Consulting & advisory
Paid advisory work for owners, attorneys, accountants and fiduciaries — on a fee, with no listing attached and no obligation to ever hire me to sell anything.
For most of my career I gave this away. Someone would call with a genuinely difficult real estate question — what to do with a building, whether a renovation was worth it, whether the offer on the table was any good, how to handle a property nobody in the family agreed about — and I would spend an hour, or four, or a month of intermittent attention, and take nothing for it unless it eventually turned into a listing.
That arrangement has a problem, and it isn’t only that I wasn’t paid. It’s that free advice is worth what it costs. If the only way I get compensated is by eventually selling something, then every piece of advice I give you is standing next to a conflict of interest, and you have to discount it accordingly. When the honest answer is don’t sell, or don’t buy that, or keep it and refinance, the free-advice model is structurally bad at delivering it.
So I charge for the thinking. You get advice from someone whose compensation does not depend on which way the advice comes out, and I get to spend real time on your problem instead of squeezing it between showings.
You are paying for judgment, not for a transaction. If the right answer is to do nothing, you will hear that, and it will still have been worth the fee.
Every engagement is quoted in writing before I start, and I’ll tell you which structure I think fits your situation rather than the one that pays me most. Fees are negotiable and not set by law.
Twenty or thirty minutes to hear the situation and tell you honestly whether I’m useful to it. Some of the time the answer is that you need an appraiser, an accountant, a litigator or a contractor, and I’ll say so and point you somewhere sensible. That call costs nothing and never has.
What I’m going to do, what you’re going to get, what it costs and roughly when. Nothing starts until you’ve agreed to it in writing, and the number doesn’t move afterward unless the scope does.
Property inspection where it’s relevant, the documents and numbers, market evidence I gather rather than recall, and conversations with whoever else is advising you — counsel, accountant, lender — because advice given around the other advisors tends to be wrong.
In writing, with the reasoning shown, not a verbal impression. Fiduciaries in particular need a document that demonstrates why a decision was made, and that is most of what I’m producing.
The questions that come up two weeks later when you actually try to act on it are part of what you paid for. I don’t bill for the phone call clarifying my own advice.
Every one of these engagements began as a conversation, not a listing.
Diallo is one of the most organized, efficient, hard working realtors I’ve encountered in my career in Real Estate Law. We have working together on countless closings, and I have NEVER had a regret recommending him to client, and have continuously marveled at how thoughtful and professional an individual Diallo is.
Diallo took over the renovation and sale of our parents’ properties and carried through even past the final sale and continued making necessary contacts in order to finalize unforeseen administrative details.
I had great respect for Diallo’s abilities from consulting work he had done for my agency in his earlier career as a network engineer. When my wife and I needed a realtor to sell our home, I thought of Diallo immediately, and the choice was completely validated by his performance, which was superb in every respect.
It depends entirely on the scope, which is why I quote after I understand the problem rather than publishing a rate card. An hour of counsel on a discrete question, a written disposition strategy for a single property, and a full portfolio review for a family with six buildings are three genuinely different pieces of work. You will have a number in writing before I begin, and if the scope turns out to be smaller than expected, the fee comes down. Fees are negotiable and not set by law.
No. The engagement letter says the fee is earned regardless, and on fiduciary and court-facing work I will waive the listing in writing so nobody can argue the advice was shaped to win it. If, after it’s over, you want me to sell the property, I’d be glad to — but that is a separate conversation, a separate agreement, and entirely your idea.
Partly, and where you need one of those I’ll tell you. An appraiser produces a valuation to a defined standard; I am not a New York State certified or licensed appraiser and what I produce is a Fair Market Valuation, not an appraisal. A management consultant knows process. What I bring that neither does is twenty-four years of actually transacting in these specific markets — what buyers in this neighborhood respond to, what a building like this really trades at, how long it really takes, and which of the plausible plans fall apart in practice. That’s the part that doesn’t come out of a database.
Often, yes — and where it would create a conflict, I’ll tell you before you hire me rather than after. Court-facing and fiduciary work is the case where separation matters most, and there I keep the roles apart deliberately and put it in writing.
Yes. Broker-to-broker consulting on a difficult listing, a complicated file, or a transaction structure nobody in the office has seen before is a real part of this. Details for agents and brokers.
No, and I’m careful about the line. I will tell you what a property is likely to do in the market and what the real estate consequences of a decision are. Whether a structure works for tax, whether a trust permits something, and what a court will accept are questions for your accountant and your attorney, and my work is meant to be handed to them, not to replace them.
The first conversation is free and always will be. What follows it is a quoted, written engagement — and you decide whether there is one.
