6 Wyckham Hill Lane and Robert Bland of Sotheby’s International Realty

The owners of a Greenwich, Conn. home on the market for $4.9 million are offering a $100,000 bonus to the broker that successfully finds a buyer for the home, on top of the area’s typical 5 percent commission. The New York Times reported the owners of 6 Wyckham Hill Lane sent out an email blast to notify local agents of the bonus about two weeks ago and set Thanksgiving as the day the deal expires.

The home is listed by Robert Bland, the manager of Sotheby’s International Realty’s Greenwich office, who said it is meant to drum up interest and focus it over a short period for a home that’s been on the market for more than a year. [more]

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]

The return of Wall Street bonuses, albeit largely in stock form, is proving a boon to the lower end of the luxury market, brokers say. After a year of going without, financiers who have bonuses coming to them once again are now looking to take advantage of a perceived trough in the real estate market — and quickly. “People are hearing about bonus money and think they’re going to miss out,” said Michele Kleier of boutique brokerage Gumley Haft Kleier, who said she received a flurry of calls in response to her high-end listings last week. Other luxury brokers experienced similar surges, an unusual event for what is typically a “quite sleepy” January market, said Stribling’s Kirk Henckels. Buyers in the $2 million to $3 million range are particularly active, with Manhattan contracts between $1.5 million and $5 million up 171 percent for the month that ended Jan. 15 over the year-ago period, according to Streeteasy.com. [NY Mag]

The return of Wall Street year-end bonuses at the end of 2009 isn’t likely to have as much of an effect on the luxury real estate market this year as their disappearance did in 2008, many industry experts say. While incentive pay likely rose 40 percent for last year, according to compensation research firm Johnson Associates, many of the financiers reaping the rewards are still uncertain about the market and more cautious about investing in second and third homes than they would have been two or three years ago. Furthermore, the incentive pay raises are expected to go largely to higher-ups, rather than get spread out amongst mid-level employees who have, in the past, directed their year-end checks toward down payments on new vacation homes. “Maybe the total bonus pool will be larger, but that doesn’t mean that middle management will make out as well as we think they will,” said Jonathan Miller, head of New York City appraisal firm Miller Samuel. “That softens the impact of bonuses on real estate.” Wall Street bonuses, he added, are “not the savior of the luxury market” and are unlikely to have much of an effect beyond Manhattan and its wealthy suburbs. [Forbes]