Hot Property

by Michele Kleier

Her cell rings; it’s Roger Erickson, calling with what Elizabeth hopes will be a higher offer on her sellers’ duplex at 155 East 72nd. Roger’s clients have steadily gone up $50,000 with each negotiation—they are now at $3.05 million. Truth be told, Elizabeth thinks the sellers, the Kennishes, should take the money and run. However, the Kennishes have not taken her advice and have only come down to $3.1 million. The two parties are now $50,000 away from a deal.

  “Good news or bad news?” Elizabeth says.

  “Elizabeth, they’ll split the difference. Can you get the sellers to take three million seventy-five? Honestly, they’re overpaying at that price—the place is a wreck parading in good condition! But they only want a prewar duplex, and these kinds of buyers are few and far between, as you know.”

  Elizabeth sighs. The Kennishes have been stubborn, but at least they finally agreed to a 120-day closing; however, the apartment will be sold as is, with no repairs to the whirlpool bath or the dishwasher. “I’ll see what I can do, but I don’t know.”

  “Let them know that there’s another apartment the buyers are interested in; they like this far, far better, but they’re at the end, and they may try and move forward on something else if they think the sellers are being that unreasonable.”

  There is a short silence. This is a ploy that brokers will use to inject urgency into a bidding situation. And yet Elizabeth knows Roger is telling the truth. “Listen,” she says, “you and I are not going to lose this over $25,000. I’ll call you back,” she says, and hangs up.

  She dials Edward Kennish at his dental office; she tells his receptionist it’s urgent, and a few moments later Edward picks up the phone.

  “The buyers have come up twenty-five thousand—they want to split the difference,” Elizabeth says. “This is it for them, and honestly, Edward, you should take it. We’ve been on for a month now, and the best offers come at the beginning—we’ve had no others. You want to run the risk of sitting and eventually having to reduce the price? This is a very, very strong price, from very qualified people with a terrific broker.” A good broker makes all the difference in a deal, especially in a co-op. Elizabeth will often advise her clients to go with perhaps a slightly lower price to get a deal done with a top broker. There are so many idiots out there!

  “You don’t have to tell me. You have to tell my wife,” Edward says. “She obviously is having what you described as ‘seller’s remorse.’ But okay. I accept the offer on behalf on my wife and myself.”

  “Edward, you need to speak with her.”

  “If you don’t hear back from me within five minutes, go ahead and accept it.”

  “Are you sure?” Elizabeth says.

  “Yes.”

  The phone rings just as she is saying good-bye to Edward. She sees that it’s Kate, and when she picks up she says, “I finally might have a deal with the Kennishes, at $3.075 million.”

  “Fab,” Kate says. “Where are you, anyway?”

  “In the car with Dave. On my way to see that jerk Lance Roberts at 860 UN Plaza.”

  “Why are you even bothering with him? Will he even pass a co-op board?”

  “He thinks that I can convince them.”

  “Ha!”

  “He apparently has more faith in my powers than you do,” Elizabeth teases, “but why that is, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Mom, he’s an animal! Why are you wasting your time?”

  Elizabeth contemplates this for a moment. “I don’t know . . . he keeps calling me. It didn’t seem like the worst idea at the time when I said yes— $2.5 million, all cash, and I know the board president. And Lance promises to behave.” As Elizabeth says all this out loud, she thinks to herself, Why am I doing this? She still has a little social worker in her after all these years, she supposes—Lance claims to be reformed, and she’d like to see it.

  “I’ll believe that when I see it. Why don’t you show the apartment to him and Bart Schneider at the same time?” Kate teases.

  “Hmmm . . . interesting thought. Maybe I’ll leave the two of them in a room and lock the door,” Elizabeth says wickedly. “Lance would eat Bart alive!” She and Kate have a good giggle. In their business they often have to deal with rich people behaving badly, but then again, isn’t that part of the fun?

  “You sound back to your old self—my plucky Kate,” Elizabeth says now, relieved. “Gorgeous and smart and everything going for you. That Scott is just an idiot!”

  “I know,” Kate says. “Love you.”

  Elizabeth looks at her watch. Ten minutes have gone by—does she have a deal on the Kennishes? She guesses so. . . . She will wait till she’s done with Lance to call Roger, just in case. As Dave drives her down 49th Street, crosses First Avenue, and loops into the semicircular parking area in front of 860 UN Plaza, Elizabeth remembers that when Teddy learned of her recent conversation with Lance Roberts (in which she was clearly resisting doing business with Lance), Teddy offered to take him on as a client and had the audacity to suggest an 80/20 commission split in his favor. (Traditionally in the business, brokers and company owners work on a 50/50 split. And when brokers gross over a certain amount, the split goes to 60/40 in their favor.) The nerve of him!

  Isabel calls and says, “I have the best story!”

  “I’m meeting Lance Roberts right now, let me just see if he’s here.”

  “Just listen for one second. It’s hysterical, I promise.”

  “Okay, hold on.” Elizabeth tells Dave to pull into one of the temporary parking spaces in front of the building’s revolving doors, scans the lobby to see if Lance Roberts is there, and when she doesn’t see him, takes a few steps so that she’s standing out of view of the lobby at the side of the building. The one (and to be honest, the only) thing she enjoys about being in the UN Plaza area is the breeze off the East River, but only in spring and summer. In the wintertime, it’s terribly windy and frigid. “Okay, quick,” she tells Isabel, “Lance isn’t here yet.”

  “Remember Cindy Kazarian, the hot young designer who’s giving Juicy Couture a run for her money? I sold her that one-bedroom on East 69th?”

  “Yes, how could I forget her?”

  “She called me today to report that she found a five-foot-long king snake in her apartment, slithering around in one of the back closets!”

  “Oh, my God!” Elizabeth gasps. “I would have run out the door!”

  “Well, Cindy managed to hold it together. She said the snake was really beautiful. Lovely color bands, was how she described it. Can you imagine? And it didn’t seem at all startled when she discovered it. She thinks it’s been living in the wall.”

  “I just shuddered,” Elizabeth says. “How does a snake get in the wall of a New York City apartment?”

  “The previous owner.”

  “But hasn’t Cindy owned the apartment for a couple of months now?”

  “Six weeks. I guess it was in hiding. Apparently it’s nocturnal. Anyway, Cindy looked it up and found out that they’re gentle and curious and can live in captivity for as long as twenty years on a diet of what they call ‘prekilled’ mice.”

  Elizabeth shudders again. The Chase house is a no-kill zone—they even make Tom carry ants into the backyard at the summerhouse! The doormen in the city once caught Elizabeth, Kate, and Isabel carrying a white garbage bag with a pair of dishwashing gloves over to the center island on Park Avenue, where they deposited a tiny field mouse they’d found hiding under the refrigerator. “So what’s she going to do?” she asks.

  “Well, she called the previous owner and asked about the snake. He told her he’d come right over. She showed it to him, and he actually said, ‘I did have a snake, but that one’s not my snake.’ ”

  Elizabeth bursts into laughter. “Oh, this just gets more ludicrous!”

  “Anyway, one of the building porters was brave enough to nudge the snake into a garbage bag. T
hey poked holes in it and then took a taxi to the Bronx Zoo.”

  Elizabeth is still laughing, but then she thinks she notices Lance Roberts sitting in one of the lobby’s waiting areas.

  “Speaking of lunatics, mine is here. I see Lance wandering around the lobby. I’ve got to run.”

  “I hope Lance doesn’t forget what he learned in anger management,” Isabel says.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I have on four-inch platforms today. My shoes could kill,” Elizabeth jokes.

  As she enters the building, all smiles, she sees Lance sitting in one of the Knoll Barcelona chair reproductions in a corner of the red-carpeted lobby. He’s in the process of sending a text message, his big thumbs tapping the keyboard of his BlackBerry. Elizabeth finds herself thinking that he looks a bit like George Costanza: short and squat and balding with a bad haircut. He’s one of those men who grows his remaining hair long, as though to compensate for what has been lost. “An unfortunate haircut,” she’d whispered to Kate when she met Lance for the first time, Elizabeth remembers.

  When Lance catches sight of her now, he jumps out of his chair and hurries over, holding his dampish hand out to shake hers. She hates a handshake—a ridiculous tradition, she thinks—and so do her girls. She offers him a polite, though unenthusiastic, shake in response and glances over at the long desk where the doorman and the concierge sit. She raises her chin toward them. “The owner is at work, so they’ll have to let us in,” she tells Lance. When the owner told Elizabeth a porter would be working in the apartment today, moving some boxes, she was actually relieved at the thought of not being left alone with Roberts.

  A porter comes down now to escort them up. Elizabeth knows him because she has sold several apartments in the building. He’s a friendly man with twinkly eyes, slightly chubby and short, with a full head of black curls and dimpled fingers that made her like him at once when she first met him. He tells her, smiling breathlessly, that he has just had his first child, a baby girl, and she was born early—at twenty-nine weeks. “She was a real fighter, my little girl, like her mother,” he tells Elizabeth. “Me, when I found out she was going to be in the hospital for all that time, I cried every day. My wife told me to stop behaving like a baby, that if I wanted to bring our daughter home, I better shape up. So I did. And she’s home now, and boy, she keeps me busy!” he says proudly.

  Elizabeth wants to hug him. “Oh, Tony,” she says, “what a happy story, and you’re going to be the most wonderful father.” Unfortunately, at that moment, she feels the thumping of Lance’s leg; he has begun to twitch in the elevator. Thankfully, the elevator arrives at their floor just then.

  Tony lets them into an apartment with such intense sunlight that solar shades are pulled down to protect the rugs and artwork. Now it is virtually pitch-black. Elizabeth presses a button, and slowly the sunshades rise and retract into recesses just above the window. The light flooding the apartment is strong but lovely. Lance drifts over to the window and gazes down at the vast, expansive, opalescent East River. For only a moment, this restless, aggressive man seems at peace. The porter, in the meantime, retreats into the depths of the apartment to begin his work.

  “I have a friend who lives in this building,” Lance says dreamily, still looking down at the East River. “He told me that you can throw golf balls right into the water from here.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s on the co-op board?” Elizabeth can’t help asking.

  Lance shakes his head.

  Elizabeth shows him the kitchen—totally renovated, with Gaggenau appliances and marble countertops—then a perfectly nice guest room, a library with its built-in bookshelves, and the master suite. Every room in the apartment, even the master bath, has a mounted flat-screen television. Decorated tastefully in neutral tones, the space definitely has a masculine feel to it.

  Elizabeth’s phone rings. Bart Schneider. She presses ignore.

  Lance turns to her and, looking her straight in the eye, says, “I really want to buy this apartment. I’m not going to screw around this time. But I need you to be on my side so that we can work together. Because we have a mountain to climb.”

  “You can say that again,” Elizabeth tells him.

  “I’m not an idiot. I know how I affect some people,” Lance says.

  “Well, knowing is one thing. Doing something about it is another.”

  “I told you I took that anger management class.”

  Oh, please, Elizabeth nearly says. “Even if you behave yourself from start to finish, Lance, I honestly don’t know if your making a bid here is going to be worth it.”

  He looks crushed and then desperate. “There’s got to be some high-end building in New York City who will take my money.”

  “Why don’t you do a condo instead? They don’t have boards in the same way co-ops do.”

  “I haven’t seen a condo that I like,” Lance says. “Besides, I want to buy in this building. My friend lives here.”

  “Well, then we’ll try,” Elizabeth tells him.

  She leads him back into the living area, and they both sit down in wing chairs. “So,” she says. “You should start by offering full asking price.”

  “Understood,” Lance says, nodding his head and cracking his knuckles, a habit Elizabeth finds infuriating.

  “All cash?” she continues.

  “Yup.”

  “And you will close . . . ?”

  Glancing out the window at the stunning view, Lance says, “Sixty days, ninety days, whenever they want.”

  “Let’s say seventy-five—you have to get your board package together, and from what I’m guessing, we’re going to have to do some creative things with the reference letters. Your financials won’t be an issue.”

  “Well, fine,” Lance says, “but of course I don’t want to bark up a tree that’s going to shake me off it.” Where did he come up with that saying? Elizabeth wonders to herself. A bizarre cliché. She loathes clichés.

  “I’ll make a phone call to my friend the president of the co-op board and try to prescreen you. How’s that?” Elizabeth says.

  “That sounds fair.”

  “But you have to understand that my friend would never look favorably on any kind of . . . coercion on my part.”

  Oddly, Lance Roberts has no response to this. He stares out the window. Elizabeth hears the sound of the porter moving boxes. At last he says, “I think you have more influence than you’re admitting.”

  The man is impossible, Elizabeth thinks. Why is she wasting her time with him? He must be desperate for this apartment. Somewhere in the apartment she hears the thud of a closet door being shut.

  In a way, she almost feels sorry for him.

  Her phone rings—it’s Tom. And even though normally she would answer a call from the family but speak only for a second and hang up, she doesn’t care what Lance Roberts thinks of her. “Please excuse me, but I’ve got to take this call,” she tells Lance, and turns away from him.

  Several hours later, after hair and makeup at Valery Joseph and a quick stop at Saks for a new lipstick, Elizabeth is joined by Tom, Kate, and Isabel at the door of her $8.9 million listing at the Lucida on the Upper East Side, greeting A-list brokers like MacRae Parker, Donna Olshan, Cathy Franklin, Sol Howard, Shaun Osher, Fred Peters, Charles Curkin, the legendary Alice Mason and her chic daughter, Dominique Richard, Robby Browne, and new “it” broker Jared Seligman, all of whom have come to view the two side-by-side penthouse units in the hopes of selling one or both of them. Because there are so many broker cocktail parties, Elizabeth wants to make this one over-the-top. The apartment has been completely staged, with exquisite contemporary pieces to mirror the all-glass building. Two long tables are covered with sushi from Nobu, and waiters in white tuxedo jackets pass all sorts of delicacies like spoonfuls of caviar, mini burgers with truffles, lobster rolls, and, for dessert, mini ice cream sandwiches, mini
milkshakes, and brownies and chocolates from Maison du Chocolat on silver trays. Drinks are all-white—champagne, white wine, and sparkling water. Models wearing the perforated, lacelike spring dresses of designer Roberto Cavalli in candy colors like pink, lemon, mint, and peach are displayed throughout the apartment like mannequins. Kate and Isabel are dressed identically in short black rhinestone-studded Ungaro dresses, each wearing Art Deco pavé diamond bracelets. Elizabeth wears one of her signature vintage Chanel pins, a big enamel Maltese cross in red, blue, and yellow, right in the center of her Nina Ricci black chiffon cocktail dress. The dress was a last-minute find from Edit. Often Elizabeth or the girls will run over there if they need something quick and fabulous for an event or party. The smaller of the two units, at around 3,300 square feet, has an astonishing 1,000-square-foot terrace that boasts views of the Empire State Building. Photographs of the building’s amazing amenities—the building’s lap pool and sauna, Kidville playroom, video arcade, and state-of-the-art fitness center—are on display throughout like artwork. If guests want to view any of these amenities, Elizabeth has brokers ready to take them on a tour. It seems as if every top broker in New York City is in this room, including Teddy, of course, and Christopher McKinnon with his entourage from LEX. Kate and Isabel have been told to mingle, but also to keep an eye on Teddy and the LEX brokers.

  Elizabeth makes sure to say hello to all her favorite real estate writers, who almost always come when she throws an event—Jhoanna Robledo from New York Magazine, Joey Arak from Curbed.com, Dana Jennings and Christine Haughney from the New York Times, Josh Barbanel and Craig Karmin from the Wall Street Journal. And then she moves on to Jennifer Gould Keil, who writes for the New York Post, Chloe Malle from the New York Observer, New York’s most famous photographer, Patrick McMullan, and Richard Lewin, the Chases’ frequent family photographer. Tomorrow morning she will be thrilled to see that the party makes Joey Arak’s column on Curbed.com, and she will see photos of her and her family in the Social Diary.

  She is in the midst of speaking to three brokers when she notices Teddy talking to Christopher McKinnon on the terrace. With a quick glance around the crowded room she manages to make eye contact with Kate, who makes it clear that she’s already watching. Elizabeth, Kate, Isabel, and Tom have all already discreetly combed through Teddy’s desk and all his files and correspondence, thinking they might find something that would support Monique’s friend’s insistent claim that Teddy may be selling private information about listings-in-the-works to other brokers for a kickback. But so far their only lead has come from Violeta, who, checking the caller IDs, discovered that Christopher McKinnon has been frequently calling Teddy at night when the office is officially closed. Still watching as she laughs and sips champagne with the other brokers, Elizabeth is distracted by two details: Tom approaching Teddy, and a stunning dark-haired young woman, no one she has ever seen before, staring at her.