By: Kevin McGuire

Selling luxury real estate in New York City might look glamorous on Bravo, but according to several top brokers who spoke with The New York Post, the reality is far messier – and often humiliating. For agents brokering deals in the city’s elite housing market, the job doesn’t end with a signed contract. It’s often just the beginning of a cascade of bizarre, entitled, and at times degrading client requests.

Peter Zaitzeff of Serhant told The Post that selling homes to the ultra-wealthy means also serving as a concierge, personal assistant, and occasional janitor. “We scrub toilets,” Zaitzeff said plainly. “People want restaurant reservations. They want to know where to take their kids.”

This sentiment is echoed by Lisa Simonsen of Brown Harris Stevens, who had just closed a roughly $10 million co-op deal on the Upper East Side when her client asked her to secure a same-day dinner reservation for 12 at the exclusive Casa Tua supper club – within two hours. As The Post noted, this kind of last-minute, high-pressure demand has become standard in New York’s white-glove real estate scene.

And the requests don’t stop at dinner tables. Compass agent Vickey Barron shared a chaotic episode in which a wealthy family asked her team to entertain their three young children during an apartment tour. “One sibling bit the other, one wet his pants, one climbed a tree and refused to come down,” Barron recalled. “The mom had a meltdown. I thought I was going to lose my team member.”

Even more personal boundaries are crossed with regularity. Nadine Hartstein of Bond New York told The Post that she found herself essentially babysitting for a client’s privileged children, who ended up trick-or-treating with her own kids and joining them for dinner the next evening. “At least I have kids,” she quipped. “Otherwise it would have been even worse.”

Pets can also be part of the real estate juggling act. Barron described being tasked with keeping a client’s nervous cat calm during a showing. “The moment I opened the door, the cat bolted into the elevator,” she said. After a frantic building-wide search, the feline was discovered hiding under a stranger’s bed. “I’m allergic to cats,” Barron added. “Where’s my Benadryl?”

Though most agents reluctantly play along, boundaries do get tested. Barron once spent three hours cleaning a client’s kitchen for a photo shoot, only to be asked to come back the next morning to do it again. That time, she pushed back. “I said, ‘Do not think that I’m going to get here early and do this all over again.’”

Still, many brokers say that going the extra mile – even when it feels beneath them – is just part of the long game. “Nothing is beneath me,” said Zaitzeff, who credits his ethos to Madeline Hult Elghanayan of Douglas Elliman. Despite being married to billionaire developer Tom Elghanayan, she would still scrub floors at open houses. “That stuck with me,” Zaitzeff told The Post. “You do what needs to be done.”

But sometimes, that ethos leads to exploitation. Vincent Pergola of boutique firm Elegran described a recent situation as borderline extortion. After closing a record-breaking rental deal for the scion of a wealthy Manhattan family, Pergola was promised dinner. But the client later texted him asking instead for a $550 pair of headphones – before the sale had even finalized.