Prosecutors on Thursday charged a 35-year-old man with identity theft and other crimes after he allegedly defrauded a would-be subtenant out of rent money. The case comes after prosecutors recently charged two other men with similar schemes.
In the latest indictment, prosecutors allege Anthony Pittman stole a woman’s identity and forged documents to rent a luxury apartment in Murray Hill, then sublet it to another tenant. The unit at the center of the case is a building on Third Avenue called the Aurora, where sources say one bedroom rents for about $4,600. Crain’s New York.
Just weeks before the charges were announced, prosecutors also charged 36-year-old Adam Chatwin false posing as a landlord of a studio in Midtown, only to pocket $32,000 in initial costs from four potential tenants. It turned out that Chatwin only sublet the house for a month.
The crackdown comes as rents are becoming increasingly expensive and the issue of affordable housing is at the top of the agenda for most New Yorkers, on the heels of mayoral elections in which candidates campaigned on solving the crisis.
But it also comes as the city’s rental agents, both on the landlord and tenant sides, are scrambling to redefine their value after the “agent fee ban” went into effect in June. With many owners recently footing the bill for broker fees – and wondering whether they should – brokers are looking for new ways to justify their role.
The scams may seem unrelated to the plight of rental agents, but as one agent noted a few months ago, one of the benefits of hiring an agent is vetting and verifying potential tenants.
“A landlord contacted me and I told him, ‘It’s going to cost you more money to hire me, but I’ll get you a qualified person,’” Shloma Hecht of Corcoran said in September. “You can do it yourself and maybe collect the rent up front. But this isn’t about the first month’s rent. It’s about 12 or 24 months’ rent.”
Landlords “think they’re going to save a few dollars doing it themselves,” Hecht added. “But real estate agents get a better idea of whether someone is serious or not.”
Not so fast…
The housing market in downtown Manhattan was already hot, but a few new, expensive homes could raise the temperature even further.
Earlier this week, filmmaker Neil Burger and his wife, architect Diana Kellogg, put their Tribeca mansion up for sale for $30 million. The couple bought the 40-foot-wide house at 4 Staple Street in 2002 for just $1.7 million.
Built in 1868, the property spans 4,100 square feet and has three bedrooms and three bathrooms. It also includes a 2,500-square-foot studio, office and wine cellar at 1 Jay Street, as well as approximately 3,000 potential additional square feet of air rights.
Burger, known for films like “Limitless” and “Divergent,” and Kellogg listed their whereabouts just a week after news of a new expensive listing dropped below 14th Street.
Developer Alf Naman is preparing to put a penthouse in his boutique apartment at 125 Perry Street on the market for as much as $85 million – a figure that could give a pending deal at a nearby new development a run for its money.
The penthouse, one of seven apartments in the former parking garage, will likely be the most expensive apartment in downtown and among the top five in all of Manhattan when it hits the market.
If it strikes a deal close to the asking price, it could challenge a penthouse at 140 Jane Street from Aurora Capital Associates, which found a buyer in August with an asking price of $88 million.
The deal hasn’t closed yet, so the actual price of the sale is still unknown. But unless the developer sells it at a discount of tens of millions, the transaction will likely set a new record for apartment sales in Downtown Manhattan, a bar that was only raised in March when an apartment at the Witkoff Group’s 150 Charles sold for $60 million.
However, there is likely another contender in the running to break the Downtown record: Atlas Capital and Zeckendorf Development’s 80 Clarkson. The team behind the project has been tight-lipped about the deals, but judging by some of the pricing released in the offering plan, there are certainly big ticket deals in store once the building starts to close.
NYC deal of the week
The most expensive deal recorded in city records this week was for an Upper East Side townhouse that sold for $16.8 million, or $2,700 per square foot. The five-story building at 48 East 81st Street hit the market last September asking $19 million.
The 7,400-square-foot home, built in 1924 and renovated in 2019, has six bedrooms and seven bathrooms. It also features seven marble fireplaces, a roof terrace and a solarium.
Sarah Wiliams and Peter Stack of Societe Real Estate had the listing, along with Madeline Hult Elghanayan, Allison Chalfin and George Vanderploeg of Douglas Elliman.
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