Boomerang: Brokers dish on the properties they sell again and again

If there’s one thing Brown Harris Stevens brokers Julie Smith and Elise Witkin can count on in nearly 30 years of selling homes in New York City, it’s apartment #2/3 at 306 West 90th Street.

The pair have sold the Upper West Side co-op four different times since the summer 1995, with the most recent sale closing earlier this year. For Smith and Witkin, their involvement with the unit is a culmination of a decades-long effort to build a strong referral network. 

“It’s our little gem,” Witkin said. “We’ve been doing this for almost 30 years now, and most of our business is referral business, which we’re thankful for. And this is just a clear case of it.”

It’s not uncommon for brokers to represent the same property more than once. Often, brokers will represent a buyer in a deal who, in turn, hires them to sell it when they’re ready to move, or buyers who bought during a sponsor sale look to the developer’s broker’s expertise. 

“They sort of come to you with the expectation that you’re going to deliver on the advice that you originally gave them, that this was a great investment,” Compass’ Diana Sutherlin, who works with several developers on new construction projects in Jersey City, said. “They saw me as the expert on waterfront, the expert on luxury, the expert on that particular product.”

But other times — like in the case of Smith and Witkin — the resales result from more serendipitous circumstances and an acquired expertise in the building and its residents after repeated experiences with the property. 

The first time Smith and Witkin sold the apartment, it was a single unit in a brownstone, and they represented the buyers and the sellers in the $105,000 deal. The buyers also bought an adjacent apartment and combined the two into a three-bedroom duplex. 

Nine years later, the two sold the home to direct buyers again, this time for $1.3 million, followed by another sale in 2015 for $2 million, and finally, earlier this year for $1.8 million.

Each of the home’s buyers “reached out to us pretty much the entire time they were living there to give us updates on how much they loved it or, you know, do we think they should renovate the kitchen? Or do we think they should paint the brick,” Witkin said. 

Brown Harris Stevens’ Jamie Joseph has also sold the same pre-war, two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. The first was in 2013, when Joseph represented her college friend from Cornell as the buyer in the sale for $745,000.

Her friend then renovated the apartment, and Joseph helped her sell it again in 2016 for $956,000 to a friend from her all-girls high school in Washington, D.C. That friend also listed the apartment with Joseph in 2021, and she closed another sale for unit #3B at 150 East 93rd Street for nearly $890,000. 

“I love this apartment,” Joseph said. “It was like meeting a really cute guy and wanting to fix him up, that type of thing.”

Joseph has shared a special connection with each of the unit’s buyers, including the third round of buyers — an American woman married to a French man and with a mutual connection to the nurse at her son’s school who helped her husband open the bakery, L’Appartement 4F. 

“I have this magic energy with that apartment,”Joseph said. 

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