· Dept. of Seller Sales Tactics for a Slow-ish Market: our friends at Sellsius point out a seller in the East 50s who is offering an unusually generous 10% commission to brokers, "5% for the listing broker and 5% to the buyers broker" for the successful sale of their apartment. The Sellsius Blog wonders, "I guess the seller just wanted to stand out from the crowd in a creative way. Will it help sell the property faster? I don’t know. Will every broker who has a buyer in this area and price range show this property to them? Most likely." [CurbedWire Inbox/Sellsius; Lamb Realty Listing]
· The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is sponsoring its annual Greenest Block Contest. It's not all fun and games: contestants report seeing "people just bend down and yank something out." [NYDailyNews]
· A reader alerts us to "this snarky quote in the New Yorker":
One day, you learn that you can’t hear a sound that is perfectly audible to teen-agers and dogs. Soon after that, you realize that you have forgotten how to calculate the area of a triangle, and how many pints there are in a quart. From there, it’s not long until you find that you are unable to stop talking about real estate, which is the first step down an increasingly rocky and overgrown path that leads, almost always—all right, always—to death.Guilty as charged. [CurbedWire Inbox/The New Yorker]