New York Values #22 - Airbnb

Airbnb is a polarizing service. I myself fall on both sides of the aisle depending on when you ask. At its core, I love the idea of being able to rent a room in someone’s home here rather than pay $80+ for a shady hostel bed or $200+ for a motel near LaGuardia airport. Or rent a whole apartment for friends rather than two double beds, again at exorbitant prices. And there’s the added benefit of getting more of the culture/architecture/feel for a place than if you stayed in a chain hotel. I’ve also used the site to long-term sublet my apartment when I traveled (with my landlord’s permission), and to rent the second bedroom when I was between roommates. 

However, I hate their interface, especially for hosting. I hate their customer service (or lack thereof). And it sucks if you accidentally rent to someone who doesn’t understand how it works and rates you 4 stars instead of 5 because “this is clearly someone’s home.” Yes, yes it is. It’s in my description. That’s how Airbnb works. Or how it initially worked, before people started taking advantage of the system. 

The New York value here is that it is still easy to find an apartment or room in NYC to rent on Airbnb for a relatively cheap price. Regardless of the legality of the tenant’s or owner’s listing, as a consumer you can access this city for less than a quarter of prior costs. When I came to NY as a high school or college student I slept on floors, under desks, or not at all, depending on people’s availability. My friends and I could not afford a hotel room, and many hotels won’t rent to 18 year olds. Now? You have options, guys. It makes the gap between apartments easier, too! If you have a lease ending and a few days before the next one starts, you can just Airbnb a cheap spot while you put your furniture (if applicable) in storage somewhere. Good job, Airbnb. You may not be perfect, but you get some things right. 

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I was supposed to write about sellers in a soft market this week, but I want to write more about Airbnb instead. Dear sellers, I promise to get back to you next week. Lo siento. Don’t list in the interim. 

New York’s city council recently voted unanimously to require room-renting sites like Airbnb to supply exact addresses and personal information about their hosts (full names, whether they rent or own). The justification for this is that people are gaming the system, worsening our existing dearth of affordable housing. There are legitimate concerns surrounding “ghost apartments” and apartments being used solely for Airbnb rentals, so at face value you can make this argument. However, the hotel lobby has a lot of power in NYC, and has donated extensively to city councilman-and-womans’ campaigns. This makes it hard to separate how much of the recent measure is to protect “the people” and how much is aimed at protecting corporate interests. 

Because my relationship with my landlord is not the best (read: he’s letting the building fall apart around me), I’ve been careful to stay within the legal confines of my lease. However, most Airbnb hosts do not. Most new leases in the city involve riders that prohibit any and all Airbnb activity. There are some reasons for this that make sense. While I was careful to make sure anyone who would share my space was respectful, not everyone is so discerning. And if you live in a building where your neighbors are constantly Airbnb-ing to loud, obnoxious guests, I totally understand how that would be frustrating. Getting onto multiple leases solely for the purpose of making them into Airbnb’s and earring a profit isn’t really fair, as you aren’t taking on any of the responsibility that your landlord does, and you don’t pay for maintenance. It’s definitely unfair to make a profit off an income-restricted or rent-stabilized/controlled apartment, as you should be bound by the same limitations in price as the landlord. I was careful never to earn more than my actual rent when I was subletting. 

However, renting out the other room in your apartment — for a portion of the rent rather than a massive profit — if you are between roommates should not, in my mind, be prohibited. People move out and leave the city unexpectedly all the time, and you can’t always find another roommate with short notice, especially one with whom you feel safe. It's incredibly stressful to share your space with someone who terrifies you, and it's also stressful to suddenly pay double because someone up and bailed on you. It's usually not even possible, causing you to fall behind on payments. 

My moral qualms aren't the only reasons that people are unhappy with this proposed law.  Multiple lawsuits have already been filed challenging the decision. Airbnb is obviously angry about it, but the second is a private citizen who rents out a portion of his two-family home using Airbnb. That is completely legal, as he is not bound by . However, after he testified about his opposition to the bill, since he sees it as an invasion of privacy (and I'm inclined to agree), he claims that city officials with Special Enforcement have been actively intimidating and harassing him. This ties back into the theory that our city council is in the hotel lobby's pocket. I can't say 100% either way, but I hate lobbies, so I'll let you guess where my bias falls. 

I don't know what will end up happening, whether the challenges will result in a change or, if not, how the enacted law will affect short-term rentals in the city even more than the "Airbnb lease riders" already have. My hope is that, even if this does go through, people who rent out a portion of their space responsibly are able to continue to do so, for the good of both hosts and travelers.

Thanks for reading,

xoxo

Anna

Meta Monday - Six Months

I’ve now been doing this for six months. Six months at Compass, six months of betting on myself and committing, running my own real estate business, “branding,” six months of commission-only income. 90% of agents in NY quit within their first year, and based on how well this is going, I’m happy to say I think I’m in the 10% that stay.

I’d like to give a huge shoutout to Joe & Kelly, my senior brokers who took a massive chance on me and helped me reach a point that would have taken years without their guidance. A shoutout to my fellow junior broker, Jane, who lets me ask her a million stupid questions a day, my whole 4th floor row for being so kind and helpful and informative. 

It hasn’t been perfect, but I’ve always learned from my mistakes and avoided making the same one twice. These past six months have held more victories than failings, although the latter can be found in healthy doses. I can pay my rent with my income (for now); I have hit my CGI benchmarks; I have made a website and continued to write and feed my creative side. So the next logical step has to be taken, and I need to work harder, smarter, and level up my business. 

So maybe there will be fewer pictures of me in front of garbage?

There are some things that have been hard for me in this first half a year. Fake it ’til you make it has never been my strong suit, since I overthink everything and have anxiety, but now I have gone through most of my first summer rental market, gotten a buyer most of the way through the home buying process, launched a building, brought in a seller, and overall just tried to absorb as much information as I could from every corner of the office and real estate world. I would still never call myself an expert by any means, but I’m going to take a page out of the white-boy book of confidence and say I can at least be enough of an advisor to know what I know, and what I need to outsource to someone more learned than myself. 

It was hard to feel like an advisor when I had only done this for a few weeks, but now I feel comfortable fielding random questions from friends and strangers alike.

It was hard to justify purchasing a work wardrobe and dressing up when I wasn’t sure I’d last and was spending most of my time sweating my ass off showing walk-ups, but now it seems like a reasonable expense and aesthetic. 

It was hard to justify writing as more than self-serving, but I am getting better at figuring out my voice and content that is actually useful to people. 

JK I won't change that much.

So it’s not really a rebrand, just a glow up. I still very much believe in #trashless, and am doubling-down on my commitment to client services. That’s a large portion of my background — working for exceptionally demanding bosses and customers — and it feels incredibly natural to me to answer texts or calls from stressed-out buyers in the middle of the night. I still believe in and want to retain my enthusiasm and approachability, just need to elevate my brand to the point where you’d refer me your boss instead of just your bestie. I won’t lose my voice, but I’ll commit to more helpful content on top of the complaints about the train and exhaustion.

I have so much love for all of you who read this. I hope you enjoy whatever amount of my journey you follow along with, and just know I wouldn’t be able to do it without you.

Yeah, this is sappy, but it’s honest. So cheers to another amazing six months. 

xoxo

Anna

New York Values #21 - Buyers' Market

Today’s New York Value is inspired, as usual, by a combination of real life events and an article I read, and it’s all about buyers!

Yesterday I submitted a board package for my FIRST sales deal (all 350 pages of it), which is equal parts exciting and terrifying. Co-op boards are like the Wizard of Oz: no transparency, no peeking behind the curtain, simply an announcement of whether your client is granted an interview. If not, they don’t tell you why, and you’re left to dejectedly speculate. But I’m sure this will go well. My client is a gem. Positive thoughts, yo! The Secret! Tony Robbins! High Frequency! 

Then today we had our agent sales meeting, where frustrated listing agents talked about their strategies for price drops in a market where seemingly nothing is moving. The even more frustrating part is that buyers are not acting on this opportunity, but are still waiting for the floor to fall out, worried that mortgage rates are going up while the market may still drop lower. As one agent put it, the market is going through turbulence and buyers are strapping in, preparing for a crash. The turbulence isn’t actually a sign of a crash, however, but a market correction that was inevitable after the past years of rapid price increases. 

Where I keep all of my money

The value here is how much data is available in NY real estate, although not in real time (yet, but don’t worry, Compass is on it). You can run comps for any apartment or building, no matter how bizarre and unique. You can read endlessly about the new development being proposed or built, to predict how neighborhoods will look years down the road. Quarterly reports, The Real Deal, Brick Underground, broker spam (my spam is the best spam, though), no other market has quite as many resources or as much activity, or as much data about said activity, as this city. 

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The actual real estate value is related to this article in The Real Deal. Brokers have been telling buyers that it’s a buyers’ market for months. And it is. Just ask any seller or listing agent; they will rant about it. But because there is a lag between when new development is planned/priced and when it hits market (years), a lag between when someone thinking about listing their place and when it goes into contract (months), and even a lag between when something goes into contract and when it’s actually listed as sold (months/weeks), many of these homes priced too high, that aren’t moving, were priced based on the data available when the market was still artificially inflated. 

Also due to the lag time in information, buyers have remained skeptical of acting, concerned that the market will continue to drop and that they should wait it out. But today, FINALLY, The Real Deal published an article backing us (the experts, if you will) up. The New York Times is writing about the power buyers currently have. Now that the news has caught up with our reality, buyers will start jumping into the pool, the market will readjust, and prices will stop falling. It’s 2009 all over again!

This is true at all price points; I was able to negotiate a price 10% below listing for my co-op buyer, at the sub-1 million point, which is usually the most competitive. The more expensive the property, the smaller the buyer pool, and the more leverage you generally have in negotiation. 

Me, advising my clients on how money works

So, if you are in the market to buy, start looking. We’re reaching the bottom, and if you don’t act now you’ll end up with higher interest rates, less inventory, higher prices, and less power. I’m honestly just upset I am not currently in a financial position to purchase an apartment…or the plane tickets I’m constantly looking at (travel bug forever). 

If you’re aiming to sell, check back in next week. Because my team just had a closing yesterday on an apartment that should have been hard to sell, but wasn’t. If you price your place right, it will sell, and sell quickly (unless it’s above $5 million, but that’s always a tricky market). If you insist on listing it way above its value, it will sit stagnant, which will lead to a whole host of problems I will get into next week on New York Values! 

xo

Anna

New York Values #20 - Landlord/Tenant

Today’s New York value is actually, hopefully, informative, and inspired by real life events AND an article I read in The Real Deal about the shocking 17,000 tenants who are late on $55 million worth of rent. Some of this is just tenants not paying out of lack or funds of laziness, but some is being intentionally withheld due to unresolved issues in their apartments. You can read all the details here. 

I have a meeting tomorrow with my tenant lawyer. Part of why I love doing tenant-side rentals is to keep any of my clients from going through what I’ve dealt with over the past six years. Long story short, my bathroom ceiling has been in various states of leaking/collapse for most of my tenure on 127th St, and I have, at times, gone to housing court in order to get it fixed. The meeting tomorrow is not related to anything in the courts, thankfully, but reading this article reminded me of the struggle. 

The positive here is that it’s possible for tenants to hold their landlords accountable in multiple ways, and also that good landlords are rewarded for being good landlords! I just held an open house for my Bronx rental building, because the owners are wonderful and care deeply about the building and their tenants. If you are financially well-off enough to purchase or build a rental building, you are well-off enough to take care of it and make sure your tenants have a safe, kept-up-to-legal-standards place to live.

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That article is specifically about Section 8 housing, but this post is about what to do if you find your landlord isn’t taking care of your home to the required standards, regardless of what type of rental you have (although it often applies to rent-stabilized, controlled, or income-restricted housing, where the landlord has an incentive to make you leave so they can raise the rent). 

NYC rentals tend towards two extremes: in-need-of-renovation low end, and then luxury AF on the high end. 

If you find yourself on the low end of the spectrum, where you are still usually paying $1,000 and up, your landlord may not care if you tell him your ceiling is leaking or that there’s black mold in your apartment. He (yes, he, most of the slumlords on the city’s published lists are men) has very little incentive to put time, money, and energy into solving a problem when he can instead wait for you to get fed up and move out. So what’s a tenant to do if they can’t get management to fix their problem?

There are two routes, and neither is perfect. First is tenant court, beginning by withholding rent. Technically they say to put it in an escrow account, but as long as you have the rent in liquid cash it doesn’t really matter where you keep it. This may lead your landlord to fix the problem, but more likely you will get a notice to pay rent within 3 days or find yourself in housing court. Tenants can’t bring landlords to housing court; they have to withhold rent until they are sued and then file a counter-suit. It took over a year the first time for my landlord to care enough to do this, potentially because he knew it wouldn’t end well for him when they saw the state of my bathroom. 

The pros: withholding rent feels better than paying full rent for diminished services

The cons: you end up on the “tenant blacklist,” a list that should not exist but does because people will always find a way to profit off of the small people looking for justice. 

Second route is an HP proceeding. I never filed one of these because my landlord and his lawyers are very adept at getting around doing actual work by sending tons of certified mail to . The issues in my bathroom are also due to an intermittent leak, so they would just say it wasn’t leaking when they were there and consider the case closed, despite the holes and mold in my ceiling. 

The pros: you don’t end up in tenant court for not paying rent

The cons: you have to go do this yourself or pay a lawyer, and if you landlord is a major player he has lawyers on retainer who will make getting this resolved difficult.