No, the Broker Doesn’t Come With the Apartment

Real-estate agents are posing in listing photos, promoting themselves along with the units. Seen in this listing photo, Kelly Killoren Bensimon shows dog owners what it could be like to live in this Centre Street apartment with dark wood door frames. Photo: Douglas Elliman Seen in this listing photo, Kelly Killoren Bensimon shows dog owners what it could be like to live in this Centre Street apartment with dark wood door frames. Photo: Douglas Elliman The fourth-floor one-bedroom at 130 Eighth Avenue in Park Slope is lovely, although not all that distinct from others on the market. The listing photos show chocolate-hued parquet floors and a galley kitchen with ample workspace, plus a generous living area drenched in warm morning light. But what browsing buyers might remember most is not the backsplash or the built-ins but another accessory entirely: the listing agent, Compass’s Michaela Morton, reclining peacefully on the living room’s windowsill in a flowy lavender dress, her bare feet stretched out along the ledge. “Someone looking at a listing is imagining a life,” Morton, who is also an actress, tells me. “Things that are empty or sterile don’t do that, and that, I think, is a missed opportunity.” Compass’s Michaela Morton stretches out on the windowsill of an apartment she is selling in Park Slope. Photo: Andrew Brincka/DDreps Catching sight of real-estate agents in listing photos long felt like blatant sloppiness or, less often, a bizarre Easter egg. Yet in recent months, brokers have popped up in apartment photos that would in the past have been filled only with furniture or, on occasion, a well-placed dog. Scroll beyond the kitchen and treetop views at a two-bedroom in the South Slope, and there’s Compass’s Matt Kirby-Smith, seated in jeans on a couch against the exposed-brick wall, looking right at the camera. For a studio at 5 Tudor City Place, a photo features the agent, Becki Danchik of Christie’s International, at one of the café tables dropped outside the building’s awning, with her dog, Bijou, at her feet. “I thought it was a nice way to not just show the apartment but, like, a little bit of the lifestyle that comes along with living there,” says Danchik, who herself lives nearby. All of this flouts the conventional wisdom that prospective renters or buyers need a blank slate — albeit a decently furnished, or at least virtually furnished, one — to envision what they would do there. As Kelly Killoren Bensimon, of The Real Housewives of New York City and Douglas Elliman, once told Architectural Digest, listing agents instruct sellers to stash their family photos and creepy doll collections because “potential buyers don’t want to go down memory lane with you.” That said, Killoren Bensimon isn’t necessarily against putting herself in the scene: At 240 Centre Street, where she’s been the sales-side broker for a number of apartments (including her own), she’s popped up in quite a few listing photos over the years, crossing the building’s communal English garden and standing next to a dining table. She had one listing for a nearly $3 million two-bedroom that led with a photo of herself leaning against the bedroom doorframe, holding a fluffy dog. “I consider myself a value-add to the image,” she says. “Sometimes it needs it, sometimes it doesn’t.” Becki Danchik and her dog, Bijou, gives would-be buyers a sense of the lifestyle in Tudor City. Photo: Jonathan Grassi Is this the creeping of influencer-reality-television culture into the brokerage world? Agents are already taking us on video tours that highlight park views and prewar moldings. What’s the difference between that and throwing a photo of yourself in the actual listing carousel? “It’s a separation of church and state,” says Serhant’s Peter Zaitzeff, who posts apartment tours of his multimillion-dollar listings to his Instagram and stars in Owning Manhattan but doesn’t inject himself into the pictures. The social-media side of it all is “fun marketing,” but actual listing photos should be seen as part of the business transaction. “We’re selling a home, not ourselves,” he explains. “You don’t come with a home.” Besides, with everyone on high alert for AI staging these days, would-be buyers sometimes see agents’ presence as evidence of ChatGPT chicanery. At least that’s what just about every friend and colleague of mine thought: “The woman screams AI-generated to me,” one friend said of Morton’s listing photo. (For the record, it wasn’t.) As seen in this listing photo, Matt Kirby-Smith shows how a buyer might unwind in a well-lit South Slope two-bedroom. Photo: Compass Morton, who is the lead agent for the Jane Advisory team, sees nothing wrong with it. It makes the job more “joyful,” she says, but it also conveys real information, like the fact that the windowsill at No. 130 is apparently really deep. “You can’t tell that unless there’s a person on it,” she says. It turns out her team has been at this for years, showing potential buyers that they, too, can be playing doubles ping-pong in a Central Park West four-bedroom or hanging on a backyard-garden sculpture of a Prospect Heights townhouse. The strategy apparently works, too: Morton says No. 130 got 17 groups touring the space over the weekend and is going to a best-and-final offer showdown today. No, the Broker Doesn’t Come With the Apartment Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.