It's the Brian Lair show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, keeping the seat warm for Brian for a couple days. and now we're going to talk about an issue that

every New Yorker who's had to move apartments in the last few years is familiar with.

Brokers fees. New York and Boston are the only major American cities where rental broker

fees are passed to the tenants. Typically, the fees are around 15% of annual rent or about one

month's rent. But those costs aren't formally regulated or capped, and recently they've gone

up. Most New Yorkers are considered rent burden, rent burdened, meaning they pay more than

30% of their monthly income on rent. So coming up with cash up front to pay more money for broker's fees can put an apartment

out of reach, even if the monthly rent is in that person's budget.

You might have heard of efforts over the last few years to change this system to no avail.

Most recently, city council member Chi Jose introduced a bill, reintroduced a bill

from last session called the Fair Act that would transfer the broker's fee from tenants to whoever

hire the broker, most often the landlord. There was a rally yesterday and a hearing on this at

City Hall and it got contentious with tenants and landlords at odds.

With me now is David Brand, housing reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, and later we're going to be

joined by Councilmember O'SA.

Hey, David, thanks for coming on and explaining all this to us. Appreciate it.

Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me on.

Why are brokers fees unique to New York, relatively unique to New York?

How do brokers get paid in other places like Connecticut and New Jersey?

Yeah, well, it's a uniquely new New York innovation that we have here, so maybe we should be

proud of that, a new way of spending money here. I think it started

many years ago when listing apartments, showing apartments, coordinating showings was more difficult

...