The wild card of Manhattan real estate is that nobody knows what the next challenge is going to be—there can be any number of issues that arise with a building. But since we’re no strangers to things going awry, we don’t get freaked out. It’s what we do. If you’re buying property for the first time, there can be so many Snafu’s that they’ll make you grab your hair and run in the opposite direction. The same if you’re selling. We walk you through it, and say, “It’s not that big a deal.” Or, if it is a big deal, we’ll say: “Let’s move on and find another apartment!”

Anything can happen. We once had a seller take out his air conditioner and replace it with a new one. The buyer said, “Why did you do that?”

The seller said, “What’s the problem? It’s a new air conditioner.”

The buyer said, “Well, we negotiated the contract based on having the old unit in.”

The seller put the old unit back.