From left: Grubb & Ellis’ Vincent Carrega and Capin & Associates’ Timour Shafran
From the December issue: When Timour Shafran negotiated the sale of a Midtown building in August, the landlord threw out an interesting, if not entirely new, carrot. If Shafran, a vice president of investment sales at Capin & Associates, and his team secured a certain price, their commission would be bumped up almost two full percentage points — potentially tens of thousands of dollars. “Unfortunately, I got the lower number,” Shafran said. “But I killed myself trying to make it to the bigger fee.” Welcome to “incentive-based fees,” an increasingly common practice that is dividing the brokerage community in New York. The process is as simple as it is time-tested: Contracts, whether oral or written, are negotiated to include commission increases that are triggered when the broker achieves a certain price for the seller. [more]
