Wrapping up a sale -- recommendations

We just closed on a place in Park Slope and I’d like to list a few recommendations from my experiences:

RE Agents/Brokers: Robert Kreiger (Corcoran) and Lori Snerson (Warren Lewis)
Although in the end our house was a Warren Lewis place and they don’t co-broke with Corcoran (meaning we didn’t have Robert represent us), we had good experiences with both of these brokers. Lori was the seller’s broker — she went out of her way and spent way more time than was necessary letting us into the house with contractors between offering and closing and was overall a great person to work with. This was especially important because we decided to go it alone once we figured out Robert wouldn’t work as a buyer’s agent, which left me on the defensive that we’d get out-maneuvered by some sneaky broker tricks. Lori was good about keeping both sides happy and the deal fair.

Mortgage Brokers: Alan Trachtman/Trachtman and Bach Mortgage
Alan was great — he twice saved us a huge amount of time by transcending the communication nightmare with the banks and getting things done. The first time was a title violation that the bank was considering holding the mortgage up until the seller redid the facade. He convinced them to let us do the work instead (we wanted control over the look, etc.). The other time was a phone call in to the higher up at the bank after they had spent more than two weeks dotting their i’s and were requesting unnecessary (and difficult to get) documentation when we were clearly qualified. Alan is one of the reasons why I think a mortgage broker is completely necessary — they can put pressure on the bank at key points to make the entire process much smoother and avoid weeks in delays (and you don’t pay them anyway).

RE Attorney: Bob Dubno
Bob seems to know everyone in the Park Slope area and was a very tempting choice given a few recommendations. However, his fee of around $3.5k for a large house closing is definitely not worth the price. Initially I chose him because I wanted someone that is on the ball and was willing to pay an extra thousand or so to have a responsive, efficient attorney. This was a huge mistake and waste of money. From what I’ve read since then on the forums, real estate attorneys are notoriously slow and poor on the customer service end of things, so I won’t fault him for necessarily being below average — my point is that he does not justify his higher fees. Couple of examples so people don’t think I’m randomly picking on him: he waited close to a week to get in touch with the bank re: a title violation, which caused us to delay closing for over a week because it moved the final stages smack into the middle of the Jewish holidays; the day of closing (one hour before closing to be exact), he finally gave us the certified check amounts, which exceeded our $50k buffer because of an escrow the bank threw on at the end for the facade renovation — the only reason we had enough money to cover these costs is because both my wife and my paychecks had direct deposited the day before… we had less than a thousand left in the bank afterwards and an additional bank transfer from our brokerage account would’ve taken at least a day. Scary!

Finally, contractors!
We will give a score card on these guys after they’re done, but so far we’ve chosen these people to do our contracting work based on recommendations and estimates.

Painting: Daniel Genova (rec from Lori(above), he’s an artist as well, so he has given us invaluable advice on colors in addition to a great rate for painting)
Facade work: Z. Abedin (rec from Brownstoner, he’s an honest guy that has good prior work and doesn’t charge too much)
Flooring: Verrazano (rec from all over, they give per sqft estimates, so it feels less like you could be getting a good deal if you had just negotiated more)
Drywall: Angelo Cingari (angie’s list, seems hard working, honest about what he can’t do, doesn’t charge too much)

Will add more as they come. Thought this would be handy for other people getting starting/being their own general contractor as the whole process was a mess for us. Let me know if you disagree!