What could be worse than living in a house that might be cursed? Trying to find people who want to buy that (possibly cursed) house. David Barbosa, a listing agent and owner of David Reality Group in Westfield, N.J., did just that when Derek and Maria Broaddus came to him in 2019 to sell their $1.4 million home five years after a terrible thing happened there.
Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale play parents who move into a perfect suburban mansion and get a series of disturbing and threatening letters from an unknown stalker. After other agents had tried and failed, Barbosa had to turn the real-life horror story into cold, hard cash in the Broaddus bank account (and forgotten). Ryan Murphy took the couple’s story and turned it into a new Netflix show.
“There were a million stories about what was going on with the house,” Barbosa, who lives in Westfield, tells EW exclusively about the Broaddus’ real-life nightmare at 657 Broadway, which was written about by The Cut in 2018. “So many bad things were said about the house.
Trying to get past this stereotype was our biggest problem. Also, people rode by your house, took pictures, and came to the front door. It was crazy.
Barbosa says that his team wasn’t afraid to take on the property, and in March 2019, they put it on the market for USD 999,000. He says there was “a lot of interest in the house” from people who wanted to buy it, and a renter lived there for a while, which added to the house’s credibility.
Even though the house has a sad past, he thinks many young couples who had outgrown Manhattan saw it as an “iconic” symbol of their desire to start a family.
Even so, there were still problems. Because the Cut article went viral, it was hard for clients to come to the house without knowing its story, but Barbosa made them take an extra step before making an offer.
“The deal was that if you wanted to make an offer on the house, you had to go to the lawyer’s office and look at [all of the evidence], so you knew what really happened before we signed a binding contract,” he says. One person, who Barbosa remembers telling him confidently that he didn’t “give an s—-” about the nasty letters the Broaddus got, changed his mind as he learned more about the case.
“He went to the lawyer’s office and then called me to tell me, “Yeah, I’m out.” He said, “Listen, I’m not going into that house after reading everything.” “With a laugh, Barbosa says.
In the end, he made a deal with a young couple, and they bought the house in July 2019 for $40,000 less than the asking price of $999,000, putting an end to the Broaddus‘ five-year pain.
“They weren’t worried at all,” Barbosa says, adding that they haven’t had any problems with creepy strangers sending them anonymous letters while they’ve lived there. “They were a lot of fun.”
The Watcher, which stars Jennifer Coolidge, Margo Martindale, Mia Farrow, and Noma Dumezweni, is now available on Netflix
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