Ryan Murphy’s newest Netflix addition, The Watcher, engulfs everyone in the horrifying real-life tale of Derek and Maria Broaddus, a couple stalked while living at 657 Broadway. Even though, it seems like the true nightmare came five years after, at least that’s what David Barbosa would say. The listing agent and owner of David Reality Group were approached by the traumatized couple wishing to sell their $1.4 million home in which they endured horrifying experiences, which, unsurprisingly, was a task nearly impossible to bring to life.
The series, starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale, follows the story of a couple who, after moving into their dream house, is welcomed to the city by disturbing and threatening letters arriving at their mailbox. Perhaps it was the fact that no one ever caught the mail-sender, known as The Watcher, or the fact that it is a potentially cursed house, but at the end of the day, Barbosa admitted that regardless of how interesting the story might be, he suffered quite the hurdle to turn the cold stone into hard cash.
“There were a million stories about what was going on with the house,” Barbosa told EW, “There was such a stigma on the house. That was our biggest hurdle: Trying to get over that stigma. Plus, you had people riding by the house, taking pictures, walking up to the front door, it was crazy.”.
The real estate agent admitted that his team wasn’t at all reticent about taking the property for sale, especially considering there was “a lot of interest on the house”, in spite of its $999,000 listed price in 2019. Regardless, there were still quite a few setbacks that slowed down the process, albeit the high-interest stake. In 2018, The Cut released a chronicle about The Watcher, in which they unveiled the whole story surrounding the New Jersey family and the mysterious, threatening letter writer. The article’s virtualization would make quite the stepping stone for Barbosa, as most potential buyers would already have some knowledge of the house’s backstory. Still, the agent ensured the clients would be entirely aware of all the events that took place at the house prior to its listing.
“The deal was that, if you were going to put an offer in on the house, you had to go down to the attorney’s office and look at [all of the evidence], so you knew what really happened before we went into a hard contract,”
Complete transparency about the case seemed to be quite harmful to the agent’s business, even though it was possibly the best possible solution to find the perfect homeowner. Barbosa even recalled a potential buyer who confidently seemed not to care about the hostile letters, that was until he delved deeper into the case. “He went down to the attorney’s office and called me and said, ‘Yeah, I’m out.’ He just said, ‘Listen, after reading everything, there’s no way I’m going in that house,'” the agent told EW.
Barbosa’s torment finally came to an end when a couple who “had no concerns at all” about the house, ended up purchasing the property for $40,000 under the $999,000 asking price. The new homeowners seem to haven’t had any anonymous letters arriving at their mailbox since the purchase.
The Watcher can be found and streamed on Netflix.
