If there’s one thing Brown Harris Stevens agents Julie Smith and Elise Witkin can rely on in their nearly 30 years of home sales in New York City, it’s the apartment 2/3 at 306 West 90th Street.
The pair have sold their Upper West Side co-op four times since the summer of 1995, the most recent closing earlier this year. For Smith and Witkin, their work with the department is the culmination of decades of hard work building a strong referral network.
“It’s our little gem,” Witkin said. “We’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, and the majority of our business is referrals, and we’re grateful for that. This is just one clear example.”
It is not uncommon for a broker to represent the same property multiple times. Often, brokers will represent buyers in transactions while buyers hire them to sell properties as they prepare to move, or buyers buying during sponsored sales seek the expertise of developer brokers.
“They come to you expecting you to deliver on what you originally gave them, and it’s a great investment,” says Compass’ Diana Sutherlin of New Construction in Jersey with several developers Cooperation City, said. “They see me as a beachside specialist, as a luxury specialist, as a product-specific specialist.”
But other times—as in the case of Smith and Witkin—resales are the result of more serendipitous circumstances, and expertise about the building and its inhabitants gained after experiencing the property repeatedly.
When Smith and Witkin first sold the condo as a single unit in a brownstone, they represented the buyer and seller in the $105,000 transaction. The buyer also purchased an adjoining apartment and combined the two apartments into a three-bedroom duplex.
Nine years later, the pair sold the home again to an immediate buyer, this time for $1.3 million, then again in 2015 for $2 million and finally earlier this year for $1.8 million .
Every homebuyer “contacts us pretty much the entire time they’ve lived there to give us an update on how much they like it, or, you know, do we think they should renovate their kitchen? Or do we think they should Paint the bricks,” Witkin said.
Jamie Joseph of Brown Harris Stevens also sold the same prewar two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. The first time was in 2013, when Joseph sold it for $745,000 on behalf of her Cornell friend as the buyer.
Her friend then renovated the apartment, and Joseph helped her sell it again in 2016 for $956,000 to a friend at the D.C. High School for Girls. The friend also listed this condo with Joseph in 2021 and she completed another condo sale #3B at 150 East 93rd Street for almost $890,000.
“I love this apartment,” Joseph said. “It’s like meeting someone really lovely and wanting to fix him, stuff like that.”
Joseph had special ties to each of the buyers of the unit, including the third round buyer – an American woman who married a French man and developed a mutual connection with the nurse at her son’s school who helped her Husband opened bakery L’ apartment 4F.
“That apartment brought me magical energy,” Joseph said.
