Find the Apartment of Your Dreams!

Is the New York housing market getting you down? Are you wondering how you’ll ever afford a mortgage? Are you sick and tired of getting outbid on run-down condos that you didn’t like that much to begin with?

You’re not alone. And, no matter what your mother might say, you don’t have to “face facts and just move to the suburbs, where you belong.” Westchester is not the only way out!

The team here at Broken Windows Theory, Inc., has been studying the New York market for decades, and we’ve learned how to manipulate it. Yes, the rumors are true. We can bring down the price on the apartment of your dreams.

Here’s how it works: You send us a deposit (bitcoin preferred) and we send specially trained undercover operatives to ruin your prospective neighborhood. Before you can say “classic six with parks views,” property values will plummet and the sellers, or “targets,” will happily accept your lowball bid.

We offer three distinct packages. Choose the one that’s right for you!

Bronze (most economical)

We dispatch a “cleanup crew” to wreak cosmetic damage only. Dressed in baggy pants and backward hats, our agents spray-paint their tags on façades, bus stops, and sidewalks. They kick over trash cans, shatter beer bottles, and urinate on stoops—directly before the first open-house showing. They’ll return every other night for “touch up” work until the other potential buyers have decided to look elsewhere.

Cost: $10,000

Estimated price reduction: ten per cent.

Silver (most popular)

This plan entails a bit more devastation. You’ll get all the great hijinks from the bronze option, plus our famous automotive routine. Window, meet crow bar. Tire, meet box cutter. We also send real, live drug dealers to patrol the corners and sell their wares to minors. For a small additional fee, we’ll toss in a “fireworks display.” That’s the industry term for a gunfight (we only shoot blanks, of course).

Cost: $15,000 (Plus $2,000 for “fireworks.”)

Estimated price reduction: between fifteen and seventeen per cent.

Gold, a.k.a. Shock-and-Awe

This one’s really something special, but it requires at least three weeks advance notice. (Remember: Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.) After sending out a “cleanup crew,” we plant stories in the tabloids and on local parenting blogs lamenting the crime spree in your future neighborhood. We also file spurious lawsuits claiming that toxic waste in the sewers directly underneath your building has created a “cancer cluster.”

Cost: $40,000

Estimated price reduction: forty per cent.

As you can see, we expect you’ll enjoy a one-per-cent reduction in price for every thousand dollars you spend. That two-million-dollar two-bedroom in SoHo that you thought was out of reach? Buy the Gold Plan and it’ll be yours for a mere 1.2 million!

We know that it sounds too good to be true, but it’s not! Here’s a testimonial from one of our many satisfied customers, Jed [would not share last name]:

My fiancé and I spent nearly six months looking for an apartment in Brooklyn in the 500K range. She was dead set on Park Slope and I was dead set on buying a place with closets and a stove, so, as you can imagine, it was a trying time. After what felt like our thousandth tearful argument over whether closets were truly necessary, I called Broken Windows Theory, Inc., and chose the Silver Plan. It was amazing. In twenty-four hours, a lovely street just minutes from Prospect Park was transformed into a nineteen-seventies wasteland. It looked terrible and smelled worse. I timed my negotiation to coincide with the “fireworks”—I could hear gunshots on the phone—and the seller folded. Thanks, Broken Windows Theory, Inc.!

Contracts with Broken Windows Theory, Inc., are final. Broken Windows Theory, Inc., does not offer refunds and does not guarantee that your chosen neighborhood will return to “normal” after you’ve moved into the home of your dreams.

Photograph: Mehlman/NY Daily News Archive/Getty