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‘Faster than you can keep up’: the highs, lows, and hustle of NYC housing brokers | New York
When Keyan Sanai moved to Manhattan and started working as a real estate broker in 2014, he was eating 12 to 15 cans of tuna a week to keep costs low. “I said to my friend, ‘My mouth tastes like a fistful of old pennies all the time,’” he says. After a doctor’s visit, he found out he had mercury poisoning. His first few years as a broker were rough. Working at a “boiler room” brokerage, he got acquainted with what he calls the “dark underbelly” of the industry. “The script is basically to lie to people: ‘Put up [an ad] that says ‘no fee’, and once you get ’em…
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The $300m flip flop: how real-estate site Zillow’s side hustle went badly wrong | Real estate
Online shopping can be dangerous, as the US home website Zillow has belatedly appear to understand. Even though quite a few of us wasted numerous several hours through the pandemic clicking by serious estate listings on Zillow and daydreaming about the type of pad we’d invest in if we had deep pockets, the business was jogging a facet-company, separate from its house looking web-site, in which it deployed algorithms to assistance it purchase properties on their own and then flip them. It did a lot of shopping for, but hasn’t been so terrific at the promoting. This 7 days the corporation introduced that its residence-shopping for division, Offers, had shed…