M6| Friday, March 20, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
The
Pandemic
missions for their income,
to brainstorm new ways to
sell high-touch investments
in a no-touch world.
“I have been in business
for 40 years, and this looks
like a cross between 9/11
and 2008,” said Manhattan
luxury real-estate agent
Donna Olshan. She said the
crisis has brought together
the worst of both the ter-
rorist attacks and the finan-
cial crisis—the deaths, the
business closings and the
financial meltdown.
The degree of disruption
to the real-estate market
has varied across the coun-
try, depending on each
state’s reported number of
cases and their different re-
sponses to the spread, ac-
cording to people familiar
with each market. Some
agents fear it is just the be-
ginning, especially if cities
go into full quarantines.
“We might see a period
where things come to an
absolute halt,” said Michael
Graves, a New York agent
with Compass.
The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention is
recommending that all
gatherings of 50 people or
more be postponed or can-
celed across the country,
and that people maintain a
distance of at least 6 feet
from each other, essentially
rendering open houses im-
possible. In cities like New
York and San Francisco,
such precautions are man-
datory. Some real-estateagents are also backing a
petition to ask the National
Association of Realtors to
halt open houses nation-
wide.
In the Seattle area, the
country’s first flashpoint for
the spread of the disease,
the local multiple-listings
service on Monday disabled
agents’ ability to input,
search or view open-house
information in a bid to curb
large gatherings and pro-
mote social-distancing mea-
sures. The move followed
Gov. Jay Inslee’s emergencydeclaration that temporarily
closed bars and restaurants
and capped all public gath-
erings at 50 people.
Driven by low inventory
and well-paying technology
jobs, the hot Seattle market
had shown little signs of
slowing. In early February,
Windermere agent Anna
Fortune Riley said the po-
lice had to be called in to
direct traffic at an open
house on the city’s east
side that had attracted over
200 people.
Last weekend, even as vi-
rus anxiety mounted and
case numbers ballooned, two
open houses in nearby New-
castle were slammed with
people, said their listing
agent, Sean Nielsen of the
Nielsen RE Group & Realog-
ics Sotheby’s International
Realty. One property, a four-
bedroom house asking $1.05
million, attracted between
20 and 25 groups. “People
still want to see houses be-
cause they have nothing else
to do. They also still need
housing,” he said.
Mr. Nielsen said he and
the other agents tried to
keep groups going in oppo-
site directions to maintain
social-distancing measures,
and noted there is a typical
natural spacing over a three-als in the industry are con-
cerned for their jobs.”
In the Washington, D.C.,
area, real-estate agents
speak of a pause, rather
than a rupture of their
business.
Michael Rankin, principal
and managing partner of
TTR Sotheby’s International
Realty, said starting on
Monday, the firm adopted a
policy of holding no open
houses for 14 days. Mr.
Rankin had two closings on
Monday, one on a $4 mil-
lion single-family home in
the upscale Kalorama
neighborhood, the other on
a $1.8 million property in
nearby Dupont Circle.
“Everybody looked at
each other and said, ‘These
are interesting times, but
we need a place to live and
we’re really excited about
this,’ ” said Mr. Rankin. He
noted that the buyers
brought their own pens to
the closing and sat far away
from the lawyers.
In some markets, deals
are starting to fall through,
with some buyers citing
losses from the stock-mar-
ket plunge. Others are ex-
pressing concerns about
where home values will be
after the virus subsides.
“There are going to be
layoffs,” said Janice Corley,
CEO of Re/Max Premier
Properties in Chicago. “This
has a big effect on our buy-
ers because they’re the
owners and CEOs of these
companies.”
Shana Rohde-Lynch, an
agent with Compass in
Marin County near San
Francisco, was on the verge
of closing a deal for a six-
bedroom home listed for
$3.77 million in the tony Bel-
vedere area. It had been in
escrow for nearly a month.
On Sunday night—the day
before the financing contin-
gency was due to be re-
moved—the buyer’s agent
called and said the buyer
pulled out of the deal. The
down payment was sup-
posed to come partly from
stock sales the buyer no lon-
ger wanted to make, given
the decline in the stock mar-
ket and uncertain times.
Ms. Olshan said she had a
contract signed on a studio
apartment in New York’s
Greenwich Village on March
12 but the buyer, who was
funding the purchase in part
with money from her par-
ents, called the following
day to say they could no
longer afford to buy.
Mauricio Umansky, co-
founder of the Agency in Los
Angeles, said he has a client
in escrow on an approxi-
mately $10 million house
who was planning to pay
cash. Now, the buyer has
asked to push the closing a
Please turn to page M7After their clients expressed discomfort about having strangers traipsing through their home, the listing agents decided to
hold a ‘live not open’ house on Instagram and Facebook last weekend. The property is listed for $2.399 million.ANTHONY BARCELO (4)hour time period. He also
provided slippers wrapped in
plastic, and began making
his own sanitary spray out of
bleach and alcohol to clean
down surfaces before show-
ings. These days, he is film-
ing virtual tours of his list-
ings in case he stops
showing altogether.
Meanwhile, in Houston,
where the reality of the
coronavirus is only startingto hit home, agents said
they haven’t yet seen a de-
cline in market activity.
“More concerning to
people is the fact that oil
prices have crashed,” said
Paige Martin of Keller Wil-
liams in Houston. “The im-
plication of this crash is
that nearly all oil-and-gas
companies will need to
make sizable personnel
cuts. While most of those
cuts haven’t happened yet,
a good number of individu-‘People still want to
see houses because
they have nothing
else to do.’
SeanNielsen,aSeattleagent2,200
number of people
engaged in a ‘live not
open’ house Facebook
video for this
Los Angeles
propertybarely appeared on Ms.
Greene’s radar.
Just over a week later,
the world-wide pandemic
has upended the lives of ev-
ery New Yorker and count-
less others. It has rocked
the nation’s economy, send-
ing the stock market into
free fall after years of sus-
tained growth. For Ms.
Greene and her colleagues,
it has transformed the na-
ture of their business virtu-
ally overnight, calling a halt
to many open houses, shut-
tering condo sales centers
and brokerage offices, slow-
ing down showings and un-
settling buyers and sellers.
The move has quickly
forced agents, who are
largely independent con-
tractors and rely on com-
Continued from page M1
‘I have been in
business for 40
years, and this
looks like a cross
between 9/11 and
2008.’
Manhattanagent
DonnaOlshan
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