“I would trust Steve [Wagner] implicitly with respect to any question about landlord-tenant relations, in part because he has actually represented both sides which is highly unusual for most attorneys in the field and which gives him enormous credence with all parties in negotiations” – Meredith Stead and John Knapp, Buyout Clients
Meredith
I’m Meredith Stead, I’m a trust and e state’s attorney, a big firm in midtown Manhattan. My relationship with Steve Wagner is that he was my attorney for a tenant buyout in which I, in fact, was one of the two tenants.
John
Hi, my name is John Knapp and I’m a nurse practitioner. I work in hospice and palliative care. Since I’m connected to this one over here, I met Steve the same way, which is when we were arranging to get bought out of our rent stabilized lease in Tribeca.
Meredith
When we were first thinking about, we were entertaining the idea of a buyout, we said to each other, we need to talk to someone who does these all the time. And who knows the things that we don’t know. And I did some research. And I asked around, and I found Steve first on a website called Brick Underground, which is a website about all sorts of tenant and lawyer issues. And he writes a number of articles for them. And so my first introduction to him was as a writer, and he is quite a distinct and fascinating writer. And after I saw these articles, I reached out to my sort of cohort of colleagues in the law business. And I said, Does anyone know this guy, and I got a number of responses, and they were all uniformly positive and enthusiastic.
John
Real estate in Manhattan, very complicated business and Tribeca, it’s very hot market. Our landlord or rather, the owner of our building, we had some communication issues. We were trying to get bought out. But at the same time, there was a series of floods that were unrelated to the owner. But nonetheless, it’s his space. Steve was very good at managing the damages claims and having that process, not derail the the overall goal of getting bought out. He was very good at caging strategy.
Meredith
Yeah, he signed on for one thing, and he ended up helping us with a lot more. So he signed on for two pieces, I would say, negotiating a price for the buyout where we relied on him because of his knowledge of the market and and the fact that he’d done so many of these and then actually preparing an agreement and sort of closing on it. And John’s actually, right, this derailed, almost derailed in a couple of ways. It almost derailed first, because we had this in a sense, conflicting issue that arose – when we say floods, what I mean is water poured into the ceiling into the unit. And since we were still tenants, the owner kind of needed to address it. It was sort of an obstacle to getting the agreement finalized, because it sort of held up discussions about what we thought the main point of the exercise was. But on the other hand, you know, we didn’t want to just say, Well, what we’re just gonna not talk about the fact that there’s an inch of water on the floor. So Steve was terrific about changing horses in midstream as it were, or sort of adding horses in midstream. Like he signed up for one thing, he ended up doing a number of things. He also ended up being the person who was very much about the enforcement of agreement- holding the owners feet to the fire, you signed this, you said you would do this, you haven’t done this, here’s what happens if you don’t do those things. So he was everything. He was the negotiator. He was the drafter. He was the enforcer. He put on many, many hats in the course of his representation of us.
John
We really didn’t want to sue or to get aggressive because we’re just trying to close the deal. And he walked a very fine line between “Okay, I’m ready to push now” or I’ll be more diplomatic. I have no doubt that that if we had decided that we were going to, let’s say sue for harassment or something, then he would have backed us up and said, “Okay, well, this is what you need to show”. He’s a he’s a delightful human being
Meredith
When you’re first in law school, one of the things they talk to you about is the different relationships you have with your client, and one of them is advocacy. And one of them is counseling. Right? And so Steve is extremely good at I would say all aspects of client interaction. As John said, he would come to us and say, “All right, well, here’s a decision for you to make. I’m going to give you input that I hope will help you. But ultimately, you’re going to make the decision”. Or he would say, “alright, well, you’ve made your decision. I’m now going to go out and fight for you based on what you’ve told me you want to do”. So he was just he was just always ready to turn on a dime, he was always ready to say, “here are your options, here’s what you should consider, in my opinion, it would be unwise to do this, but you may have other reasons for doing it and I will accept those”. He was brilliant in that sense. I don’t know what we would have done if we had not found Steve. John moved into this space, the space that we relinquished a rent stabilized lease for in 1977. It’s a loft building which means it was originally a warehouse, essentially. Everything that ended up making the loft a livable residential place was essentially built in by John. Any wall that was not a bearing wall, John built. Any flooring that was not the original flooring John put in. There’s a tub, the reason there’s a tub was because of John. So our attachment to the space was very long standing and also very deep. It’s not sort of a typical tenant apartment relationship. Steve understood that this was emotionally difficult for us, because we were relinquishing something that had more meaning than an apartment might typically have to a tenant. We were relinquishing relationships of 40 plus years, we were relinquishing a space that in a sense, we felt an ownership of because we had done so many things to make it what it was. He acknowledged this and took it into account without letting us wallow in it.
John
He wrote that article. That’s, that’s a great service to people, in the Brick Underground, his blog, that’s a great service to people who are considering buyouts.
Meredith
There was a particular article, and that article was specifically about the current market in terms of tenant buyer, what could be expected, what factors would influence expectations about a buyout? So it was extremely helpful to me because it was like it was essentially very fact driven. It was here is the current status of the market based on the fact that I have done, I don’t know, 10 of these buyouts in the past six months. Here’s what I’m seeing, here are the trends. Here are the issues that will inform a decision by a landlord or a tenant of what to do in terms of a buyout.
John
If you have a question about some aspect of the case that he’s working with you on, and he’s on vacation in some tropical place, he will answer his phone.
Meredith
I would trust Steve implicitly with respect to any question about landlord tenant relations, in part because he is actually represented both sides, which is highly unusual for most attorneys in the field, and which gives him enormous credence with all parties in negotiation.
John
One of the representatives of the owner at one point realized who Steve was, and he was really looking forward to working with him. He was recognized positively by the landlord side of the profession, which was, you know…
Meredith
That’s helpful. I think that that was extremely helpful.