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.

Fee: $1,000 per shot of espresso.

Breakup Broker
Breaking up from a crummy relationship is difficult, but disaffected lovers are far too busy internalizing the feeling that things aren’t working out to actually go through with it. Before cuffing season hits, a broker arrives to facilitate uncoupling, not by communicating any terms or requests or actually delivering the breakup message, but by making the restaurant reservation under their own name and briefly meeting the soon-to-be exes at the coat check. (Subject to multiple “can’t make it, must reschedule” text messages.)

Fee: 15% of all emotional investment in the relationship or $6,000, whichever is greater.

Baby Broker
Hospitals are far too busy billing patients by the square for toilet paper to figure out whose baby is whose. Once a newborn is delivered, the broker arrives to receive the baby in the…

Adam Campbell-Schmitt

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