Michael Bass, head of Controlled Access Systems, with a SentriLock electronic lockbox last month.Michael Bass became an independent New York City real estate broker in 2008, after a 22-year career in residential leasing with the LeFrak Organization. But it didn’t take long for the routine of showing rental apartments to wear on him. The inefficiencies, he said, were maddening, especially tracking down apartment keys from building staffers.
“‘Keys? What keys?” Bass recalled hearing. He added: “The worst thing is for a broker to try to show an apartment with a client, and you can’t get access to the building.”
Those experiences, along with conversations with brokers outside New York, led him to a new line of work: lockboxes. In September, Bass launched Controlled Access Systems, which aims to provide lockbox technology to New York City real estate firms.
Listing brokers all over the country use lockboxes to store keys to for-sale homes, so that fellow agents showing the property can let themselves in. But while the devices are widely used elsewhere — including the New York City suburbs and even Hoboken and Jersey City — they’ve never caught on in Manhattan.
While sales agents here remain resistant to lockboxes, the devices may finally be gaining a toehold in the city’s rental market, brokers said.
At the forefront of this trend are new electronic lockboxes that allow landlords to keep track of who enters the apartment, and when. Bass’s company, for example, has a contract to distribute systems from SentriLock, which makes boxes accessible by electronic “smart cards” and key pads. Supra, a rival company that’s a subsidiary of General Electric, makes access systems that utilize Bluetooth-enabled smart phones, among other means. Both companies provide landlords with online reports tracking the boxes’ usage, and allows them to restrict access to particular agents and times.
The new devices are starting to appear in New York City.
“Here and there, you’re starting to see them more, and it’s great,” said Jay Heydt, senior managing director of Citi Habitats.
The boxes are a better fit for rentals than for sales in New York, Heydt said, because apartment sellers nearly always sign an exclusive listing agreement with a broker, while there are more “open listings” in the world of rentals. In addition, many New York rental buildings don’t have doormen on site to hand out keys.
“If you want to increase traffic in elevator buildings that are non-doorman buildings, this is an excellent, excellent alternative,” Heydt said. Still, he said, Citi Habitats does not yet use lockboxes, preferring instead to keep keys at its offices around the city.
Locking it up
Until now, brokers said, resistance to using lockboxes in New York has stemmed from security concerns, especially since traditional lockbox systems were little more than metal boxes with locks on them.
“Your neighbors just don’t want people randomly coming upstairs,” said Kathy Braddock, a co-founder of Rutenberg Realty.
Plus, these low-tech lockboxes often fail to function the way they’re supposed to in New York’s competitive, fast-paced real estate market, said Andrew Barrocas, CEO of the rental and sales brokerage MNS.
“The typical lockbox, it just doesn’t work, because agents take the keys and do not return them,” he said.
Barrocas said he’s heard more reports of high-tech lockboxes in the city lately, and is considering using them at MNS, though he noted that the newer systems are “kind of expensive.”
Some older rental buildings without doormen are now being refurbished by new owners and outfitted with card-swipe systems, according to John Wollberg, executive director of sales for Halstead’s Park Avenue office. One company, Stone Street Properties, has installed card-access systems by the firm Video Doorman at rental buildings like 11 Cornelia Street. While the system is not technically lockbox designed to help brokers, Wollberg said, brokers can benefit from the added convenience.
“It’s simply a faster, more economical method of control,” Wollberg said. “If you can control it all from the main office on a computer, bingo.”
Full service
Manhattan sales agents appear especially resistant to lockboxes, however, even with the recent technological advances.
Wollberg said he doubts that lockboxes will ever be widely used for sales in the city. For one thing, he said, he would never use one for an occupied house or unit — which most for-sale Manhattan properties are — for fear of disturbing the residents.
Another reason is that Manhattan sellers, unlike homeowners elsewhere, expect their listing agent to be present at showings, to meet and evaluate buyers, get feedback on the property and answer questions.
“That’s part of what we think the listing is paying for,” Braddock said. “Here, the selling broker has a very hands-on role. You’re talking about the building, you’re talking about the [co-op] board.”
There are various reasons for this expectation, brokers said: strict co-op boards, the high price of Manhattan real estate and the competitive nature of the market, in which brokers and agencies jockey for business by offering greater services.
In part, that’s why Halstead Property uses Supra boxes for New Jersey properties, but not in Manhattan, according to Eugene Cordano, Halstead Property’s director of sales for New Jersey.
“We are a full-service brokerage,” Cordano said, noting that for Halstead brokers in Manhattan, attending showings is considered part of the service. By contrast, many New Jersey buyers’ brokers often don’t want the seller’s agent present at showings.
A related issue is that Manhattan, unlike other markets, doesn’t have a multiple listing service, so brokers here are less accustomed to giving up control over their listings.
Moreover, some city brokers and landlords are simply skeptical of new ways of doing things, Wollberg said.
Still, lockboxes have made some inroads with sellers in less-urban areas of the city, including parts of Queens, said Gloria Soria, a sales associate at Laffey Fine Homes in Jackson Heights. Soria, who also works on Long Island, where the boxes are used more frequently, said she has encountered them occasionally in Queens, mostly on foreclosure properties and vacant houses.
Lockboxes make the process “totally easy,” she said. “We don’t need to wait 24 hours to get an appointment; we don’t need to wait for the seller to get in to the house.”
When it comes to Manhattan, however, brokers may have to wait a while before technologies like SentriLock and Supra boxes become widely used.
“I do see it as a wave of the future,” Wollberg said. “I just don’t see it as our immediate future.”