Send me your New York referrals. I look forward to sending referrals back your way.

Why send it to me rather than to a name off a portal or a group thread

A referral is not a lead. It is your client, and your reputation with that client, placed in someone else’s hands where you can’t see what happens next. That is a genuinely uncomfortable thing to do, and most agents do it badly — a name from a relocation network, a form, and then silence.

Here is the case for sending it here.

• Your client gets me. Not an assistant, not a junior on the team, not whoever was free that Saturday. I own the firm, I do the work, and the person your client talks to in month four is the person they talked to in week one.
• You get told what is happening. Proactively, without having to chase me, including when the news is that nothing has happened. Most referral relationships die on exactly this.
• Your referral fee is likely to be larger, and that is arithmetic rather than a promise. A referral fee is a percentage of a commission, and a commission is a percentage of a sale price. I charge a full fee and I work to get the highest net result the market will actually pay. A percentage of a well-run sale at a strong number beats the same percentage of a discounted fee on a property that sold for less.
• I negotiate the whole deal, not just the number. Price is one term out of a dozen, and the other eleven are where most of the money quietly moves — who holds the risk on the inspection, what happens if the appraisal misses, how long the seller stays, what the closing date is actually worth to the other side. Chess, not checkers. Your client feels that in the result and you feel it in the fee.
• My structure lets me shape the file around the client, and keep it quiet. I own the brokerage, so there is no policy manual deciding how your client’s matter gets handled and no office that needs it closed this quarter. If the situation calls for a marketed exclusive instead of an open listing, or for a sale that is never discussed outside three people, I can simply do that. An agent inside a franchise usually cannot, and often cannot tell you why.
• It is safe to send me a hard one. This is most of the point. A guardianship sale, an occupied estate property, a matrimonial where the parties are fighting through their agents, a hoarding condition, a co-op board that has already rejected two buyers, a property that needs a court to approve the sale. These are the files a generalist regrets taking. They are the ones I specialize in, and I won’t hand the client back to you halfway through.
• I have more ways to serve the client than most brokers do. I hold more than one New York broker’s license — my own independent brokerage and an associate broker’s license with a firm affiliated with the national REALTOR® association — so a property can go out through a non-association listing service with full syndication, or through the association’s MLS, or as a marketed exclusive, depending on what the client’s situation actually calls for. Most brokers have one route and have to make the client fit it.
• I want the relationship, not the transaction. I would rather build a short list of people I send referrals to and receive them from for the next fifteen years than collect one-way referrals. If you send me something and I handle it well, I want to be sending you my clients when they move to your market.

If your client is moving to New York

Or has inherited a house here. Or is divorcing and the marital residence is in Queens. Or owns a building here they have never seen. Refer it, sign a written referral agreement, and get paid at closing like any other broker-to-broker referral. New York law expressly permits a New York broker to compensate a person regularly engaged in the brokerage business in another state.

I refer out, too

When my clients leave New York — my sellers have been moving to Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas for two decades — I refer them to agents I have vetted, under a written referral agreement. They are my clients and my reputation too, so I would far rather know a handful of agents well than throw names at a relocation network or pick one out of a referral-group thread. If you work a market where New Yorkers land and you do good work, introduce yourself before I need you: where you work, what you do best, and how you keep a referring agent informed.

If you have a New York client and a situation you would rather not handle

Some files cost more than the commission justifies for a generalist — not because they are impossible, but because they need a set of skills and a tolerance you may reasonably not want to develop. Refer it to me and take a referral fee instead of eight months of aggravation and a client who ends up unhappy with you for something that was never your fault.

You are not losing that client. Handled properly, you are the person who knew exactly who to send them to, which is a better thing to be remembered as than the person who struggled through it.

Some referrals I have closed in the past five years

Fourteen files across six counties. The fee is agreed in writing before the introduction and paid at closing. Half the sales I closed in this period came to me from another agent.

Client names and addresses are omitted deliberately — the same discretion your referral would get.