Send me the New York deal you can’t take. I’ll send you mine.

Why send it to me rather than to a name off a portal

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.
• 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 trade with 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.

If your client is leaving New York

I send referrals out constantly — my sellers have been moving to Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas for two decades, and that flow has not slowed down. I vet who I send them to, because they are my clients and my reputation too. I would far rather know a handful of people well than throw names at a relocation network. If you work a market where New Yorkers land and you do good work, introduce yourself before you need me.

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 unwinnable, but because they need a set of skills and a tolerance you may reasonably not want to develop. Refer it out 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.