New Jobs for NYC Apartment Brokers

Adam Campbell-Schmitt
3 min readFeb 7, 2020

Brokers gonna broke.

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

In an eleventh-hour move, the New York City Council recently passed legislation essentially banning the city’s notorious real estate brokers from charging unwitting tenants a fee for their unrequested services. It could potentially bring equity to an out-of-control rental market while wiping out an entire industry of enterprising middlepeople.

But brokers gonna broke. So here are a few new gigs NYC’s out-of-work real estate brokers should consider:

Uber Broker
Anyone who has opened a rideshare app in NYC knows it’s almost always surge pricing, and in such a competitive market, drivers are far too busy harassing or otherwise making their current riders feel uncomfortable to figure out who they’re picking up next. When a customer hails an Uber, a broker arrives at the same time as the vehicle to verify the rider’s star rating and open the car door.

Fee: 30x what taking a yellow cab would have cost.

Starbucks Mobile Order Broker
Starbucks staff are far too busy restocking cake pops to field dozens of extra orders coming in via the app. A broker accepts multiple orders (with $75 application fee, each) and, based on Experian credit scores, prioritizes the customers most likely to actually show up to pick up their coffee.

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Adam Campbell-Schmitt

A writer and editor living, laughing, and loving in the NYC suburbs. Twitter: @adamcswrites