…to get fleeced by a client
Barbara Fox, president of Fox Residential Group
As told to Emma Johnson
Every broker gets screwed at some time or another — and I’ve been in this business 30 years! But the most egregious situation I had was 10 years ago with a very high-profile seller on a $6 million property. I was the exclusive broker representing the seller, and it was a very difficult property. It took months and months to find a buyer. Finally, we did, and it was the perfect person — out of central casting for this building.
When we went into contract, I started to feel very nervous when the seller forced me to sign a brokerage agreement with a willful default clause. That means the seller can pull out of the deal for any reason. I was leery, but because of this seller’s profile, the fact I knew they really wanted to sell it, and I had invested so much time to get to that point, I stuck with it.
Two days before the closing, what’d you know? I get a call from my client’s attorney, who said the seller had negotiated with the buyer to get out of the deal — and that was the last time I saw or heard from them again.
Then, they had the nerve to send me a Baccarat crystal candy dish as a consolation prize. I threw it against the side of the building! Just kidding. I immediately gave it away — I thought it was bad karma.
The beauty of this story is that 10 years ago I sold that same apartment from that scumbag, representing the buyer. I didn’t have to go face-to-face or even speak with them. But they were horrible throughout that whole process. Needless to say, I was leery of them throughout the whole deal.
Deals often fall through for legitimate reasons. Our job is to properly serve the client, and when a client is on the up-and-up, you can just mark a fall-through to part of the job. But in this situation, I thought it was very duplicitous. I was representing the seller, and they were screwing me on the side.
…to have a prime property sit vacant
Robert Selsam, Boston Properties senior vice president and regional manager
As told to Emma Johnson
When we closed on the site acquisition to build the Times Square Tower in October 2000, 60 percent, or more than 600,000 square feet, was leased to Arthur Andersen. When we started building two years later, we watched Andersen evaporate right before our eyes.
We first started reading about the Arthur Andersen fallout from the Enron scandal; then we got calls from the company. Over a period of a few months, we watched the firm disappear, which was really surprising. It had incredibly strong financials — I remember $12 billion to $14 billion in annual sales, and its credit looked impeccable.
But rule No. 1 is: Don’t panic. And we didn’t. It all comes down to whether you have confidence in the property or not. And we knew we had a terrific building. It was efficient and well-planned and it had a great location.
The market was not strong at the time, but we had no choice. We came up with a marketing strategy that allowed us to make deals of as little as 5,000 square feet. One of the most creative and successful things we did was to come up with our design-build program for smaller tenants. A firm could come in and we would design, build, and hand over the space to their specs without the hassle of construction. That was a new product at the time. In the end, we did very well.
To tell the truth, there wasn’t a lot of nail-biting. One advantage of that situation is that we had time on our side — construction was just starting. Also, a company the size of Boston Properties doesn’t have to worry that one project is going to have a huge impact on the firm.
I don’t think that deal taught me a lot. It just reinforced what I knew: You have to keep looking forward and deal with what you have.