The old tenant and the new tenant were separated by one day and one service elevator.
The StreetEasy sprint had produced a signed lease in December. That did not mean the apartment was ready to change hands. The current tenant still had to move out, the new tenant still needed board approval, and The Gretsch had procedures for every person, box, elevator, key, and piece of paper involved.
My friend was running the Gretsch Manager inbox while I was buried at Aaptiv. She had turned the listing into an application and the application into a lease. Now she was trying to fit two moves through the same building without leaving either tenant stranded.
The outgoing tenant planned to leave at the end of January. The incoming tenant needed the apartment immediately after that. A normal turnover might include a few empty days for cleaning, repairs, and a calm walkthrough.
We had one.
The service elevator made the schedule tighter. Other people were moving too, so the outgoing tenant could not get a morning slot. Her movers were assigned a window in the afternoon. The walkthrough would happen after that, and the apartment had to be ready for the next move.
Meanwhile, the board application came back.
It had been submitted on the building's old requirements. A consent form was missing. The unit-owner contact form needed to be completed again. One more signature had to come from the incoming tenant, and the moving company needed to send its insurance paperwork before anyone could use the freight elevator.
The new tenant was scheduled to move in Friday and had to finish by five. Utilities had to be transferred. Internet needed to work. She wanted the keys ahead of the move if possible, which was completely reasonable and depended on us actually having the keys.
The approval email finally arrived with two exclamation points.
“Lease approved!!”
My friend forwarded it with one word: “approved!”
“you rock!” I wrote back.
That solved the largest problem. It did not solve the small ones.
The apartment had accumulated a fairly complete smart-home setup while I lived there. There were automated shades, a smart lock, a mounted television, a soundbar, and Verizon internet. The outgoing tenant wanted to recreate the setup in her next apartment. She told me I had converted her to intelligent living and asked who installed everything.
I sent her to the company that had done most of the work. Then she asked if I would sell her the television.
That required another tiny negotiation. The television was part of what the new tenant expected to be in the loft. It was also mounted against a wall that would eventually change when the exterior construction came down. I forwarded the question to my friend and asked the most useful version of it: did the new tenant actually care about the TV?
We left it where it was.
The outgoing move happened. The apartment was vacant, the blind controls and TV remote were on the windowsill, and the old tenant had moved into another unit in the same building. The key, however, was somewhere inside roughly thirty unpacked boxes.
The new tenant was arriving the next day.
My friend offered to document the walkthrough with pictures and video. We needed to know quickly whether to order a replacement key and whether the television required a service visit. By the next morning, the key had made it to the front desk. The missing TV cord had also been found and was on its way downstairs.
The incoming tenant had arranged Con Edison, transferred her internet, submitted the mover paperwork, and planned to arrive early enough to beat the five o'clock cutoff. Her two largest pieces of furniture would come later. That took a little pressure off the elevator.
The lease had been signed for weeks. The actual handoff came down to a freight-elevator window, a key at the front desk, and a television cord sitting on somebody's kitchen table.
As handoffs go, that counted as ready.