Leah Hochbaum Rosner

Even if you’re only doing what seems like a minor renovation to your apartment—adding a tub to your bathroom, moving the sink to the other side of your kitchen—you’re probably going to need construction permits. You might be able to figure out the paperwork you need to file and the fees you need to pay on your own, but it’ll take a lot of research and a lot of time that you probably don’t have. That's where expediters come in. “[The average person] has to have nothing else to do in his life to be able to figure this stuff out,” says Michael Genari, the founder of Grand Expediters NYC--a member of BrickUnderground’s Real.Est List resource directory and the focus of this week's Real.Est List Spotlight series.

In this inaugural edition of BrickUnderground’s new Low-Fee Rental Roundup brought to you by rental search site Naked Apartments, we’ve got a healthy mix of low-fee (9% or less of the annual rent versus the usual 12-15% commission) and no-fee apartments in a variety of New York City neighborhoods. Still hunting for that perfect place to live, but don't want to pay a top-shelf broker's fee? Click on over to Naked Apartments and check off the “low fee” search box.

Great real estate deals are few and far between these days, which means the most effective way to draw buyers and renters to a listing is with great photos--like the ones above from Gotham Photo Company, a member of BrickUnderground's Real.Est List resource directory and the subject of this week's Real.Est List Spotlight series.

When he was 15—an age when most of his friends spent their summers at camp or running wild on the streets of Brooklyn—Gasper Nogara was at his father’s Red Hook ironworks shop learning how to forge intricately decorated wrought-iron railings and fences. And he wouldn’t have had it any other way. “I love making things with my hands. It’s my way of expressing myself,” says the now 40-year-old Nogara, who took over sole ownership of Piscopo Iron Works—this week’s Real. Est. List Spotlight Series subject—following his dad’s retirement nearly a decade ago, and relocated the outfit to Crown Heights in 2009.

Frustrated that the nearly half-dozen companies he'd hired to keep his Murray Hill apartment clean were unreliable, unprofessional and often ineffective, Mike Russell believed that there had to be an easier way. 

Whether you’re a real estate agent or seller looking to rent furniture to stage an apartment, a movie prop master in search of an antique clock, or a city dweller who wants to throw a party (and have someone quickly rid you of all the accoutrements afterward), Long Island City-based prop rental house propNspoon—the subject of this week’s Real. Est. List Spotlight Series—probably has what you’re looking for.