It sounds like a real estate developer’s worst nightmare. Rats running rampant in a neighborhood store. And it’s not just one rat, but a gang. They’ve been caught on tape and broadcast across the world. Meanwhile, your sparkling, new 14-unit condo sits diagonally across the street. Tenants, who have forked over anywhere from $1.5 million to $4 million, are anxious to move-in but their new home is making news for all the wrong reasons. Welcome to the “real” world of developer David Gruber.

“It’s a terrible incident,” Mr. Gruber says, referring to the now infamous rats at the neighborhood KFC/Taco-Bell on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. “But it has nothing to do with the property value.”

Veteran Manhattan broker Douglas Heddings of Prudential Douglas Elliman disagrees. While headline-hogging rodents may not affect a new development where tenants signed on the dotted line months in advance, Mr. Heddings argues they may affect the sale price of an existing property — at least temporarily.

“It will affect the bottom line,” Mr. Heddings said, recalling a time when it wasn’t rats but fear of dry cleaning chemicals, or a smelly smokestack from a restaurant that prevented a big sale.

“It was virtually impossible to sell the apartment. It was the first comment of every single person who came in. Nine out of ten said, “This apartment is amazing but I can’t stand the smell.”

Still, commercial brokers seem to take the perspective that when it comes to rats, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”

“A location can stand on its own,” the chairman of retail leasing and sales division at Prudential Douglas Elliman, Faith Hope Consolo, says. When asked whether a former tenant, like a rat-infested restaurant or a seedy porn shop, can affect the re-sale or re-leasing power of a commercial space, Ms. Consolo answers a definitive “no.”

“When a retail lease is up, other retailers are chasing for it — whether if failed because of operations or a disaster like this one,” she said.

A principal at Newmark Knight Frank Retail, Jeffrey Roseman, calls the latest incident an “aberration.”

“The reality is that it’s a good retail location,” Mr. Roseman said, referring to the commercial space on 6th Avenue. “If someone dies in a home does that home not get sold again?”

While it’s true that not all New Yorkers have a complete history of rodent infestations, never mind the number of deaths, in their apartments, Village residents say it’s hard to forget the video that catches the frolicking rodents in the act.

“I’ve received emails asking, “Isn’t that right near where you live?” the president of the Central Village Block Association Peg Helmholz, said. “In that respect it’s a little embarrassing.”

That reaction may affect a buyer who’s considering a nearby 5-bedroom apartment with an asking price of $2.5 million. If the owners can’t unload their property or have to drop their price because of the latest “taco-gate,” can they summon the age-old American right to sue?

It’s not likely according to real estate attorney Sandor D. Krauss. Not only would it be very difficult to prove the rats, and only the rats, are affecting the resale price but Mr. Krauss says legally it’s an issue for the landlord to handle with their tenants.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Krauss said, “the decrease in property values as a result of such negligence is something that the owners in the surrounding area will be forced to deal with.”

“That’s life in the big city,” Ms. Helmholz said. “I think rats are disgusting and horrible. But if I win the lottery and have a chance to buy a building next to rat infested KFC, I would probably buy it.”