Occupy Corcoran: Do The Facts Add Up?

At the end of the day on Friday, we received an email designed to look like a tip from someone who had just happened to stumble across a blog-worthy scene. “Just spotted this,” was the text of the email, accompanying the headline “Protest in front of Corcoran FG.” Over the weekend, as we read up on the protest in places like the Village Voice and Curbed, it became clear that this email was actually from the person staging the protest himself. And why the protest? The blog posts told the story of a homebuyer who had been in contract to buy a Clinton Hill studio through Corcoran only to find out two days before closing that the it lacked the proper C of O. This hopeful buyer was understandably upset when the deal fell apart as a result, especially since he’d already committed to leave his existing apartment. According to Patch, when the buyer expressed his frustration, Corcoran offered to refund his out-of-pocket expenses, an offer he rejected. Instead he decided to embark on his own negative publicity campaign that has included in recent days (a) putting up large banners outside the Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights offices of Corcoran that question the firm’s ethics and (b) picketing two open houses of a totally unconnected Corcoran broker with signs and fliers, threatening her livelihood and reputation and potentially the economic well-being of the sellers themselves.

The buyer readily admits that Corcoran didn’t do anything wrong legally (the concept of caveat emptor applies in these situations) but feels that the broker, and by extension the company, lapsed ethically by failing to disclose the lack of C of O, despite not even knowing himself whether the broker was aware of the C of O problem; he also holds Corcoran at fault more generally for a perceived lack of empathy. (“My grevences [sic] largely stem from Corcoran’s reaction to this problem,” he wrote us in an email. “No apology until provoked, no attempt to resolve it until asked.”)

While we understand that this young man (he’s 25) feels frustrated and burned and wants to blame someone, we think naivete and recklessness have ruled the day. First off, there’s a basic breakdown in his logic: Why would a broker spend months showing an apartment and ushering a deal through its various stages if he or she knew it was going to break down when the lawyer or mortgage company did a C of O search? (He even told us that there’s no indication on the DOB website that the C of O has expired.) What’s more, according to the buyer, the seller had a history of hiding the C of O problem from another brokerage firm, so why so quick to blame it on Corcoran? Furthermore, as we understand it, a buyer’s lawyer typically checks the C of O much earlier in the process so the buyer or his lawyer certainly bears some responsibility for the fact that this discovery came out so late in the process. (“Could my lawyer have determined this earlier? Yes,” he wrote to us.)

So, in summary, could it turn out to be possible that the broker in this case was either lazy or incomplete in his or her due diligence? Sure, it’s possible but so far we’ve not even seen any proof of that. Is it fair to blame Corcoran for the existence of the caveat emptor law? Nope. Is it fair to claim that a single broker’s failure to track down the right C of O information is somehow indicative of a company-wide lack of ethics, especially in an industry where each broker is really an independent contractor? Seems like quite a stretch to us. And was it a fair and reasonable step to randomly select a broker with no connection to the original incident other than her company affiliation and to picket and harass potential buyers? Definitely not.

Disclosure: Corcoran is a frequent advertiser on Brownstoner and the broker whose open house was randomly selected for picketing on Sunday sold us our brownstone seven years ago–amazingly, without failing to disclose that the house’s C of O was a Single Room Occupancy or perpetrating any other ethical lapses.