By a lopsided 42-8 vote, the City Council in November approved a bill that will put more landlords, rather than tenants, on the hook to pay broker fees. With that, lawmakers beat back a monthslong lobbying campaign by the once-feared Real Estate Board of New York, whose broker members railed against the legislation.
One frequent foe of the real estate industry took the opportunity to gloat on social media after the vote. “When was the last time REBNY won a legislative fight?” wrote Kevin Elkins, then the political director for the pugilistic District Council of Carpenters union, who is now working for Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign. “I’m being sincere.”
He wasn’t the only one asking the question. The 14,000-member, 129-year-old Real Estate Board has now spent more than a half decade trying to claw back the power it lost in 2019, when Democrats took control of state government and promptly passed a set of sweeping changes to rent regulations that the Board’s landlord constituency has been largely powerless to reverse. REBNY’s clout has similarly suffered at the city level, where a wave of progressive politicians swept into office during the first Trump presidency, rejecting support from developers they blamed for the city’s affordability crisis. Last year brought more disappointment: months before the defeat on the broker bill, REBNY negotiated a state-level housing package that seemed to please nobody. Although the package included some industry priorities, it was headlined by a new tax break for residential development that was loudly criticized over its labor-friendly wage standards.
In conversations with more than two dozen real estate executives and political insiders, many praised REBNY as a savvy lobbying group doing its best to eke out wins in a hostile political climate. Most agreed that REBNY has retooled itself since being banished to the wilderness six years ago — under Jim Whelan, its president since shortly after the 2019 setback, it has focused more on building coalitions and marshaling data in hopes that hard evidence, rather than raw power, will persuade politicians to embrace a pro-development agenda.
Others were less kind, saying last year’s defeats showed REBNY is still shaking off the vestiges of its old model — which relied on relationships, campaign cash and brute force that seems ill-suited to the present moment. (Few industry insiders critical of REBNY’s recent strategy were willing to go on the record, a sign that the group retains plenty of clout.)
The question is whether the group’s leaders can change the conversation — and update REBNY’s own image.
Whelan noted in an interview that the group notched plenty of victories in the last year. Despite resistance in Albany, REBNY won a deadline extension for the lapsed 421-a tax break desperately sought by developers, plus a tax incentive for office-to-residential conversions. The group persuaded lawmakers to lift a decades-old cap on residential density in the city. At the local level, the City of Yes zoning reforms included office-conversion rules and density bonuses that developers prized — although opinions differ on how closely REBNY was involved in that push.
Whelan acknowledges the last few years have not been easy.
“It’s not for the faint of heart, but that’s what motivates me,” said Whelan, a bridge-building veteran of the Bloomberg administration. “It’s more playing chess than checkers.”
The group remains a political force, with a high-powered lobbying team and an annual gala that draws the mayor and governor. But plenty of challenges remain. REBNY’s diffuse membership of brokers, developers and landlords remains hard to unify, given their varied and sometimes competing interests. State leaders have signaled they are not interested in tackling thorny housing issues for the foreseeable future, meaning REBNY’s members will need to wait longer for action on their most pressing needs.
“It’s not a particularly happy time,” said one well-connected executive familiar with REBNY’s inner workings. “There are not a lot of high-fives and kumbaya moments.”
But political shifts are also providing unexpected opportunities. In recent months, REBNY has begun raising money to back favored candidates it plans to identify — and to oppose those who stifle development. The time seems ripe: as the city’s housing shortage grows worse, Democratic Party politicians are increasingly open to new development, and mayoral candidates such as Scott Stringer and Zellnor Myrie who used to shun contributions from the real estate industry are now accepting them.
At the same time, REBNY may have new competition. A new generation of pro-housing groups is springing up, sparking more urgent conversations about whether the Board can keep pace with the times — or risk losing more influence.
The glory days
For decades, REBNY had it good. In Albany, thanks to tight relationships with successive governors and heavy campaign spending to prop up state Senate Republicans, the industry could stifle bills it opposed without worrying much about persuasion.
“Their view was, literally, you buy legislators to vote ‘no’ on stuff or you buy legislators to put in bills for you,” said Manhattan state Sen. Liz Krueger, a Democrat in office since 2002. Krueger recalled asking one Republican colleague if he even knew the contents of the industry-friendly legislation he was sponsoring.
“He would say, ‘They just hand me this bill and say, we’re passing it,’” recalled Krueger, who has never benefited from REBNY’s campaign spending. “That’s how they used to do it back then. That’s not working for them now.”
REBNY’s sway was similar at the city level, where the industry won tax breaks to spur construction and laws that allowed landlords to jack up rents for allegedly rent-stabilized apartments. Then-REBNY President Steven Spinola boasted that Mayor Rudy Giuliani called him asking for advice the day after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Although the Board spent heavily to boost its preferred candidates, public-facing politics was never a strong suit: REBNY’s 2009 attempt to defend a few City Council incumbents from progressive challengers fell flat, consisting mostly of mass mailers that appeared “ineffective and amateurish,” the Observer reported. (Three of REBNY’s four favored candidates lost.)
The good times came to a dramatic end in 2019, when Democrats took over the state Senate and passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act — a package that supporters said would protect thousands of tenants from painful rent hikes. But the real estate industry said the effect of HSTPA has been to make renovations so unaffordable that landlords have been forced to leave apartments vacant. Within weeks of that vote, REBNY shook up its leadership and named Whelan, who had joined the organization in 2010, as president.
The man in the arena
A veteran operative, Whelan had helped usher in development in Downtown Brooklyn and spearheaded land-use projects under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In City Hall, Whelan was known as “Jimmy Wheels” — a nickname he earned for seeming to show up everywhere and negotiate with everyone.
Whelan landed at REBNY after working as chief of staff for former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and a stint in the private sector at Muss Development. On the wall in his Midtown office, he keeps the framed text of Theodore Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” quotation, which argues that credit belongs to the person who fights and sometimes fails in pursuit of a worthy cause — “not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
“It is sort of my mantra,” said Whelan, a plain-spoken inhabitant of Bellerose, Queens.
Whelan got to work quickly in 2019 to build coalitions. REBNY formed an unusual alliance with its frequent rival — the Building and Construction Trades Council, a collection of construction unions — to promote their shared interest in pro-growth policies. REBNY has teamed up with the tenant-friendly Legal Aid Society to push for a rental aid program, and organized local business groups to campaign for better tax incentives — alliances that were uncommon years ago.
“The past REBNY executives were less diplomatic and more passive,” said Doctoroff, the former Bloomberg deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding.
More recently, Whelan has won plaudits among insiders for his personnel moves, including last year’s hire of Aravella Simotas — a former assemblywoman with close ties to some current lawmakers — as REBNY’s top lobbyist. REBNY has also put more emphasis on data — showing lawmakers slick presentations explaining the costs of building in New York, and releasing frequent reports aimed at publicizing the impact of regulations like the HSTPA on the city’s housing market.
Those efforts paid off modestly last year, when REBNY and other landlord groups finally persuaded state lawmakers to tweak the 2019 HSTPA by raising the amount by which landlords can raise rents to recoup the cost of renovations. But the failure to secure any bigger rollbacks has exposed longstanding fissures within REBNY’s membership, where smaller landlords have long felt marginalized compared to billionaire developers.
“Owners want to make sure that their voices are being heard, separate and apart from the office-owner class or the broker class or the new-developer class,” said Jay Martin, head of external affairs at the New York Apartment Association — an advocacy group that formed last year from the merger of the residential landlord groups Rent Stabilization Association and Community Housing Improvement Program.
Cea Weaver, a leading tenant activist who has served as one of REBNY’s main antagonists in the fight over rent regulations, credited the Board with taking steps to organize smaller landlords since its big defeat in 2019. But she said REBNY’s fractured membership continues to limit the group’s power.
“[REBNY board chair] Jed Walentas and mom-and-pop landlords don’t actually have the same political interests, so the coalition can’t hold,” she said. “They’re constantly overplaying their hand.”
Whelan, asked whether he has any hope of further changes to the HSTPA, said REBNY is focused on publishing data that shows landlords’ struggles to repair their buildings. In the meantime, he suggested, the ball is in the Legislature’s court.
“It’s really a matter of seeing when those legislators and stakeholders are going to want to engage in a conversation that’s more data-driven,” he said. “Right now, it’s pretty much driven by ideology.”
That conversation does not appear to be close at hand. Linda Rosenthal, chair of the housing committee in the state Assembly, said she finds REBNY’s posture unproductive.
“This yearly attempt to chip away at the gains made for tenants in the HSTPA has to stop,” she said. “Why do we keep having this discussion?”
‘Housing fatigue’
Arguably REBNY’s biggest task in recent years has been replacing the state tax incentive for multifamily construction that developers say is crucial to building housing. Lawmakers allowed the 421-a incentive program to expire in 2022 over concerns that it didn’t require developers to set rents at affordable levels. REBNY spent more than a year agitating for a replacement and to extend the deadline for in-progress projects to benefit from 421-a — warning that thousands of apartments hung in the balance.
After a major housing package collapsed in 2023, developers came to Albany in 2024 desperate for a deal. In a testament to the Board’s continued influence, Gov. Kathy Hochul left it up to REBNY to negotiate a new tax break with the construction labor unions.
By late March 2024, after weeks of grueling negotiations, REBNY and the unions were stuck in a stalemate — forcing Hochul to intervene and finalize a deal. The scenario might have seemed favorable to REBNY, which prides itself on cultivating close ties to the governor and her top deputies.
But the deal that emerged in the April state budget looked friendlier to labor than many observers expected. It raised construction wages to a minimum of $72.45 an hour for large projects in much of the city, expanded the wage rules to cover buildings bigger than 150 units — compared to 300 units in the old program — and imposed a new wage floor to replace the old “average wage” system that REBNY had favored, which had allowed some lower-paid workers to earn far less than their better-paid counterparts.
People on REBNY’s side say they had little room to maneuver, and some observers agree that the outcome was all but preordained. Pushing too hard on the tax break might have forced REBNY to make bigger concessions on good cause eviction, a tenant protection opposed by landlords but prioritized by progressives, which was also being negotiated in last year’s housing deal. Hochul, despite her friendliness to real estate, was under pressure from unions and tenant activists to reach a deal that satisfied labor and renters.
“She wanted a deal,” a person familiar with REBNY’s negotiating position said of Hochul. “In this environment, labor is very strong.”
But critics within the real estate industry said the outcome exposed the limits of the new-and-improved REBNY, particularly its alliance with labor. Several pointed to a key moment during negotiations when a subset of construction unions publicly broke off talks with REBNY and asked the Legislature to step in instead — a move that limited the real estate industry’s ability to team up with job-hungry unions and, together, pressure the left-leaning Legislature to approve a program that would maximize development.
“They wanted to beat the trades rather than come to a deal with them,” a landlord who followed the negotiations said of REBNY.
REBNY leaders say they could only play with the hand they were dealt — namely, a Legislature that is uninterested in the math of building housing. But another lobbyist generally aligned with REBNY on policy said the result showed the Board was still trying to muscle its opponents into submission, rather than meeting lawmakers where they are.
“That means our strategy probably isn’t the best — we’re not providing enough political cover in conversations with people to explain why we need what we need,” the lobbyist said. REBNY, he added, “still fundamentally misunderstands where they have to go.”
Last year’s housing deal was not a disaster. Developers celebrated the 467-m tax break for office conversions, lifting the floor-area ratio cap that limited residential density and the five-year extension of the old 421-a deadline to 2031 — which REBNY says will allow construction of some 60,000 apartments to proceed.
But looming over it all is 485-x, the replacement for 421-a. Whelan himself criticized the final rules as too costly, and some developers have paused major projects as a result — although no hard data has emerged to show whether those attitudes are universal. With the tax break not set to expire until 2034, lawmakers may have little appetite to revisit the terms any time soon.
“We’re told there’s housing fatigue in Albany,” Whelan said.
‘It didn’t make a difference’
REBNY suffered a more clear-cut defeat in November, when the City Council approved the so-called Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act. Unless a pending lawsuit stops it from taking effect in June, the law will require whoever hires a broker — most often a landlord — to pay that broker’s fees, ending New York’s unusual system that leaves tenants on the hook to the tune of as much as 15% of a year’s rent.
The overwhelming council vote showed lawmakers were unpersuaded by REBNY’s months of lobbying, which focused on claims that the bill would reduce transparency in the market and cause landlords to pass on the fees by raising rents. It was also a starkly different outcome compared to 2019, when REBNY killed another council effort to curb broker fees before it even reached a vote.
Publicly, REBNY put up a big fight — amassing hundreds of brokers to rally against the bill at City Hall and meeting with council members to caution against it. Now, however, even REBNY’s allies tend to throw up their hands and suggest they had little chance of stopping it — pointing in particular to its sponsor, the media-savvy 26-year-old Brooklyn councilman Chi Ossé.
“You have this very dynamic City Council member who knows how to use TikTok, you have a built-in constituency of housing activists who are willing to engage on this very easily,” said a lobbyist familiar with REBNY’s efforts against the bill. “Versus a non-monolithic, somewhat antiquated and ideologically diverse brokerage industry. You couldn’t match the campaign that was put together.”
Brokers who teamed up with REBNY to combat the bill say the group did all it could to get its message through to a City Council whose members had little interest in hearing it. The current council is arguably the most left-wing in the city’s history, and term limits have resulted in a less experienced crop of lawmakers that have a poor understanding of industry issues, according to REBNY’s sympathizers.
“It didn’t make a difference, quite frankly, what REBNY was doing,” said Gary Malin, chief operating officer of the Corcoran Group, one of the city’s leading brokerage firms. “When it came to the City Council, they had a supermajority and that supermajority effectively was voting as one, even if we were privately told not everyone agreed with the FARE Act as constituted.”
At times, though, REBNY looked simply outmatched. Ossé used social media to mobilize supporters and racked up thousands of likes on a typical post about the FARE Act. REBNY’s parallel social media posts received a few hundred likes apiece.
“Can we please hire a PR firm to combat this!!” wrote one Compass broker, tellingly, under one of REBNY’s Instagram posts.
Whelan shrugged off the outcome and said he is confident that REBNY will prevail in the lawsuit it filed in December to block the law from taking effect. He dismissed another bit of industry speculation: that REBNY may have fought so hard against the FARE Act because a hit to brokers’ commissions could hurt REBNY’s own finances. Brokers make up a majority of REBNY’s 14,000 members, and their annual dues contributed most of the $8.9 million in member fees that the organization earned in 2023 — REBNY’s main source of funding, eclipsing even events and fees from its listing platform for brokers.
But Whelan said the group is doing just fine financially — and said the question is moot anyway.
“We’re going to win the litigation,” he said.
Planting the seed
The politics of development in New York have shifted in unexpected ways in the last few years amid the city’s worsening housing crisis. Progressive politicians who once opposed new construction based on fears of gentrification now welcome it, and mayoral candidates who once rejected campaign money from real estate executives are keeping the donations this year.
REBNY believes it deserves some credit for that shift by publicizing the dangers of paltry housing growth.
“We’re the ones who have consistently planted the seed, over the last three, four years, about the need for production,” Whelan said.
Others say REBNY is simply riding the wave, and jockeying for relevance in a conversation it no longer dominates. Indeed, REBNY in recent years has been joined by a new cohort of peers — or rivals — like the New York Apartment Association, which represents apartment building owners, and Open New York, a YIMBY group modeled after pro-housing efforts that found success on the West Coast.
These newer groups are active on social media and use organizing tactics that multiple sources called “grassroots” — a label seldom applied to REBNY. The new generation of advocates, while generally aligned with REBNY on policy, have their share of gripes with the Real Estate Board for setting a us-versus-them tone — you’re either with landlords or with tenants — that they view as counterproductive.
It remains to be seen whether that new competition will fuel changes within REBNY. In conversations, some industry insiders said they want to see a more public-facing Real Estate Board — one that aggressively corrects false statements by politicians or takes out subway advertisements explaining the real estate industry’s importance to the city’s bottom line. As an example of what is possible, some pointed to Kenny Burgos, the 30-year-old former Assemblyman who now leads the Apartment Association and appears in TikTok-friendly videos explaining the plight of small landlords.
Whelan is something else — “an insider’s insider,” in the words of one lobbyist who has known him for decades. The sources acknowledge Whelan can only go so far to placate left-wing elected officials and advocates without unsettling REBNY’s board, a fractious group of more than 100 developers, brokers and landlords.
“Jim can’t go where he needs to go because of who he represents,” an industry lobbyist said. “He has to sell multiple billionaires on this idea — ‘Well, we have to go hat in hand to dozens of folks who have no idea how your business works, no idea how you accumulated your wealth, and we have to not just beg them, but go above and beyond to convince their broader constituency, the public, that what we’re doing for New York is actually helpful.’”
REBNY may soon satisfy the members who want to see a return to political battling. Whelan said he is gearing up for more campaign spending at the city and state levels, including during the June primaries for City Council, although he was loath to give details. (One early indicator was a $2,100 donation REBNY made this month to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ mayoral campaign, although the Board has the resources for much bigger spending than that.)
“There’ll be a much greater focus on political, electoral involvement,” Whelan said. “You’re going to be seeing more and more groups collaborate with the goal of putting in folks who are going to be much more focused on quality of life, crime, creating good jobs, ensuring we have a good education system, and the like.”
More political meddling could spark backlash, but Whelan exudes confidence. REBNY’s agenda, he said, will not be at odds with those of any future leaders.
“What’s good for the city,” he said, “is good for real estate.”
