I’m in the midst of my apartment hunt here in NYC and, if you’ve never experienced this process let me tell you… it is hell.
On September 16th, via Craigslist, I found a lovely apartment in Brooklyn that looked ideal. It was the right price, a good size, accepted pets… great! So, because I’m always leery of Craigslist I did my Googling and found that it was being brokered through Corcoran’s Fort Greene office. This seemed good. It is a big company, long known to offer quality and service… one of the “big dogs”. So I emailed the agent immediately. She wrote back that evening and we scheduled a 10am showing the next morning. This is great! I thought. She’s available, responsive… I feel good about this.
I met with the broker, who was absolutely delightful. She showed the unit, which was amazing, and I fell in love just as I expected I would. I made an appointment to meet her at the Corcoran Fort Greene office that afternoon where I would fill out the application, pay my $75.00 application fee and provide her with all the necessary documentation needed for the owner to review.
And then the waiting game began.
After a few days I became nervous but not desperate. I texted the broker and received the following reply – click for a larger view).
After a full week I was becoming concerned and after some back-and-forth was finally told that the owner was dealing with some personal issues and wasn’t in the city nor was she available to review my application and accompanying paperwork. There were supposed to be meetings between the broker and the owner and each time those meetings were canceled because the owner had personal issues and couldn’t make it. Finally, after two weeks of waiting and being told to be patient I received the following text message on September 23rd:
To add insult to injury, I received the following text message from the broker the next day (September 24th):
After not hearing back from the broker for several days I sent another message, included above, asking for an update. Yesterday, October 1st, after not hearing anything and needing to move this month, I decided to email the Senior Managing Director of the Corcoran Fort Greene Office and ask what was going on.
Again, after some back-and-forth conversation via email with the Senior Managing Director, the final response was short and simple: “[the owner] she is looking for a qualified tenant whose salary is a minimum of $75,000.”
I did some quick math. A salary of $75,000 a year is 57.7x the monthly rent of $1300.00. I replied to the Senior Managing Director:
“I was told by your staff member that I would be considered based on having a salary which was ’40x the rent’… for which I was more than qualified. Had I been informed by your staff member of the truth, that the owner was basing her decision on my needing to have a salary which was ‘57.7x the rent,’ I would not have applied, would not have spent $75.00 on the Corcoran application and would not wasted two weeks of my time anticipating a response since I was repeatedly told by your employee to ‘hang in there’ since I was a ‘shoe in’ and ‘the best candidate’. I would appreciate the immediate return of my $75.00 application since this I was blatantly deceived in the application process.”
The only silver lining of this whole experience is that the Senior Managing Director replied today that she would be sending a check for $75.00 to me.
So, take this experience for what you will. It is entirely possible that this company has helped millions of other people but my experience has been sorely lacking in confidence.
Tommy Karr 