Sometimes It Seems That Everyone’s A Broker (No, Seriously)

Real estate agencies and rental brokers should think about ways to take advantage of the existing black market in rentals:

Seven days a week, a mustachioed, 47-year-old Dominican named Pedro Reyes sells fruits and vegetables in front of Bonhita’s Barber Shop, on a block of West 137th Street that slopes gently toward Riverside Park. Starting at 8 a.m., Mr. Reyes positions milk crates and cardboard boxes full of waxen limes, bright tomatoes and bulbous calabaza, or squash, on the sidewalk. When a favorite song plays on the radio sitting nearby, he breaks into salsa moves with an invisible partner.

Mr. Reyes, who is widely known as Piri, calls his business the Valle Encantado Fruteria — the Enchanted Valley Fruit Shop. But food is not all that he peddles. For $60, he will drive you to the airport in his battered white van. For negotiable rates, he does deliveries and moving. And for a $25 commission, he will find you a bare-bones room to rent in Harlem or neighboring Hamilton Heights.

That last sideline may be Mr. Reyes’s biggest. Over the last decade, he says, he has placed hundreds of $100-a-week boarders in the apartments of mostly older single women from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. In a town full of heart-stopping rents and behemoth real estate firms, Mr. Reyes is a little broker for the little guy.

“People used to say, ‘Hey, if you know someone who has a room, let me know,'” he said the other day, recalling the early days of his sidewalk real estate venture as he sliced into a watermelon in front of his produce stand. In the beginning, his only clients were other Spanish speakers seeking rooms. But as gentrification crept farther north and Manhattan’s apartment vacancy rate sank to less than 1 percent, Mr. Reyes’s services, known only by word of mouth, have been sought by all sorts of people.

“Everyone comes to me,” he said. “Boxers. Dancers. Students. People who have some education, because they definitely have to have a job to pay for the room every week. But it’s less expensive than getting a whole apartment.”