A common practice we have declined to adopt
The standard structure in New York rental management is for the tenant to pay a broker fee at signing — typically one month's rent on a no-fee listing, or two months' rent on a fee listing. The fee compensates the broker for the work of finding the tenant and for the work of representing the listing. The fee is, in most cases, ten or fifteen times what the broker actually spent in time on the placement.
We do not charge it.
Why not
Block & Stone is a property management firm, not a brokerage. Our compensation comes from the building owners — through our 8% management fee on collected rent — not from the tenants we place. The work of leasing a unit is part of what we are paid by owners to do. Layering on a separate broker fee to the tenant on top of that would be charging twice for the same labor.
More fundamentally, we believe broker fees create the same kind of misalignment as renewal-leasing fees. A firm that earns a month's rent each time a unit turns has a quiet incentive to allow turnover. We have observed, in firms we are not part of, the consequences: maintenance requests slow-walked in a tenant's final lease year; renewal terms offered at rents calibrated to push the renter to leave rather than renew; the same unit re-leased every twelve months at a fee.
We do not believe owners benefit from any of this. The economics of long renewals — a resident who stays three years, four years, six years — are dramatically better than the economics of frequent turnover, even at modestly higher rents. Our renewal rate is 96%. We attribute that figure, in significant part, to the absence of a financial incentive on our side to engineer it lower.
What our pricing looks like instead
For tenants: $20 application fee per adult, capped by New York state law. First month plus security deposit at signing. That is all. No broker fee, no "amenity fee," no "key deposit," no "credit check fee" on top of the application fee.
For owners: 8% of collected rent. No setup fee. No vendor markup; trades invoice through at cost. Leasing-only placement: flat $1,500. Month-to-month engagement, terminable with 30 days' written notice on either side.
A note on the FARE Act
The New York City FARE Act, which took effect in 2025, prohibits charging tenants broker fees on listings the broker did not solicit. We have observed, with mild interest, the industry adjusting to this requirement. The adjustment, in some firms, has been to fold the broker-fee economics into elevated rents on the listing side. We have not done this; our rents are benchmarked to comparable closed leases and, demonstrably, are not inflated to recover lost broker fee revenue.
If you are looking at a Block & Stone listing and the rent seems comparable to a fee listing elsewhere on the same block, that is because the comparable rent in the neighborhood is what it is — not because we are quietly recovering a fee.
A note on the conversation we want to have
If you are a renter who has been quoted a broker fee on a comparable Brooklyn unit, the most useful exercise is to ask the broker plainly whether they represent the building owner or yourself. If the answer is the owner — which it almost always is — the fee is, on its face, the owner's expense, not yours. We have written publicly about this for years and the response from prospective tenants has, gratifyingly, been close to universal: when the math is laid out, no one prefers a fee listing.