The Real Estate Broker Who Got Priced Out

by Brendan O’Connor

Welcome to Surreal Estate, a new column in which we will explore listings from the tumultuous New York City real estate market.

144 Carroll Street, #4
• $2,300/month
• 1.5 Bedrooms, 1 Bath
• 650 square feet

On Tuesday, I took a short tour of Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens — which used to be considered part of Red Hook, and is still served by the same zip code, 11231 — after a visit to one listing fell through. The broker, Realty Collective’s Josephine Ciliento, and I drove over to a $2,300/month, one-and-a-half bedroom fourth-floor walk-up down by the water, at 144 Summit Street. “This was called Carroll Gardens West. And then it was changed to Columbia Waterfront District,” Ciliento said. “Realtors like to rename neighborhoods.”

“What are they calling Ridgewood now?” she asked. “Bushwood?”

Born and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Ciliento is moving to Charleston, West Virginia, in a month. She was reflective about leaving New York, Brooklyn, and her family home behind. “It’s bittersweet for me, having grown up here,” she said. “It’s very sad. Because my mother got the home from her parents, and it’s not gonna happen that way.” She’s leaving — why else? — because New York is just too expensive.

Ciliento, who has been working as a broker for almost five years, was looking to make a move when she got offered a job in Charleston as a broker working on both sales and rentals. “I’m so prepared for West Virginia. It’s not like I’m coming from West Virginia into New York doing real estate. It’s the other way around,” she said. “It might be too relaxed for me, at first!” She’ll also be working as a property manager. “So I’ll be getting a salary.”

The rental market has been stagnant for months, Ciliento told me. In the past, she could expect to close between three and five deals a month in December and January. “I haven’t made a deal since December,” she said. The lull stretches back to the summer. “I’ve had a lot of clients relocating, and they say, ‘It’s not like this in my state, it doesn’t take this much to get an apartment.’ I’m like, well, it’s not New York City, that’s why. Totally different ball game, that’s why.”

241 Carroll Street, #4
• $2.75 million; Common charges: $209; Taxes: $442 (monthly)
• 3 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms
• 1,517 square feet

Elsewhere in Carroll Gardens, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old brownstone that collapsed in 2012 has been rebuilt and is back on the market as four multi-million-dollar condos. The developer, Gino Vitale, who bought Red Hook’s famous House of Pizza and Calzone in 2004, had plans at the time to put up another eighty apartments. “I don’t want to do anything to harm or ruin a gorgeous place,” he told the Brooklyn Paper in 2006.

Speaking of the new construction at 241 Carroll Street a few years later, in 2013, he told the Paper, “It will last 500 years. It’s going to be all steel and concrete.” One of the condos, #3, is already in contract.

Vitale was recently charged with one count of bribery in the third degree, a class D felony, in Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s recent sting. According to the district attorney’s complaint, Vitale bought off Department of Buildings Supervisory Inspector Wilson Garcia with a trip to Puerto Rico. Garcia was allegedly paid to “expunge Vitale’s complaints and alert him to impending audits.”

241 Carroll Street is right next to Public School 58. Select students at PS 58 are able to enroll in a dual-language, French-English curriculum — very attractive to parents of a certain demographic. “Being zoned for that school right there will raise your rent a few thousand dollars more,” another broker who works in Carroll Gardens and asked to remain anonymous told me. “Prices go up, it’s because of that school.”

This broker speculated further that landlords have a tendency to undermine their own listings by constantly seeking higher rents, even as the slowing rental market is signaling that they need to lower their rents — or at least stop pushing them up. “In some ways it’s not good for our business,” this person said. “But it gives me hope.”

“Landlords love it when they can get a high price. Except for one landlord, she’s a judge. She prices her apartments, like, seven hundred dollars below market, because she wants an opportunity to look at multiple applications, and she also wants to give it to the person who deserves it because she’ll keep their rent low so they can buy eventually. That’s her service to her community. And that’s how landlords should be.”

“People have an ethical code. It’s hard, because you can’t talk to a broker and ask, ‘How ethical is this landlord?’ You can usually tell by the price though.”