Wednesday Links

Bstoner, FWIW, I wasn’t so much implicating conspiracy, so much as complicity. Most steering happens because brokers assume LL’s and owners will be upset if they do otherwise. It’s not like the brokers and owners meet in a smoke-filled backroom and agree to keep the darkies out.

Likewise, I did not so much feel that you & Babs were in bed together, just that you might be afraid of biting the habd that feeds. And that would be part of the problem.

But, hey, I take your excuse at face value. We’re all human.

And, while I applaud bstoner’s including the link to the article, I smell a bit of commercialism in the fact that this was not featured as a headline topic.

Bstoner? Are you going to be part of the problem? Or part of the solution?

I’m a brownstone owner in an interracial marriage and I’ve had various strange experiences, not just with Corcoran, but with any number of brokers over the years. Bottom-line, I think money wins over racism. But, from time to time, you encounter somebody who is just too dumb to understand that their racism is actually harming their own self-interest.

One of the stranger experiences was with a broker who tried to steer us to Clinton Hill several years ago, presumably because I’m black and he felt we’d feel more comfortable over there, despite the fact that we could afford Park Slope and expressed a clear preference for Park Slope.

We eventually just got fed up with him and asked the office mgr to assign another broker to us. I think it was more that the broker in question was responsible for developing their Clinton Hill business, rather than any overt racism. Still, he could not get past his own agenda and my skin color.

I’m a white person who recently bought a house in Bed Stuy from a black Corcoran realtor. I looked at several Corcoran listings in the area and never had a problem. I did experience something weird with a realtor from another large agency. He was trying to steer us towards Clinton Hill because he thought we would feel more “comfortable” there. He was black. I don’t want to mention his firm, because I believe it was coming from this agent, not his company.