Originally published at: Artist Andi Schmied pretended to be a billionaire to photograph the views of NYC's most expensive homes | Boing Boing
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from 2020
the details overlap, of course.
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How could she fake having billions for the credit check? I’m thinking the checks weren’t done. So, what got her into 25 penthouses? Not just chutzpah, certainly. But how about…
Having an exotic accent with a certain air of… nobility, however obscure?
Dressed from head to toe in haute couture?
An apparently successful portrayal of a billionaire’s persona?
Physical attractiveness?
White privilege?
Sellers’ greed?
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You know real estate photography is a whole profession - get this - they will actually pay you to photograph these homes….
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I wanted to do this myself, when I was an art student years ago, but from hotel rooms I couldn’t dream of affording. But with hotels, I found employees would always allow me to go up, take pictures, and refused my tips. I think they could tell I wasn’t a billionaire, but they didn’t care. It was basically just a break in their routine, they were fine with it.
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They don’t do credit checks that early in the process.
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The realtors’ greed, combined with their superficiality. If a lickspittle is convinced that the person he’s dealing with is ultra-wealthy then a lot of questions that the merely affluent would be required to answer go un-asked.
For commercial purposes, with rights signed over to the realtor. If an artist showed up saying she was doing a project showing how rich arseholes live I doubt the realtor would agree.
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I wonder if boredom could also be one of the reasons? The realtor sitting somewhere… waiting for that phone call? Given all the empty or near empty luxury towers, how often do prospective buyers/tenants show up, with the realtor just itching to get back in the saddle?
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A realtor typically has little to lose by (at least initially) treating someone respectfully as a potential buyer even if they don’t know for sure if that person is serious or has the financial resources to make the purchase. Not all wealthy folks outwardly meet the stereotypes, and there are a ton of anecdotes about people asking how much something costs only to have the salesman give the snooty “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” reply, then later learning that the person really did have the money and bought the goods elsewhere.
Nobody wants to end up being the salesman in one of those anecdotes.
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Ah, so these are the kinds of views the 1% of the 1% of the 1% have in New York…
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Might also be that they are not paid enough to care, as long as nothing disappears or gets damaged.
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Yes. This is why it’s relatively easy to fool people who sell luxury goods and services just by engaging in borderline cartoonish rich-person cosplay. As I commented on the Anna Sorokin article linked above, her marks:
If you have some bling and a bit of Tom Ripley in you, you can con your way into viewing and photographing an $80-million condo with no questions asked. Or, in the case of Sorokin:
As for the “Pretty Woman” anecdotes, I lived one. After I landed my first high-paying job I went to the Armani Exchange in my Manhattan neighbourhood with the intent of buying an entire new wardrobe. I spent 15 minutes wandering around the store in my geeky normcore outfit and being studiously ignored by the salespeople, many of whom were licking the boots of customers who looked the part. Someone lost a hefty commission that day and Armani lost a customer for life.
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I hate to be the guy - but this photo is clearly fake.
It is impossible for a camera to have straight perspective on the window frame but curved perspective on the view behind. In other words straight lines on the window frame must align with straight lines on the buildings.
Looks like this photographer is fooling everyone.
Isn’t it just a stock photo? I don’t think that BB has the rights to use the actual photos.
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I’ve never had to try to get a credit check to see a $100M penthouse but I would imagine it’s different than punching your SSN into Experian.
Probably all of that but I’d also guess that they don’t really care. I doubt this happens often enough to be more than a minor annoyance at most.
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And yet, you still proceeded anyway…
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That’s perhaps the most infuriating aspect of all. Not that people spend tens of millions for luxury apartment buildings with amazing views, but that nobody ever even sets foot in them.
Any salesperson working a luxury store in Silicon Valley would learn a lesson pretty quickly that this is the wrong way to profile customers. It’s not uncommon to see billionaires in schlubby clothes driving shitboxes.
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