Now I understand why I see so many fellow Yelpers advocating for the option to give less than a star, 0 stars, -99 stars; my god, we really need that option for businesses that clearly do not give a damn about the people they service.
Last year I had the greatest misfortune of attempting to use Keith Frazier's services to find an apartment in Brooklyn. Unlike many brokers, he doesn't actually show you any of the apartments personally. He sends you to the addresses that have apartments in your price range and calls the super to let them know you're coming. This is all fine and dandy; as a New Yorker I don't need a tag-along broker showing me the joints, but every place he sent me to had a problem. One had an incredibly rude super who made snide comments to me the entire time he showed me the apartment. A second super refused to even show me a place, saying he didn't show apartments after 5 pm despite the fact Frazier had made an appointment for me. Another apartment was littered with mouse and giant roach traps. Meanwhile I'm bracing myself against all his pet names "sweetie, baby, honey" because I'm a New Yorker so I'm used to it.
Then he turned my attention to apartments "under renovation". This was a relatively new concept to me, but I was assured by family members it was fairly common.
I was directed to a dump of an apartment, but the super said to only visualize the space, because everything would be replaced and it would look like a "brand new apartment." It was a pretty good space, so I went with it, met Frazier at his "home office" to seal the deal (he refused to take anything but cash for his brokers fee by the way, no paper trail) and waited a month and half for the renovations to be finished. Not only did they keep pushing back the move-in date (and I was under a pretty strict time constraint), but I could not have been more disappointed at the finished product. There was a huge hump in the bedroom floor, the hallway floor was slanted, the walls were coated in cheap paint, the kitchen was done in what was clearly the cheapest tile available (yeah, the EXACT same style as the $5 a tile option in the original Sims game), the plywood closet door looked like they picked it out the scrap yard (it matched no other door in the apartment), and the baseboards were a mosaic of cracks and gaps that a large rat could get through without collapsing its vertebrae.
All in all, I was dissatisfied and asked if there were any other apartments I could look at it because there was no way I could move into that one in that condition. Frazier refused to show me any others and also refused to return the $900 broker fee I had paid him, claiming that he "delivered me an apartment" and that it wasn't his fault I was choosing not to take it. Then he claimed I signed some ridiculous contract with him, which I never did, and when I asked him to produce said document with my signature, he "couldn't find it" and told me to "take him to court". He got loud with me, hurled insults over the phone, even went so far as to call me "confrontational" and hang up the phone on me and stop returning my emails.
The KICKER? Almost all the apartments he sent me to turned out to be NO FEE apartments that you can go through the MANAGEMENT COMPANY YOURSELF to look at! He basically gets a list that anyone can walk into their office and ask for, then sends you out to see them and collects a fee for it!
I felt cheated...violated...and MURDEROUS. It was the worst consumer experience I have EVER experienced. For someone who has an autistic daughter, I would expect him to be more of a good samaritan, however, it is clear that he is nothing more than a greedy con-artist running a seedy operation from his home and calling himself a broker. For the love of GOD, Buddha, the atheist's creed, don't give this guy your business. Stick with honest Brooklyn brokers like Tariq Hakim with AIM Realty, or Terance Philip. read more