy. You had to order the death certificates online, if you’d ever get them. “The listing agent and I decided to go to St. John Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, and take a photo of the gravesite. It was gray, misty — creepy, almost like a movie set. We went to the main office and explained the situation and they gave us a map and said, ‘This is where they are.’ We found it, took a photo, and sent it to the title company, which they accepted as proof of death. “My buyers backed out three days before the closing, but that’s another story.” Justine Lee-Mills, Corcoran “I’ve shown homes where there were squatters with a meth-y situation. Once I opened a freezer and found a dead cat. But I was selling a townhouse in Bed-Stuy that went for like $800,000 back in 2015, and what nobody mentioned was that the sellers were going through a divorce and had apparently decided the best move was to leave their entire life in the front yard. I show up one day, and the whole front patio, gate to door, looks like a yard sale hit by a tornado. Clothes, books, their tax returns, everything. I still don’t know if they had one final fight or just collectively said ‘not it’ and walked away, but either way, I inherited the debris field. It was like becoming a mom for the first time: ‘I’m in charge of this? Oh shit.’ “I called my best friend, and we started shredding anything with a social-security number on it, and pretty soon we’ve turned the stoop into a full retail operation. People are just materializing out of nowhere. Plates: gone. Books: gone. A truly staggering amount of mystery boxes: gone. We cleared that yard. “Three or four hours in, we are sweating through our clothes, and we find two lone beers sitting in the otherwise empty fridge. We decide this is a sign that we’ve earned a victory lap. We sit down on the porch and take one sip. Then cops appear and issue us open-container tickets. $100 each. Nothing humbles you like getting ticketed for drinking a stranger’s abandoned beer on the porch of a house you don’t own. Jessica Swersey, Compass “I have a listing in Vinegar Hill, and it’s a fourth-floor, one-bedroom condo, an $850,000 listing. It was the first open house, and I had left a sticky note at the front with the instructions for people to text me when they arrive. A group texts me they’re here, so I hop in the elevator to go down, and it stops moving. I really didn’t have much signal in there, but I can call 911 without service and the Fire Department said ‘Great, we’re on our way.’ “Meanwhile, these buyers are probably like, ‘What happened to you?’ so I’m moving around the elevator cab, trying to find a sliver of service, and then I do and get a million texts, like ‘Hello? Are you there? What happened to you?’ I text them, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m stuck in the elevator.’ I didn’t want to lose the traffic and tracking of the people we had coming through, so I tell them, ‘I did leave the apartment door unlocked, so if you can get into the building, feel free to bring your clients through and make sure they see the apartment.’ I was like, ‘There’s a great rooftop, there’s a great deeded storage downstairs.’ I’m trying not to hyperventilate that I’m trapped in this elevator, and I’m walking them through the listing, giving them all the details and trying to still get it sold. They didn’t buy the apartment, but I’m glad I got them through so I could at least tell the owner people did come to the open house.” Veronique Perrin, Coldwell Banker Warburg “A few years ago, I was representing the sellers for a two-bedroom, two-bath co-op in prime Carnegie Hill. We had a best-and-final going, and there was a lot of back-and-forth to make that happen. At the same time, I was having some serious health issues and was scheduled to undergo a bronchoscopy at Mt. Sinai. They have you on that table, quote-unquote ready to go, but then you sit there for, like, 30 minutes. They had taken my phone away earlier, but I had my daughter get it back so I could negotiate, text, and send emails. I got busted, and the anesthesiologist got very upset with me, but a girl’s got to do what girl’s got to do. I surrendered the phone again and went down hoping he would wake me up. I could barely breathe when I came to, but I went right back to it. I got almost $200,000 above ask — I think it was right under $2 million.” Ashley Reidy Quinn, Coldwell Banker Warburg “I had a final walk-through for a townhouse closing in Carroll Gardens a few weeks after giving birth to my daughter in July 2024. At the time, my business partner was on a long-planned two-week trip to Alaska and our administrative coordinator was in the process of relocating out of state. Rather than postpone or compromise the transaction, I packed my breast pump, cooler, and ice packs and headed to Brooklyn. “The home was a four-story carriage house that was converted with a center staircase, but I had not yet been medically cleared to climb stairs. So I remained on the ground floor, sitting on an ice pack and walking the buyer through the property remotely. I also had mastitis and a fever, so I had to step away every hour and a half to pump. It was a fairly easy walk-through, but it was long because the buyer wanted to take measurements and photos. They wanted to chat, and I was like, ‘I want to go home.’ It was August, and the A/C was kicking in, so the buyer’s broker left early because she was ‘cold and tired’ — and she left her client with me to ensure every question was answered and every detail addressed. At the closing, the attorney congratulated me, and the sellers were like, ‘You just gave birth and didn’t tell us?’” MaryElizabeth Smith, Corcoran “Last year, we had a client who was lovely but going through a challenging time in his life and showed up to his own open houses drunk. We give very specific instructions to our clients: ‘We need you to not be present because buyers don’t feel comfortable.’ The first open house went well, but then at the second he was present and obviously inebriated and I couldn’t get him to leave. Buyers could not wait to get out that door. I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re killing me here.’ “The next one, he was gone at first, but then he returned literally blackout drunk. He was talking to the buyers — very, very inebriated — and I had a potential sale going on. So I said, ‘Let’s go, I want to talk to you,’ and I walked him to the elevator. The condo was in a multi-unit building in Downtown Brooklyn with 20-plus floors. I put him in the elevator and just hit every button, all the numbers. I had a huge amount of compassion for him, but it was the only solution I could think of, and the goal was to get that apartment sold. They paid $1.128 million.” Just How Far Will a Broker Go to Close a Deal? Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.