That is because Mr. Berkson, a feverishly fast-talking 36-year-old Long Island native, keeps an extensive database of the 1,200 clients he has worked with, as well as the thousands of apartments he has visited and photographed over the past eight years. Each day, he enters detailed notes about his clients and scans in every document he receives, like tax returns and financial statements for co-op board and rental applications. Then he carries this information around on a hard drive in his briefcase.
Reactions from clients, he said, ranged from “ ‘Wow, you’re really organized’ to shocked at the level of detail,” Mr. Berkson said while scrolling room by room through photographs of the many apartments he has visited. “You say toh-MAY-toh. I say toh-MAH-toh.”
Salaries, employers, birthdays and spouses’ birthdays are just the start. Plugging the hard drive into a computer at one of Citi Habitats’ offices, he pulled up the completed application of three women trying to rent a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment downtown for less than $6,000 a month, including letters of employment, bank statements and pay stubs. Mr. Berkson then pulled up the photograph of one client’s Lhasa apso, so he could quickly show landlords that the dog weighed less than 20 pounds.
He said his intention was only to help his clients beat out others in a cutthroat real estate market. “When you want to run a race, you don’t stretch when you’re running, you stretch before,” Mr. Berkson said.
He knows that losing his database would be disastrous for his clients and for his reputation of having a sterling memory. The hard drive is protected by security passwords, and if it is not with him it is locked in a desk.
Kevin Balfe, who said Mr. Berkson had helped his family rent two apartments on the Upper West Side in the past six years, was impressed that Mr. Berkson remembered that he and his wife wanted a second bathroom more than they wanted good views. “He is walking around with data that I trust is going to be kept private,” Mr. Balfe said.
Still, he said, it is no scarier than faxing personal information to landlords and brokerages, not knowing what will become of it. “To get the apartment you want,” he said, “to me there’s a tradeoff between personal privacy and ability to make a fast offer. It’s worth the trade-off.”
Mr. Berkson’s dogged collection of detail may have come from his brief career in film, which included stints working in Los Angeles for MTV and Miramax and as a production assistant for the forgettable 1996 film “Kazaam,” where his jobs included making Shaquille O’Neal a perfect vanilla milkshake. But he missed his family and felt frustrated working for other filmmakers, and returned to New York to build a real estate career.
Kristin Kilbourne, who rented three apartments through Mr. Berkson on the Upper East Side from 2004 to 2009, said that he was able to describe most of the apartments she looked at before she even stepped inside, and that he remembered the name of her puppy, Sadie. Mr. Berkson said Ms. Kilbourne sent him a dozen referrals.
When Eshai Gorshein asked Mr. Berkson, whom he had previously met, to help find him an apartment, Mr. Berkson recalled how Mr. Gorshein preferred quiet apartments because of a bad experience he had had with a noisy college roommate. And when Mr. Gorshein’s mother later sought help from Mr. Berkson, he was able to recall the job she held 30 years earlier because Mr. Gorshein had mentioned it in conversation. The referrals Mr. Gorshein made resulted in about five more deals for Mr. Berkson.
He said he realized that gathering this data made many clients uncomfortable, especially when they were coming from out of town. His father had the same concerns when Mr. Berkson was starting out in real estate and needed his father to be a guarantor on a lease, which required him to hand over his own financial information to his son’s landlord.
But Mr. Berkson’s clients need not fear that his database will go astray, he said: “I treat it like my life.”
Real Estate by Day
Scott Kreitzer, an agent for Prudential Douglas Elliman, was busy enough juggling parenting duties for his 4-year-old son and trying to rent or sell about two dozen apartments. Then, in March, Mr. Kreitzer, a saxophonist, was hired to perform in the musical “Memphis.” Now, he juggles Sunday open houses around matinees and has also picked up business from a bass player in the orchestra, whose Harlem apartment he is trying to sell, and from Lauren Kinhan, a singer, who is trying to rent out an apartment she owns in Midtown West.
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