Going through the obituaries to find an apartment may seem like a quaint practice in New York City, where real estate advertisements are nearly impossible to escape. But for real estate brokers in a tough market, getting listings from death could be gaining ground.
Indeed, so-called “ambulance-chaser” lists, which include the name of the deceased, the executor and the estate lawyer’s name, may be poised to get more use in New York as the market turns and brokers look for leads wherever they can get them.
“Right now in this market, you have to be creative, and I think these types of lists might be used more now,” said Max Dobens, vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “The brokers who are going to survive in this market are the ones who are resourceful.”
The methods for getting information about the deceased can vary. A New York trusts and estates lawyer, who asked not to be identified, said some firms probably send assistants to the Surrogate’s Court in Lower Manhattan to mine the database for potential listings.
According to information services at the Surrogate’s Court, the database provides all property holdings, the name of the deceased, their last-known address and the name of the executor of the estate.
But there’s also the more formal subscription-based Bernhardt Report, which has been around since 1973. The report provides its readers with a weekly list of new Surrogate’s Court entries without having to trek Downtown.
“My personal opinion is that people who use the Bernhardt Report will continue to use it, and it might get a bit more interest because people might have to dig deeper into the corners to do business,” said Jane Bayard, executive vice president at Warburg Realty, whose firm has been using the list for years.
Arthur Bernhardt, a retired court reporter who founded the report, sold the business two years ago, and it went from a daily to weekly listing.
Meanwhile, the above-mentioned trusts and estates lawyer said he is regularly contacted by brokers eager to help sell the estates he represents.
“Once orders are entered, wills are admitted to probate and an executor is listed, I get a boatload of solicitations,” the lawyer said. “It’s routine; it happens every time I open an estate.” He said so far, he hasn’t noticed any major uptick in those calls.
Some brokerages try to mitigate the nuisance factor of what are basically cold calls to lawyers about properties.
“We try to regulate the number of calls made to a listing in our office by having people initial a listing on the Bernhardt Report when they’ve called, so as not to be annoying,” said Bayard.
Barak Realty currently has the listing for William F. Buckley Jr.’s East 73rd Street apartment, which has an asking price of $24.5 million. Buckley, who is widely considered the patriarch of modern-day conservatism, died in February.
Barak Dunayer, president of the firm, said that the deal came about because of a previously existing relationship he had with Buckley. He said, however, that he was not Buckley’s broker before his death.
Speaking generally, Dunayer said brokers can benefit from their relationship with estate lawyers. “Brokers are in touch with estate lawyers, and some lawyers pass on those leads,” he noted.
“We don’t actively do this at Barak, but at some brokerages, when a lead comes up for someone who just died, they give the lead to the broker who sold in the building or area before,” he said. “They give it to someone who has experience with that type of property, like a classic seven apartment.
“I know some people who simply look at the obits; it’s definitely done,” said Dunayer.
Michael Gross, author of “740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building,” said he knew of a broker who kept a list of all of the elderly widows in the building.
“I think that the person who keeps a list of the living is far more macabre — waiting for someone to die as opposed to pecking at the corpse,” Gross said.
But some brokers, even those who personally knew the deceased, prefer not to take advantage of such a situation.
Angela Vita, who has run Vita Realty in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, for decades, said she and her colleagues often pass by neighborhood funeral homes and see the names of people they know listed outside.
“I’m not comfortable going to people who are in mourning,” Vita said. “I have never done it. We go in to pay our respects, and we tell the family to give themselves six months before they make any big decisions.”