A Rental Broker Hero Myth . . . Somewhere Joseph Campbell Turns In His Grave

Broker-columnist Brian Carter seems like a good guy, but this kind of special attention seems like a stretch and, frankly, I’m skeptical:

If ever there was someone who needed a good rental agent, this was the kid, and this is where I got into trouble. Not a one of them had any idea of what to expect, or what they were really looking for, or how the process worked, or how badly they could get screwed. But regardless of your reasons or intentions, the one rule not to be violated in this business is: Never want the deal more than they do. I’m not sure I did, but I was certainly pulling for these guys. Their enthusiasm was contagious, and their simple search for any landlord willing to take them was humbling.

The young artist fell in love with the first apartment I showed him. Small and pretty beat up; it was exactly what he had imagined a New York apartment should look like. But what did he know? He’d never been here before. I called the management company and waded delicately into the conversation. As I suspected, there was no way around the employment letter without a stronger guarantor.

We saw a few more places, but everywhere we went we ran into the same problem. It was late Friday night, and we had gone as far as we could. They headed to McDonalds or someplace for dinner and I went back to the office. I tried calling everyone I knew in the restaurant business to see if I could set him up with a job or at the very least an employment letter. But no one seemed to need an inexperienced waiter, nor was anyone willing to write the stupid employment letter.

I think somewhere in the back of mind I refused to believe that in a city this large and supposedly diverse, there wasn’t a place for this kid. It was time to pull my resources together and to summon all of my real estate power and knowledge. This amounted to going through every landlord I could think of and finally searching Craigslist for no-fee places in Queens. Nothing came up. Even if I had better contacts in the outer boroughs, they weren’t about to consider Brooklyn yet. Never the super agent, I had screwed this one up good.