Real Estate Agents Have a Reputation Problem

0:06Lilah Burke: Welcome to Deconstruct, a podcast from The Real Deal. I'm Lilah Burke.

0:10Hannah Kramer: And I'm Hannah Kramer. Today, we will talk to you about the pied-a-terre tax, the summer camp empire that is still falling apart, and a pretty prolific deed fraudster.

0:21Lilah Burke: And we'll also hear from Compass agent and American Real Estate Association founder Jason Haber. Let's get started.

0:31Hannah Kramer: All right. Today, we have Jason Haber with us. Jason, you are a Compass agent, but you're really an advocate for real estate, the founder of the American Real Estate Association. you sort of came at least into our line of sight a couple of years ago when you started pushing back against Kenny Parcell, who was the head of the National Association of Realtors at the time, and then ultimately come to found ARA and become this really sort of prominent voice for residential brokers and for the real estate industry more broadly. So first of all, welcome to the pod. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Happy to have you here.

1:08Hannah Kramer: So you were the subject of our magazine feature, The Closing. You must be running out of guests to profile because I was very flattered to get the call. Well, you were a great closing guest. I want to read this quote or this answer that you gave, and then I want you to explain it to us a little bit. So the question was, what is one thing you could change about the industry? And what you said is that there are too many darn agents, right? Too many darn agents. Explain that to us. As an advocate for real estate agents, how are you saying there should be less? Every year, Gallup does a public opinion survey, and they rank the respect that different industries have.

1:46Our industry at the last poll, which was done in December 2025, showed that we rank under both lawyers and car salespeople and customer approval. Now, you know the jokes about lawyers and car salespeople. So you have to try to be that low. So I look at that and I say, how did we go wrong? And we did some work into this. And it turns out a lot of people think about us the same way they think about Congress. They love their member of Congress, but they hate Congress as a body. And that's why Congress has a 12 % approval rating. But even this fall in a midterm wave election will have something like a 95 % re-election.

2:25In our industry, we have a lot of part-time agents who aren't true professionals. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't go to a heart surgeon who said they did this part-time. I think too often we make it so easy to get licensed and to retain your license that we open the door to too many people who end up being bad actors. I'm not saying that all part-time is bad. One of the things that's great about this industry is it allows for certain flexibility of schedules. You know, single moms, actors, actresses, people who have differing schedules can make it in this industry and can earn a good income.

3:02But there are also plenty of people who get their license because, quote unquote, it's good to have a license. You should just have your license. No one says that in law. No one says, I'm going to get my law license because it's good to have. But we're an industry of professionals. And what we do is guide people through what is generally speaking the most important financial transaction of their lifetime. Shouldn't that person be a professional? Shouldn't that person be held to as high a standard as your cardiologist? I argue they should be. And I think we have an industry where it's so easy to be licensed.

3:37We've opened the door. Five million agents out there chasing less than three million deals a year. And as a result, I think we've had too many bad actors. And unfortunately, the way the system is set up right now, it's designed for a floodgate of agents. Why? Because the states make money on origination and on dues renewals. And then, frankly, there are certain associations out there that the more agents there are, the more revenue it is for them because of things like the three-way agreement and how revenue comes in. So I think the industry is set up not for success when we open the door to so many agents who aren't true professionals.

4:16Lilah Burke: And you mentioned bad behavior. We cover a lot of bad behavior. Yes, you do. Sexual assault, something much not as extreme, which is, you know, setting up deals for yourself, things like that. Where does regulation come in with agents? How do you see that? Do you think there should be more regulation? Yeah, so I think the industry has to do a better job of self-regulating themselves and holding themselves to high standards. We always worry about too much regulation coming in and stifling good people. And so you want to strike a very careful balance with that. But I'll tell you, when it comes to bad behavior, like you mentioned, when I first got involved in fighting the problems that were happening at NAR with sexual harassment, it actually wasn't the problems in NAR and the harassment that drove me at first.

5:01It was the silence. And I didn't understand at the time why I was the only one first calling for his resignation and then calling for change at NAR. You know, being New York City agents, we're obviously not members of NAR. We're members of Rebni here. Rebni hasn't been a member of NAR since, I think, 1994. And I had just recently gotten licensed in Florida, so I was like six months an NAR member. I had no idea about their size and scale. When I first started talking about NAR, I had to actually write NAR on my hand in interviews because I was calling them the NRA. Like, I was very green at first.

5:39But to me, silence and indifference are the enemy. And I was really struggling with this. Why is no one else speaking up? And it turned out NAR is very powerful. At the time, it was extraordinarily powerful. Biggest trade group in America, one of the oldest trade groups in America, biggest political donor, on and on and on. That silence bothered me. And then the further I dug, the more I realized how deep this problem was. And you're talking about behavior. You know, a lot of the stories I've never shared with the people who came forward, both women and men who came forward with really horrible stories, not just at NAR, to be clear, well outside the organization, industry-wide, across the country, this was and continues to be a problem.

6:25Better now, but far from perfect.

6:27Hannah Kramer: But I'm wondering where the line is between, you know, this is professionalization that we can encourage as, you know, a trade group for the industry as advocates, or these are rules that we can put onto our members to encourage them to be more professional. And then where does that tip into something that you think, you know, should really be regulated by the public sector, by state or federal governments? I think the public sector can do a much better job on regulating licensure and renewal. One thing that's interesting is if you take these exams, for example, I just got my recertification in the state of Florida.

7:0630 questions, 10 % of the test were questions about NAR. NAR is not a governmental body. You can be licensed in the state of Florida, as I am, and not be a member of NAR, yet 10 % of the test is on a trade association. I think that's ridiculous. I think that's systemic around the country and needs to change. At the same time, some of what they teach you, for example, what year certain bodies were formed, the location, which city they're in, was it the capital, are completely unnecessary. It's very easy to get licensed. It's very, very easy to renew your license. And I think you want to strike a line.

7:47You don't want to make it impossible so that single mom, actor, actress can't get licensed. But you also have to realize that we have to be smart enough because we're not right now with the public. The public holds us in low regard, and that needs to change. And I think if we raise the standard, we elevate our industry, we'll work our way up that list. certainly get above lawyers. And I'd like to see us climb higher and higher. I think if the public really knew what we do and why we do it, that we would climb in public esteem. But we're just not there right now.

8:21Lilah Burke: And where does transparency figure into this? You know, where do you come down on something like private listings network? Yeah. So I think that we came out at ARA with a policy called clear collaboration. And clear collaboration is different from clear cooperation, which NAR has. What we believe in is mandatory sharing of listings amongst real estate professionals. So whatever firm you're in, if I have a private listing at firm X and you're at firm Y, you should have access to it. All colleagues should share listings. But who am I to tell a seller that they must be on the public market if they don't want to?

8:58Hannah Kramer: So do you see this concept of clear collaboration as one, you know, jibing with Compass's private listing strategy and two, with what your clients want? Yeah, so my clients are very excited about being on a private listing network. They like the idea of being able to preview a price with brokers and get feedback because days on market doesn't run. Once the clock starts, the difference of the caliber of offers that come in on day four or day 40 or day 400, if you're on that long, is very significant. When you price an apartment or home, you're using both quantitative data, which is what the comps show.

9:42What you're usually missing is qualitative data. What's the feedback real time? What private listings allow you to do is to get quantitative data coupled with qualitative data because sometimes they speak different languages. And when you take both together and you dispassionately look at the information that both are telling you, you can get the right price. Sometimes the comps can just be dead wrong.

10:06Hannah Kramer: As all of this private listings drama has been happening, it's also been this real peak for industry consolidation, right? You've seen Compass buying up a whole lot of other brokerages, which brings other people under your umbrella. At the same time, there seems to be a tension to me there in, you know, you're coming in with ARA and providing an alternative to NAR, at least in certain ways, right? do you see consolidation in the industry, you know, impacting you at ARA and also impacting, you know, the way that people think about real estate agents and where they should go to look for a broker, whether they should trust a broker?

10:42Yeah, I think consolidation had to happen, particularly in this time where you've had interest rates much higher for as long as they've been. And I think that the costs of marketing have been way, way up and that the industry benefits from this kind of consolidation, but also when brands maintain their own separate identities, which is happening at Compass International Holdings. So that's good. But what I also, what I love out there as I travel the country now is meeting with the small brokerage owners. You know, I just met with one yesterday who has 12 agents under them in a different part of the country.

11:18And they need support as well. And that's why it's important for them to be collaborating with Compass. And when you bring them together and they can compete and collaborate together, everyone wins. At the end of the day, what we want is what's best for the consumer. And I think when a 12-person firm can have access to information that a 340-person firm can, that it's really good for the consumer. So there's a place in this very big country of ours for both and for both to succeed.

11:48Lilah Burke: Okay. And to end off, if you had a magic wand, And what would you change politically to make things more affordable for consumers, to benefit the real estate industry? What would that look like? So here in New York, if I had that political wand, which I would very much like to have right now, we'd increase supply by making changes to 485x. We'd make structural changes to HSTPA passed in 2019, which has led to almost 60 ,000 vacant rent-stabilized units right now that are just sitting there. We would make changes to the FAIR Act because that's also brought down rental supply. What's happened is we've had a supply crisis here in New York City, and government has poured kerosene on that and fanned the flames of unaffordability.

12:36And so we've got to reverse that with this wand. Around the country, we would look at other ways to build more smartly. It's not just about adding housing. One of the things I talk a lot about is how housing relates to healthcare costs. Do you know that there are certain parts of the city, in NYCHA buildings, for example, but of higher incidence of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer. If we cure and improve NYCHA housing, we actually reduce public sector healthcare costs. Wouldn't that be great where healthcare costs in the public sector right now are spiraling out of control if we can rein those costs in.

13:16And we can do it with passive interventions into our housing. Often people don't think about how important housing is for other sectors of the economy. But with healthcare costs spiraling right now, we should be looking at how we can improve our housing stock to bring those costs down.

13:33Hannah Kramer: A lot of maybe wishful thinking, but at least ambitious and exciting ideas. That's what we do. And you guys are growing fast right now. We are really excited to see where you go. Jason, thanks for coming. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Awesome.

13:51Hannah Kramer: In our latest magazine, we had a feature from one of our freelance journalists that starts to get into a topic that's been in the political spotlight quite a bit recently. I know you've become really interested in this. So tell us a little bit about Joseph Makani and his deed theft empire.

14:09Lilah Burke: Sure. So this is my obsession for the week. And as you said, Hannah, deed theft is getting a lot of attention politically, but there hasn't been a lot of reporting here in New York to look at exactly how this sort of crime happens and to look at how this can happen at scale.

14:28Hannah Kramer: Okay, who is Joseph McConney?

14:31Lilah Burke: So Joseph McConney is sort of a big fish in the deed theft world, a sort of con man. Prosecutors have linked him to more than 800 deed transactions, and his empire at the height was worth more than$83 million. Makhani, specifically, you know, as a person, was born in Iran. He lived in the Great Neck area of Long Island and got involved in real estate, you know, a few decades ago.

15:00Hannah Kramer: As folks in Great Neck often do, we've covered quite a few Great Neck real estate operators, But Joseph McConaughey had a pretty illegitimate turn here, right?

15:09Lilah Burke: Yeah. So he became involved in some pretty unsavory activity in the 1990s, specifically with bid rigging. So at a foreclosure auction, you have these distressed properties and he would work with other bidders and, you know, sometimes with the folks who are running the auction to rig them to keep prices artificially low and score properties. And he was caught for this and charged in 1998.

15:36Hannah Kramer: So basically, he says to the other people at the auction, hey, you know, let me bid on this one. I won't bid on the next one. Let you have that. And we won't bid each other up at all.

15:45Lilah Burke: Yeah, and everyone gets sort of a cut. So that was sort of the first place we see him engaging in criminal activity. Then he gets involved in more deed theft, deed fraud. And his playbook here was to identify a vulnerable property, to transfer the deed through some sort of forgery, transfer to a second LLC, you know, develop a claim to the property and have it, you know, stamped by a court. And then to profit, to sell or get a mortgage, to flip the property or, you know, sometimes get a settlement from an heir.

16:19Hannah Kramer: So usually this is the kind of situation where, you know, an older person has passed away and it's not clear who's going to inherit their house, for example, right? And then Makani can come in and create this new chain of deed transfer that at least really muddies the water, right? But how does he start that?

16:40Lilah Burke: Yeah, so the vulnerable properties could be, it could be, like you said, you know, someone who dies without an immediate heir. It could be something else. But there is a first deed transfer, and that is where a lot of the direct forgery would happen. So there would be a forged signature and prosecutors linked some of these forged signatures back to prison inmates, to dementia sufferers, or to people who were just not at all real. And then there's a second deed transfer to an LLC. And then, you know, Makani would go to court and get a judge to, you know, sign off and really transfer the title to this LLC.

17:23Lilah Burke: You know, maybe it was murky before, but here is your title. And so then that's where he would be able to flip the property, sell it or, you know, get a mortgage.

17:33Hannah Kramer: And make his money. But he got caught, right? This is not an ongoing fraud, at least not right now.

17:42Lilah Burke: Yes. So he got caught by prosecutors who were tipped off by a neighbor of one of these properties. And he has been convicted of a couple of deep theft-related crimes for Manhattan properties. And he is yet to be sentenced. He is likely going to prison. But there's still all of these other deeds that have been transferred that, you know, have yet to be unwound and his empire is sort of yet to be really, really scrutinized.

18:16Hannah Kramer: One of the things that stood out to me here was, you know, there are 800 different deed documents that cite Joseph Makani in some way or another. He's only actually convicted on deed theft for, I think, three of them. So there are so many potentially other properties out here that have still kind of remained a part of this deed theft empire. And he was prolific, right? Right. And most of these fraudsters are not doing it at the scale that Joseph Makani was. Right. So we hear about this problem from our politicians. How prevalent do you think this really is?

18:52Lilah Burke: Yeah, something that the article talked about is the fact that the mechanics that allowed this level of fraud to happen are still really there. It's a little bit of a tough thing to combat. You have vulnerable homeowners. You have people who die without a lot of estate planning. A city that needs to register every deed that comes in. Judges that might have a hard time determining what's real and what's not. So the city has been paying a lot of lip service to efforts to prevent deed theft. But it is really a tough thing to combat. And I think we'll see if, you know, as things go on, if this is something that we're really able to prevent.

19:40Hannah Kramer: Yeah. So Joseph Makani's deed theft empire falling apart. But there could be others yet to rise.

19:48Lilah Burke: Yeah. Still very much an issue.

19:52Hannah Kramer: Let's run through a couple of the most important real estate headlines before we wrap up today. Since we left off in the spring, we've been tracking a lot of different political issues, especially here in New York. Lila, will you run us through one or two of them?

20:06Lilah Burke: Sure. I mean, I think the major thing to talk about here is the pied -à-terre tax, which has been kind of controversial lately. I mean, it was always unpopular with a segment of the real estate industry, but the rollout has been not great.

20:22Hannah Kramer: Botched, I think, at least a little bit, right?

20:24Lilah Burke: Tell us about what happened. Okay, so to refresh the pied-a-terra tax, Momdani introduced it, idea that they would tax second homes worth more than$5 million. Now, first, the city put out a list of all of those who might be eligible for the taxes, include addresses and names, and people really freaked out about this, said they felt like they were being doxxed, they felt like it was an invasion of privacy. Now, all of this information really is available in city public records. It's something we use all the time, right?

20:58Hannah Kramer: Yeah, and I think as journalists, we know that this kind of information is public. But what was interesting about this was just kind of the city shining a little bit of a light on this. You know, it is public information, but usually they don't draw attention to it when they're releasing it. We know it's there. We look at it. But most people don't. And so for some people, you know, they're finding out for the first time that your information about your home and your, you know, finances is kind of available. And that it seemed that seemed to upset a lot of people.

21:27Lilah Burke: Yeah, I mean, the city did say that they are legally required to put out this list by state law. But yes, people were not very happy with that. Then people started getting letters in the mail about being potentially subject to the tax. And a lot of people saying they were contacted at their primary residence, so not a pied-a-terre. People got very upset about this. You know, you needed to upload documentation to the website. People said the website wasn't working. They're hiring real estate lawyers. Just not really what people want, especially feeling like you really need to prove something. And I think this was potentially alienating to a segment of voters who, you know, might be pretty sympathetic to Mamdani's policies, who are wealthy but not second-home wealthy.

22:14Hannah Kramer: Yeah, it's kind of an interesting thing because I think with the pied-a-terre tax, it was very unpopular with our kind of tried-and-true real estate audience from the beginning, right? But there was this segment of folks who, you know, are homeowners in the city who are well-to-do or who maybe inherited a townhouse from their parents who bought it for, you know,$20 ,000 70 years ago. Lucky for them. But now they're getting this letter, they're a tried-and-true New Yorker, that says, we're not really sure that you live here, and you might have to pay really quite a large sum, something like$50 ,000 in some cases, to this second home tax.

22:51Hannah Kramer: People are very upset at having to prove their residency. It seems to feel like having to prove your loyalty to New York in some way. And there wasn't a huge window of time given either, right? It's like, in August? No, it was like a couple of weeks.

23:03Lilah Burke: I mean, there's a lot of discussion about, you know, why these people were targeted. Maybe they were registering their cards in other states. They registered to vote in a swing state or what have you. But yeah, people are not pleased about it. Not great headlines for the Mamdani administration here.

23:18Hannah Kramer: Yeah, so a little bit of a political fumble there. And then to jump into a kind of story of the summer for us, when we left off in the spring, once again, we were tracking the fall of this empire of summer camps held by Simad Holdings, which was run by two brothers from New York, the Shabzils. In the spring, we learned that they had raised$200 million on the Israeli bond market and then very quickly defaulted on that money, making it seem like, you know, these bondholders might really be out of luck and raising a lot of questions about what happened to this fresh financing money so quickly, especially when it was supposed to go towards camps that are by and large, you know, well-known, well-respected and profitable.

24:02Hannah Kramer: So since we left off in the spring, the Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the Shabzels and Simad Holdings. And we are very much hoping to get a hold of some of the documentation that they dredge up in their investigation to see, you know, can we figure out where did this capital end up? We know that at least some of it, something like$34 million, was diverted to the Shabzels or companies that they hold directly. So we're still sort of sorting that out.

24:30Lilah Burke: And they're also selling the camps, right, at bankruptcy?

24:33Hannah Kramer: They are, yes. They are starting to auction off a lot of these camps. And again, you know, these are by and large profitable camps that are very well-liked, camps that are well-known to people in and out of the real estate community, right? And you have a pretty wide variety of folks starting to put in bids on the camp and pretty, you know, good number value bids, right? You have everyone from operators of the camps who would, you know, kind of bring ownership of them back into camp hands, to David Zaslav, who has a family connection to one of the bigger camps on the list. All of these different people are coming in, offering to put forward, you know, pretty solid numbers for, again, these profitable camp properties, businesses.

25:17Hannah Kramer: So we're watching to see whether they can auction off the properties at a high enough price to get any money

25:23Lilah Burke: back to those bondholders who otherwise might be out of luck.

25:26Hannah Kramer: And of course, we want to see, you know, who from the real estate community ends up getting into the summer camp business.

25:33Lilah Burke: Well, lucky for kids and parents at camp, it seems like the camps will likely stay open, right?

25:38Hannah Kramer: It does. And it would be a real shame to see, you know, some real estate financial shenanigans be the death of some of these really beloved summer camps, I have to say. So hoping that whoever they go to ends up a better steward than the last ones.

25:53Lilah Burke: All right. Well, that's our episode for this week. Thank you for listening.

25:57Hannah Kramer: We have lots of exciting topics coming up over the next couple of weeks of Deconstruct. So we'll be back next Monday. See you then. Our script today was written by Lila Burke and Hannah Kramer, edited by Kara Eisenpress, and our in-room producers were Mary Jaduk and Usha Sukai. Our sound engineer and post-producer is Mila Miller.