My Broker, My Therapist - New York Times 

 



May 14, 2006
My Broker, My Therapist 
By TERI KARUSH ROGERS
BROKERS, like therapists, have to understand what buyers really want in order to 
help them get it. While that might seem easy, it is not, because buyers often 
don't know themselves what they would like — hence an old real estate maxim, 
"Buyers are liars."
In the course of probing for information, brokers sometimes encounter far more 
than they really want to know or need to know. Details that might make a 
therapist wince, or at least write faster.
"More so than any other profession, I think you get to see the window of 
people's inner souls in a kind of hyper-reality superquick time," said Rob 
Gross, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman. "Is it big enough 
to have kids, do I want to have kids, do I want to live in the city for the rest 
of my life? Do I want to move out to the suburbs? Should I move out? Real estate 
just opens up the kimono. And you see it all, beauty and warts." 
For brokers, the line between information they need to do their jobs and 
information that's just embarrassing is an occupational hazard most often 
encountered when dealing with couples. 
"Public fighting is the worst," said Diane Saatchi, a senior vice president of 
the Corcoran Group East End in East Hampton. She described the frustrated wife, 
shopping for a $3 million summer home, who turned to her husband and uttered one 
line that said it all: "I wish you had a good job so we didn't have to live like 
this." 
Mercedes Menocal Gregoire, an agent for Stribling & Associates, is surprised at 
what is sometimes revealed. "People get absolutely shameless in front of you," 
she said. She recalled a well-known New York developer — she would not name him 
— whose idea of a pied-ŕ-terre fell short of his wife's. "In the middle of Park 
Avenue, she started screaming at the top of her lungs: 'I can't take it anymore. 
You never give me what I want.' He says, 'I give you whatever you want,' and he 
bought her the apartment."
Relationship spats commonly occur over kitchens, closets, the need for 
renovation—and most especially, the price. 
Real estate, said Marc Broxmeyer, an owner of Bellmarc Realty, "is probably the 
largest investment people make, and it brings up many of the issues we bring 
with us from childhood in terms of whether we're entitled or spending too much, 
whether we should spend it now and not save it for later."
Even something as innocuous as an appliance can expose the tremors in a 
relationship. Dawn Ashinoff, a vice president of Bellmarc, recalled the 
mild-mannered wife who wondered aloud how to operate an apartment's washing 
machine. "Her husband went ballistic," she said. "He started screaming about how 
she never does the wash anyway and their clothes are always dirty. I finally 
calmed them down and recommended a good cleaning service."
Tempers also tend to flare, oddly enough, when one half of the couple finds the 
perfect place, and the other spouse just doesn't see it the same way. "Their 
agendas play out, because one may have always dreamed of a Central Park West 
address, but maybe the stay-at-home dad wants to be in a building with lots of 
kids and a playroom," said Brian K. Lewis, a senior vice president of Halstead 
Property. "They go to their corners at that point, and sometimes they sit there 
with their arms crossed." 
When skirmishes erupt, brokers alternate between acting as interested witnesses 
and as mediators. "I generally let them finish, but all the time I'm observing 
and trying to decide who is the real decision maker," said Stephen S. Perlo, a 
senior vice president of the Corcoran Group. "Sometimes I feel like a 
psychiatrist when I'm dealing with couples."
As the tempest winds down, he said, "I try to soothe both parties and recognize 
the fears and insecurities of each while pointing out how they might overcome 
them."
Usually, the subject of a dispute is secondary to its subtext. "It has nothing 
to do with the apartment," Ms. Gregoire said. "It has to do with the nuance of 
the marriage." 
To an observant broker, those nuances are very much on display during the hunt 
for a house or an apartment. "The couples who have a great sex life are the ones 
who want the wall where their bed is to be away from the children's rooms," Ms. 
Gregoire said.
Less passionate couples care more about the entertaining spaces and the closets. 
"So you know they're at that stage in the relationship where entertaining is 
what they do together," Ms. Gregoire said. "It's the glue that keeps them 
together."
And sometimes, it's evident that one spouse is heading out, Ms. Gregoire said. 
"Then, you get a call from the husband: 'I'm looking for a pied-ŕ-terre for my 
mother.' Really — your mother?"
Other times, room to stray may be precisely what both clients desire. Mr. Perlo 
described a couple with a child who were interested in buying an apartment with 
two separate wings of bedrooms. "They kept saying to me they loved it because 
there were two totally separate living areas and bedroom areas. When they came 
back to look with friends of theirs, I could see that that the friends were more 
than just regular friends." Mr. Perlo deduced that the couple "lived totally 
independent lifestyles and had an open marriage."
Brokers who have been around long enough become skilled at drawing inferences 
from certain patterns of behavior. One who deals in high-end Upper East Side 
properties and the twice-married men who buy them explained how the purchase and 
the way it is structured can be a litmus test. 
"If the husband is madly in love with his wife and financially capable, he will 
give her anything she wants, because a home is the basis of a happy 
relationship," said A. Laurance Kaiser IV, the president of Key Ventures. "And 
he will buy it in both of their names. 
"The man who has trepidation about whether the marriage will work tends to be 
more conservative. He wants a condo in his name, and if the marriage works out, 
he will transfer it to joint ownership."
Older men at the start of a second marriage tend to make grander real estate 
gestures than their younger counterparts who are remarrying. "They have less 
time left to be happy," Mr. Kaiser said, whereas "when you have your life ahead 
of you, you tend to be more conservative."
Looking back at clients who eventually divorced, Mr. Kaiser realized that he had 
already picked up signs of discord. "You knew it was never going to be a home," 
he said. "It was going to be a residence, a commodity. There was never any 
emotion involved in it. The man was basically humoring his wife and had no 
interest." 
Sometimes a home is temporary by design, as in a furnished summer rental, and 
couples searching for one can be astonishingly frank about their intimate lives, 
said Ms. Saatchi, the East Hampton agent. 
"People kind of tell you more about their needs because they have to fit the 
contents of a house," she said. For example, one couple explained that they 
wanted a room with two queen beds because although they couldn't fall asleep 
together, they needed somewhere to meet for sex. 
Sometimes, brokers hear about an important event in the couple's lives at the 
same time as one of the spouses. 
Mr. Lewis was showing a junior-four condo to a young couple when he happened to 
mention that a two-bedroom was available in the same building. The wife pressed 
to see it over her husband's objections. "He was saying: 'Why are you so 
adamant? We've already talked about a two-bedroom,' " Mr. Lewis recalled. "She 
just kept saying, 'We need it.' " 
Finally, she laid her hand on her belly, and the men slowly caught on.
Then, "we all screamed and yelled," Mr. Lewis said. For him, that was just the 
start of the good news. Aglow with the impending change in their lives, the 
parents-to-be bought the two-bedroom. 


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