A Black couple searching for a house in New York City received a stunning message from their realtor as they pulled up to see a home.
“Ugh they are black,” read the message that Lisa Renee Olaso and her fiancé, Cyril Christopher, said they received while arriving at a home in Flushing, Queens, on June 20.
They were checking out a potential new home and were just stepping out of their car when the message from their real estate agent flashed across their phone, Olaso said.
“I have never in my life had tears come out of my eyes so fast,” Olaso told Daily Voice. “I have never cried like that….It had hit in such a deep way.”
Olaso and Christopher left the area after a brief discussion with the broker — “I looked over at my fiancé and said, ‘Get back in the car,’” Olaso explained — and have since filed a lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the real estate company, Douglas Elliman, has fired the agent who sent the text, according to multiple reports.
The Search Begins
Olaso and Christopher started looking for a new place near JFK Airport in May, after she landed a management job with Delta operating out of the airport, she said. They would make the drive up their home from Delaware every weekend, up to four hours each way, to check out properties.
“I was really excited about that place in Flushing because it was really close to the airport,” Olaso said.
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When the couple got to Queens on June 20, they arrived ahead of the broker and looked around the neighborhood for a bit to get a feel for things, then drove back to the home for a tour.
“I look down at my phone, and I was just like, ‘Am I –?’” Olaso told Daily Voice, explaining she was stunned by what she read and had to scan the text multiple times to be sure. “I was connecting, ‘Who sent this? Where is this coming from?’ and that’s when I saw it was from her, and then my mind kind of played catch up really quick.”
The Interaction Outside the House
Olaso showed the text to Christopher, then told the agent to look at her phone when she attempted to engage in small talk.
“Now you see her face, and it’s mortification right in front of you,” Olaso said. “We see stupid things in the news, but you don’t really understand it until you are actually the victim of it. And it is an unbelievable pain.”
The agent attempted to explain that there were previous Black tenants in the area who caused “a lot of problems,” which only inspired Olaso to ask, “What does that have to do with us?”
Olaso and Christopher left the neighborhood quickly afterward and stopped at a restaurant, then continued home to Delaware.
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