The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is cracking down on rental scammers — and the timing could be an opportunity for rental agents.
Prosecutors on Thursday charged a 35-year-old man with identity theft and other crimes after he allegedly duped a would-be subletter out of rent money. The case comes after the DA recently charged two other men in similar schemes.
In the latest indictment, prosecutors claim Anthony Pittman stole a woman’s identity and forged documents to rent a luxury apartment in Murray Hill, only to sublet it to another tenant. The unit at the center of the case is a building on Third Avenue called the Aurora, where one-bedrooms rent for about $4,600, according to Crain’s New York.
Just weeks before announcing the charges, prosecutors also accused 36-year-old Adam Chatwin of falsely posing as the landlord of a Midtown studio only to pocket $32,000 in upfront costs from four prospective tenants. Turns out, Chatwin was only subletting the place for a month.
The clampdown is coming as rents are growing increasingly more expensive and as the topic of affordable housing is top of mind for most New Yorkers on the heels of a mayoral election where candidates campaigned on solving the crisis.
But it’s also arriving as the city’s rental agents on both the landlord and tenant side have been scrambling to redefine their worth after the “broker fee ban” took effect in June. With many owners newly footing the bill for broker fees — and questioning whether they should — agents are searching for fresh ways to justify their role.
The scams may seem unrelated to rental agents’ plight, but as one broker pointed out a couple of months ago, one of the benefits to hiring an agent is to vet and verify prospective tenants.
“A for-rent-by-owner reached out to me, and I told him, ‘it’s going to cost you more money to hire me, but I’ll get you a qualified person,’” Corcoran’s Shloma Hecht said in September. “You can do it by yourself and maybe collect the rent on the front end. But this isn’t about the first month’s rent. It’s about 12 or 24 months of rent.”
Landlords “think they’re going to save a couple of dollars to do it themselves,” Hecht added. “But brokers get a better sense if someone is serious or not.”
Not so fast…
The residential market in Downtown Manhattan was already hot — but a couple of new, pricey listings could turn the temperature up higher.
Earlier this week, filmmaker Neil Burger and his wife, architect Diana Kellogg, listed their townhouse in Tribeca for $30 million. The couple bought the 40-foot-wide home at 4 Staple Street for just $1.7 million in 2002.
Built in 1868, the property spans 4,100 square feet and has three bedrooms and three bathrooms. It also includes a 2,500-square-foot studio, office and wine cellar at 1 Jay Street as well as roughly 3,000 potential extra square feet of air rights.
Burger, known for movies such as “Limitless” and “Divergent,” and Kellogg listed their abode just a week after news of another expensive listing below 14th Street dropped.
Developer Alf Naman is preparing to list a penthouse at his boutique condo at 125 Perry Street for a whopping $85 million — a figure that could give a pending deal at a nearby new development a run for its money.
The penthouse, one of seven condos at the former parking garage, will likely be the most expensive listing downtown and among the top five in all of Manhattan once it hits the market.
If it scores a deal close to its asking price, it could challenge a penthouse at Aurora Capital Associates’ 140 Jane Street which found a buyer in August with an asking price of $88 million.
The deal hasn’t yet closed, so the actual price of the sale is still unknown. But unless the developer offloaded it for a discount of tens of millions, the trade is likely to set a new record for a condo sale in Downtown Manhattan, a bar that was just raised in March when a condo at the Witkoff Group’s 150 Charles sold for $60 million.
However, there’s likely another contender in the race to break the Downtown record: Atlas Capital and Zeckendorf Development’s 80 Clarkson. The team behind the project has been tight-lipped about its deals, but judging from some of the pricing released in its offering plan, big ticket trades are surely on the horizon once the building begins closing.
NYC Deal of the Week
The priciest deal recorded in the city rolls this week was for a townhouse on the Upper East Side, which sold for $16.8 million, or $2,700 per square foot. The five-story property at 48 East 81st Street hit the market last September asking $19 million.
The 7,400-square-foot abode, built in 1924 and gut-renovated in 2019, has six bedrooms and seven bathrooms. It also features seven marble fireplaces, a roof deck and solarium.
Societe Real Estate’s Sarah Wiliams and Peter Stack had the listing, along with Douglas Elliman’s Madeline Hult Elghanayan, Allison Chalfin and George Vanderploeg.
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