New York Real Estate Brokers Then and Now
I have been a licensed real estate person since 1971. Though I have dabbled in residential brokerage, I mostly have been a property manager and commercial broker. There have been many changes in the way we do business in that time. Most of the changes have resulted in a vast improvement over the old ways. Technology has made our job so much easier. And the commercial brokers of today are much better educated than when I began.
Forty years ago, being a broker was depended on your intuitive ability to use a "seat of your pants" philosophy in procuring deals. Many men (and it was overwhelmingly male) had come to the business not with a college degree but had previously worked in the industries that they now specialized in as real estate brokers. One day, I was in a sewing factory with an old broker who was speaking to the owner of the company. The broker noticed that one of the foremen was having trouble fixing one of the sewing machines. The broker went over and had the machine working in no time. In a heavy East European accent, he told the owner that he had had his own factory when he came from Europe. Needless to say, he snagged a client that day.
New York City, including Manhattan, still had thousands of factories in the 1970's. There was definitely a divide between the corporate offices of midtown proper and the rest of the city. If you were a broker outside that corporate sphere you needed to be not only entrepreneurial and tenacious but also someone who could negotiate a deal. The broker really had to work to bring the landlord and tenant together. What is more, they didn't disappear once leases were drawn. Lawyers in most deals were non-existent.
Another thing that is so different today is that I don't remember discussing a commission until the deal was actually completed. In those days, if you were a member of the local board, the commission rates were published. When acting as a broker, I never hesitated to take less commission in order to finish a deal. As an owner or agent, I often asked brokers to throw something into the pot. Things were just done differently.
The nature of the clientele has also changed. From one end of Manhattan to the other, office space dominates areas that were once home to a diverse manufacturing base. Industries such as "tech" or "bio medical" were not even known then. With those new and emerging demographics, the real estate industry needed to change. The past real estate community could not serve the present tenant base. A much more educated and corporate-type broker came into the picture. Sid Fine retired to make way for Taylor Colucci.
Though I went to college and worked to receive professional designations, I was schooled in real estate by the immigrant/depression/WWII generation. When I began in the business, the garment center was alive with hand trucks and racks of clothes bustling on the streets and sidewalks. There was a fur district where mink pelts were sown together. SoHo was known as the butter and egg district. The meat market was at 14th Street and 9th Avenue when Chelsea was a working class neighborhood of long shore men and other blue collar workers. The city was a much different place than today.
Between the 1930's and the early 1970's, office technology changed very little. We still had big, black rotary phones on our desks. While there was one IBM Selectric typewriter in our office, but the majority were still manual. Carbon paper was abundant as were ash trays full of cigarette butts. Wite Out was as important then as a charging cord for a cell phone is now. It was a long way from the technology we enjoy today which has made each of us so much more productive.
The city was different, the real estate industry was different, and the brokers were different. Was one generation better than the other? No, I don't think so... just different. The old guys were characters, they had distinct personalities. They were not interchangeable wonks without any discernible accents or idiosyncratic traits. I sort of miss the challenge of dealing with them because, at the end of the negotiation no matter what the outcome, there was always a little knowing smile of how silly most of the posturing had been.
Now you can check
notar
