She Told Her Client Not to Buy And Got 12 Referrals • Frances Katzen

Keeping It Real Podcast • Secrets Of Top 1% REALTORS ® • Interviews With Real Estate Brokers & Agents

In this episode of Keeping It Real, host DJ Paris interviews Frances Katzen, a leading luxury real estate agent in Manhattan. The conversati

Key takeaways

• Frances Katzen uses 'The Katzen Report' to provide visual, opinionated market updates rather than generic, boring newsletters.
• The Manhattan luxury market is currently navigating uncertainty caused by high interest rates and the rollout of the pied-à-terre tax.

Main topics

• Luxury Real Estate
• Marketing Strategy

Notable quotes

The ultimate revenge is success.

Conclusion

Authenticity, discipline, and a willingness to provide honest, expert

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Would you tell a buyer not to buy the house? Well, my guest did. The client waited seven months, bought something better, and then sent her 12 clients some of the biggest names on Wall Street. She runs one of Manhattan's top luxury teams, and she'll show you why having an opinion is the most profitable thing you can ever do. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping It Real is brought to you by Real Geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren't converting? Well, Real Geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose Real Geeks as their technology partner. Real Geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real Geeks also includes an easy-to-use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest, and have great follow-up conversations. Real Geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness. Visit realgeeks.com forward slash keepingitrealpod and find out why realtors come to Real Geeks to generate more business. Again, visit realgeeks.com forward slash keepingitrealpod. And now, on to our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Corded.io. Are you looking for agents to join your brokerage or team? Now, as a real estate recruiter, I can tell you the answer is always yes. but most agents aren't looking to move right now. So how do you know who to contact? 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Now, if you are looking to grow your brokerage, Corded.io is the best tool out there. Visit Corded.io to schedule a demo. Again, that's Corded.io. And now, on to the show. Speaker 1 (3:04) Welcome to Keeping It Real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And today I'm really excited to talk with our guest, Frances Katzen of the Katzen team at Douglas Elliman in New York City. So let me tell you more about Frances. So she leads one of the top teams in real estate in Manhattan. in particular on the luxury side. She's consistently ranked among Douglas Elliman's top 10 teams since 2010. She's built her business representing an international clientele of financiers, investors, developers, ultra high net worth individuals across the New York market known for her candor, her data driven approach. Frances is a frequent media commentator on luxury real estate, buyer behavior, market trends, housing policy, et cetera. Before she got into real estate, she was a professional ballerina. performing with American Ballet Theater, Miami City Ballet, and the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center. She credits the discipline, resilience, and precision of her dance career with shaping the way she approaches both her business and her clients. Today, I want everybody to follow her on Instagram, Frances Katzen, F-R-A-N-C-E-S-K-A-T-Z-E-N. We'll have a link to that in the show notes and the description. Frances, welcome. Speaker 2 (4:30) What a treat to be here. Thank you so much for having me, DJ. Speaker 1 (4:33) Well, the treat is all ours because I am super interested in hearing your story. So, okay. So I'm going to start with a stat that I just found. So in the week before Labor Day, buyers in Manhattan signed contracts on 13 homes asking $4 million or more. Not one of them was over $10 million. So that was the weakest week in New York since 2023. And it came in a year where your second quarter was like a record median. So tell me more about what's going on in New York. Speaker 2 (5:10) Look, it's trying to recalibrate. We've had a lot of policy change, tax implementing, a botched rollout, compounded with a sprinkle of high interest rate, and then a dollop. of fear then you mix that cocktail up and you've got people going yes no yes no yes no the bottom line in my humble opinion having done real estates for almost 20 years is that there's an ebb and flow and there's always a fear factor and a pause when legislation comes into effect we had the largest bonus payout in a decade that was issued this past year, which is what we saw play into our Q2 performance. We had 39 % uptick of contracts signed between 10 and 20 million. And Speaker 1 (6:00) then we Speaker 2 (6:00) had 27 % uptick in contracts signed between five and 10. The most compacted and impacted market is usually the two to five, because that leverage is really key to the buyer. meaning they need a nice low interest rate to make the numbers make sense yeah Speaker 1 (6:21) now Speaker 2 (6:21) this pied-a-terre tax that is you know a process of phase one and phase two phase two basically goes into effect july 1 2028 and it's basically up for grabs yes it's in con conversation but It vacillates between will it be an average over the past five years of sales? Will it be predicated? It's most likely going to be predicated on the valuation of the sale. And it's for people who are not primary residents here in New York. And it's targeted for five million and above. But it's also effective and in effect for one to three family dwellings. So the co-op and condo market are going to get impacted. And there's a lot of misinformation. You know, the land value is the first phase of this pied-à-terre tax, which has happened. And the rollout went to, made public record, which is now in court because it was so botched, meaning they named people that were not even a pied-à-terre. recipient. People that have been living in their home for 25 years in Staten Island are not up for grabs on the pied-a-terre tax from the guy at Stella Tower. It's just not happening. And so in the spirit of that, I think we are seeing a lot of pause. There are ways around it, but it's a change of time. Speaker 1 (7:56) Yeah, I was going to go into the Pierre Auteur tax because you had written an article about it back in June. And it's been live since July 1st, I think. And so how has it impacted your personal business? Speaker 2 (8:13) It's hard to say because summer is usually where we slow down. So we're just ramping up now. So I don't have a pulse on it just yet. What I find fascinating about this whole process is that we don't have enough inventory. We are down on inventory, which is creating somewhat of a false demand, if you will. So the adjustments that we're seeing hasn't impacted price yet. But that might change now that we're back. You know, it's hard to say yet. We don't know. I don't know yet. Speaker 1 (8:47) You've published the Katzen Report every month, I believe, since 2007, which is amazing. Speaker 2 (8:54) Yes. So Speaker 1 (8:55) you have more than 100 issues. Speaker 2 (8:56) Yeah. Walk Speaker 1 (8:58) me through building one of these. What's in it? Where does the data come from? Who touches it? How many hours does one take you? You know, that kind of thing. Speaker 2 (9:08) Well, you know how when you start as a new agent, they always say, oh, you need to have a touch campaign. You should have a newsletter. And they give you these templates. And I was like, throw that away. Yeah, nobody. I Speaker 1 (9:19) wrote an article once called Nobody Wants to Read Your Newsletter. Speaker 2 (9:23) It's so apropos. Honestly, it's true. So I thought, how can I grab people where they don't gloss over and delete it? Because of course, they're going to delete it. But how do you grab them? So I thought if I were getting, I'm a visual person, I like to see things. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if we had a big flash page that are all your properties rotating. So you get eyeballs to the product outside of the mainstream market and then have an opinion. Don't be so politically correct. It's so boring. And, you know, we touch upon it. It's like, but isn't it like a white picket fence? Yay. And I love to eat. And it's like a, it's like a hinge profile, you know, and I'd like to take slow walks on the beach. And, you know, have a pet. And I thought, God, that's so bloody boring. Let's have an opinion. And it is provocative. You know, highest price sold. Is the market really down? Ooh, that'll get people. And so it grew from there. And it was also a way to track because you can, you have these abilities to see how many people are actually opening it, but then how many people actually clicking into the link and then getting a feedback. It was really nice. We started to build it. I had one guy, an