RIP in Real Estate

David Goldsmith

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Marc J. Goodman, a broker with the Corcoran Group for more than two decades, died at his Upper West Side home on Sunday from Covid-19, according to the brokerage and a close friend.

Pam Liebman, Corcoran’s president and CEO, informed company staffers and agents on Monday.

“An unfailing optimist, Marc is remembered by his colleagues and clients as the most generous of agents, always willing to lend an ear and offer a helping hand,” Liebman wrote in a statement.

Goodman was 67.

Friends and colleagues remembered Goodman as a good-natured man who had a playful sense of humor.

“People were drawn to Marc,” said broker Merope Lolis, who was his business partner for a decade. They began working together after Goodman helped her land a listing while she was out of town.


It was just the kind of man he was, she said.
“He approached his business the way that he approached his life, and that was with great honesty and integrity,” she said.
Robert Hickey, who said he’d been a close friend of Goodman’s for 18 years, described him as having “an easy charm,” and “that sort of Seinfeld humor where you see the humor in almost nothing.”
“He really loved that moment when you realize this is all crazy,” he said.
Goodman, who worked out of the West Side Gallery office, was also a long-time fitness instructor. He was devoted to his meditation practice and mentoring others.
Hickey recalled a conversation with a few of Goodman’s neighbors earlier in the week who were shocked to realize that Goodman, “who still looked great in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans,” was in his late 60s, not his 50s as most of them thought.
 

David Goldsmith

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Robby Browne, celebrated Corcoran agent, dies
Veteran broker was battling cancer and contracted coronavirus

Robby Browne, one of the city’s most celebrated residential agents, who was known as much for his exuberance as he was for closing high-profile deals, died Saturday.

Browne had been battling cancer for several years but recently contracted coronavirus, sources confirmed to The Real Deal.

An avid gardener and self-described raconteur who rode his bicycle to showings, Browne was a veteran agent who spent 18 years at the Corcoran Group. On Instagram, the firm called his loss heartbreaking.

“To know Robby was to love him. He was a light that shined brightly — not only at Corcoran but across our industry, and to all who had the opportunity to meet him,” the statement read. “As we grieve this immeasurable loss, our thoughts and love are with his family, friends, and all of those close to Robby Browne.”

Over a career that spanned more than three decades, he built a star-studded roster of clients including Hilary Swank, Uma Thurman and Jon Bon Jovi. In 2014, he sold billionaire Jon Stryker’s penthouse at 50 Central Park West for $42 million.

That deal and others earned him an arsenal of accolades through the decades — Corcoran’s deal of the year, broker of the year and top sales team of the year awards on multiple occasions. He sold $218 million worth of real estate in 2018, placing 25th on Real Trends’ broker ranking last year. Browne left Corcoran for Brown Harris Stevens in late 2014 but returned in the summer of 2015.

In 2007, the year he turned 60, he accepted Corcoran’s broker of the year award dressed in a woman’s bathing suit and dancing to the Village People’s “YMCA.”

“It was a release for me, a remembrance of people I lost and a lesson for those in the audience that they too can achieve great things by keeping a sense of humor, maintaining their dignity, and being honest and true to their own spirits,” he told Leaders magazine in 2016.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Browne moved north to attend Princeton University and Harvard Business School. (He later did a stint as a Harvard admissions officer.) Before real estate, he owned Browne-Ladd Tours, which took students to Europe. In 1984, Browne was on the organizing committee for the Los Angeles Olympics.

In many ways, he was a broker of another era. Rising through the ranks before StreetEasy became ubiquitous, he memorized floor plans, sold and resold some of the city’s best units and knew which lines could be merged in particular buildings. It was a skill he learned, in part, from his mother, who was a residential broker in the 1950s. “She used to babysit me at open houses and I would draw floor plans of how I thought homes should be designed,” he said.
Openly gay, he supported groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, where he sat on the board for many years. “Partly as a result of my brother’s death from AIDS in 1985, and the death of so many of my friends from AIDS, and the fear that I was going to die myself, I channeled my energy into Gay Men’s Health Crises, Act Up, God’s Love We Deliver, and many other causes,” he told Leaders magazine in 2016.
 

David Goldsmith

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Spire Group’s Bianka Yankov dies at 37
Brokerage chief was a pioneer of 100% commission model

Bianka Yankov, a co-founder of Spire Group who helped pioneer the 100-percent commission brokerage model in New York City, died Friday after a battle with cancer. She was 37.

Born in Bulgaria, Yankov moved to New York when she was 17. While working as a bartender she met her future husband, Dimo Nikolov, and in the early aughts the couple quit their jobs and got licensed as agents so they could spend more time together.

“Friends said, ‘You won’t last,’” Nikolov recalled. “But it was the opposite. We became a strong rental team.”

Working at Kevin Kurland’s boutique firm, Kurland Realty, Yankov quickly ascended the management ranks. In 2011 she and Kurland co-founded Spire, one of the city’s first 100 percent commission firms.

At the time, brokerage competition was heating up because the market was soft and the notion of agents keeping 100 percent of their commission — instead of giving the firms a cut — was relatively novel.

“It was outside the box,” said Josh Fields, Spire’s managing director, who worked with Yankov for 15 years. “It was a way to draw in experienced agents who liked the idea of not having to give a large percentage of their hard-earned money back to the company.”

Within a year, Spire grew from four agents to more than 100. In 2017, Yankov bought out Kurland’s stake in the brokerage. He later joined Citi Habitats, now part of the Corcoran Group.
Fields said Yankov’s grit, determination and work ethic drew agents to her. With Nikolov, Yankov had two sons. “Spire Group was her third baby,” he said.
In 2019 the firm closed $14.7 million in sell-side deals, according to an analysis by The Real Deal. Including buy-side deals, the total was north of $100 million, said Dina Tango, Spire’s director of operations.

“[Bianka] had a sixth sense about the market and how to save a deal,” Tango said. “Agents responded to that. In a positive environment, they produced more.”

Competitors said Yankov was also known for being ready to roll up her sleeves. “The 100 percent models don’t have huge staffs,” said David Schlamm, founder and president of City Connections Realty. “She was very hands on, 24/7. She wanted her agents to do well.”

Last year, Yankov was diagnosed with colon cancer — a disease that killed her older brother — but kept the news to herself. “When doctors said ‘no’ to her, she didn’t accept it,” Fields said.

Yankov and Nikolov — avid travelers who got engaged in Alaska, married in Hawaii and honeymooned in Bora Bora — pulled their six- and seven-year-old sons out of school earlier this year for a final holiday. They traveled to Mexico, Panama and Costa Rica.

In early March, the family flew to Bulgaria and celebrated Yankov’s 37th birthday on April 15. She died two days later.
 

David Goldsmith

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Jerry Wolkoff, prolific New York developer, dies at 83
Head of G&M Realty rose from poverty to be one of the biggest builders in the five boroughs and Long Island

Gerald “Jerry” Wolkoff, the brash and prolific New York developer, has died at 83.
Wolkoff suffered a brief neurological illness and died Friday evening at his home in New York City. Long Island Business News first reported the news.
Born on Nov. 8, 1936, the Brownsville-native began working at an early age, following his father’s death when Wolkoff was 11. In a 2018 interview with The Real Deal, he described how he and his two brothers had to help their single mother make rent each month.

“We all went to work, and whatever we made we put into a pot,” he said. “Money was never a thing that we would concern ourselves with. We just wanted to make sure we had enough to eat.”
Wolkoff launched his real estate career in the 1960s, when he sold his floor-waxing business to fund the construction of two houses. He would eventually become one of the largest homebuilders in the five boroughs. His firm, G&M Realty, amassed a 12 million-square-foot portfolio in New York City and Long Island.

Though prolific in his own right, Wolkoff was a different breed of developer. He never went to college, and took a different approach to real estate investing than his Ivy League counterparts in the business.

“I build different than most of them because I’m not doing anything unless I know I can afford to build it with very little debt,” he previously said. “They know how to play the game in their offices, but fuck it.”

Wolkoff is best known for owning 5Pointz, the iconic street art mecca in Long Island City — and the later “whitewashing” incident that landed him in court.
The developer had purchased the former water-meter factory in the 1970s, and for 25 years allowed graffiti artists to use the structure as a canvas. But when he began planning a massive 1.3 million-square-foot mixed-use project on the site, tensions rose. Then, one night in 2013, Wolkoff had the site painted over. The action drew a lawsuit and a $6.75 million fine, which he had appealed.

A strong advocate for business, Wolkoff was sometimes at odds with organized labor — his local City Council member, James Van Bramer, promised to never approve another of his projects after Wolkoff said he would not use union labor at 5Pointz.

“So Jimmy Van Bramer doesn’t want to bother with me, whatever,” Wolkoff said in 2018. “All these people have term limits — eventually they’ll be out of here — and my children are young. Thank God for term limits for our industry.” (Wolkoff has previously said his plan was to pass G&M onto his sons, David and Adam.)

The developer also rallied against the campaign that led Amazon to back out of bringing its headquarters to Long Island City.

Wolkoff’s firm has yet to break ground on Heartland Town Square in Brentwood, which would be New York’s largest planned community since Levittown, a project which the developer envisioned nearly two decades ago. The $4 billion proposal would see 9,000 apartments and 3 million square feet of office and retail space built on what is currently an abandoned state hospital.

Wolkoff is survived by his wife of 59 years, Michele — the “M” in G&M Realty — and his sons, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren.
David Wolkoff, who will helm the family firm with his brother, Adam, called his father a visionary.

“He was full of dichotomies — focused and intense, but warm and generous,” said David Wolkoff. “But he still had time for everybody, not just high-level businesspeople and bankers, but the guy on the construction site.
Wolkoff, who still drove a Prius and flew JetBlue despite his firm’s success, said he never planned to retire.
“I hate sleeping,” Wolkoff said. “People love sleep. What is that? Did you ever make one penny sleeping? Never.”
 

David Goldsmith

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Eastern Consolidated founder Peter Hauspurg dies
Veteran broker ran one of city's most active I-sales firms; mentored top dealmakers

Peter Hauspurg, who as co-founder of Eastern Consolidated ran one of New York’s most active investment-sales shops and played a broader role as a gregarious emissary of the city’s commercial real estate industry and a mentor of a generation of dealmakers, died Tuesday at his home in Santa Monica. He was 67.
Hauspurg and his wife Daun Paris started the firm in 1981, and grew it into one of the largest investment-sales focused shops in New York, with clients such as Gary Barnett’s Extell Development, Silverstein Properties and Forest City Ratner. One of the brokerage’s longest relationships was with the Durst Organization; over an 18-year period, Eastern helped the developer assemble the site for One Bryant Park, the office tower at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street that’s now home to Bank of America. Douglas Durst, chair of the Durst Organization, described Hauspurg as a rational and reasonable voice in a hyperbolic world.”


In 2015, Eastern did nearly $2 billion in deals, according to The Real Deal’s annual ranking. Notable transactions for the firm include Barnett’s $100 million sale of a NoMad development site at 30-36 East 29th Street to Rockefeller Group; Abraham Fruchthandler’s $50 million buy of a Harlem portfolio; and the sale of a $115 million East Side development site to Hines and Welltower.
Amid the 2018 market slowdown, the firm, like others in the industry, faced severe financial challenges. After being unable to find a buyer for the firm, Hauspurg and Paris shut it down. By then, Eastern Consolidated had shrunk to about a 100-broker shop.

After the closure, it appeared as though Hauspurg and Paris would step away from the grinding work of real estate dealmaking and administration. They surprised many when they joined ABS Partners Real Estate as investors.
Several top brokers came up under Hauspurg, including David Schechtman, Lipa Lieberman, Brian Ezratty, Adelaide Polsinelli and Robin Abrams.
“He was a mentor to thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of brokers and real estate professionals,” said Gregg Schenker of ABS. “They [Hauspurg and Paris] had moved [to California] for this beautiful chapter of their life. But he was still a New York City real estate deal person.”

Hauspurg relished his broader ambassadorial role in the industry. He was a popular fixture at the annual Real Estate Board of New York gala, and was on the trade group’s board of governors. In 2015, he received REBNY’s Louis Smadbeck Broker Recognition Award.
“In word and deed, Peter was an industry leader,” said REBNY president James Whelan.
“He was an inspiration in my early years,” said Bob Knakal, chair of JLL’s investment-sales division. “It is our people who make our industry what it is, and Peter was definitely one of the good guys.”
Marcus & Millichap’s Eric Anton, who worked at Eastern for 14 years, said Hauspurg was “very generous of spirit and a terrifically well rounded man. He was an excellent broker, an athlete and a family man.”

Anton said his fondest memory of Hauspurg was one time when they went fishing in the Bahamas.
“That’s how I remember Peter; he was a timeless, calm, class act.”
 

David Goldsmith

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Sheldon H. Solow, Manhattan Real Estate Mogul, Dies at 92
He built an empire from scratch, changing the skyline with high-end residential and office towers but leaving his crowning project unfinished.

Sheldon H. Solow, a Manhattan real estate developer who built a commercial and residential empire from scratch over a half-century, but left his son to finish his crowning project, a line of towers down the East River from the United Nations complex, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 92.

His wife, Mia Fonssagrives Solow, confirmed the death, at Weill Cornell Medical Center, but did not specify a cause.

The son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Mr. Solow, who embraced litigation with the passion of a sports fan, was a mercurial fighter with unshakable confidence in his own views. He built scores of high-end rental structures, including his signature Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street, a 50-story office tower whose front-and-back glass facades are steep concave slopes. Since the early 1970s, it has been one of the city’s most distinctive edifices.

But Mr. Solow’s most ambitious and visionary undertaking, by far, was his unfinished $4 billion project to transform the 9.2-acre site of a former Con Edison power plant on the East River into seven glass towers, with 4.8 acres of gardens, lawns and esplanades. The site, just south of the United Nations headquarters, was the largest undeveloped, privately owned plot in Manhattan.

A decade after buying the sprawling property in three parcels with a partner for $630 million in 2000 and spending $125 million more to demolish the power plant and clean up toxic debris, Mr. Solow was still bogged down in public-approval processes, community resistance, financing issues and other problems. He had shed his partner but had not yet begun to build on the site.

The Solow Building on West 57th Street near Fifth Avenue. When it went up in the early 1970s, the Fifth Avenue Association objected to its height and curving facades.

In 2013, he sold the southern parcel for $172 million. Two residential towers were built, but not by Mr. Solow. His first building on the site, a 42-story condominium-and-rental tower on the west side of First Avenue between 39th and 40th Streets, was finished in 2018. But most of the site, bounded by 41st and 38th Streets, First Avenue and the F.D.R. Drive, has remained a grassy wasteland, awaiting three residential condominium towers and an office building that were approved in a master plan in 2008.

While Mr. Solow said nothing specific about retiring as he turned 90 in 2018, his son, Stefan Soloviev (a pre-Ellis Island family name), had in recent years assumed a growing role in his father’s affairs. After working in agribusiness with large landholdings in the West, Mr. Soloviev appeared destined to succeed his father and to complete his long-dormant East River project.

“I’m taking over the business — I get that,” Mr. Soloviev, who was 42 at the time, told The New York Times in a 2018 joint interview with his father, with whom he had a long, prickly relationship. “But right now I work with my father. And I don’t think we’ve ever worked as well together as we are right now.”

In a career that began in the 1950s building rental garden apartments in Queens, Mr. Solow became a tycoon. This month, Forbes put his net worth at $4.4 billion, No. 167 on its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Solow in 2018 with his son Stefan Soloviev, who had assumed a growing role in his father’s business.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times
Though shy of publicity not of his own making, he was often in the news, announcing a project or one of his 200 lawsuits against rivals, tenants, banks or even friends, often in losing causes. Like it or not, he was a New York real estate mogul, along with Donald J. Trump, the Fisher brothers, Lewis Rudin, Leonard Litwin, the Milstein family, Bernard H. Mendik, Larry Silverstein and Harry B. Helmsley.

While he dropped out of New York University in the 1950s, Mr. Solow, who was self-taught in fine art appreciation, amassed one of the city’s notable private collections of Renaissance and modern art, with works by van Gogh, Joan Miró, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Balthus, Picasso, Matisse, Botticelli, Giacometti, Morris Louis and Mark Rothko, as well as Egyptian antiquities and African art.

He bought most of his art from dealers. But in 1973, he picked up a telephone in New York, called Sotheby’s auction house in London and waged a trans-Atlantic bidding war that won him Picasso’s 1909 Cubist “Femme Assise” (Seated Woman) for $800,000, a record price then for a Picasso. In 2016, Mr. Solow sold the painting, in a Sotheby’s auction, for $63.7 million.

Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Mr. Solow’s collection eclectic and distinguished. Its astronomical value was hard to calculate. Like many aspects of his life, his art generated controversy. Crain’s New York Business reported in 2018 that his art was held by a nonprofit museum that received federal tax breaks despite not being open to the public.

Sometimes his publicity was quite positive. In 1984, Mr. Solow built a row of 11 connected five-story single-family townhouses on East 67th Street in Manhattan, between Second and Third Avenues. They all had elevators and shared a private common garden in the back. It was a creation that had rarely been seen in Manhattan since the 19th century.

Paul Goldberger, at the time the chief architecture critic of the Times, wrote of the project: “It marks the return of an ambitious and deeply civilized idea: the belief that the individual house enriches the city more by being part of a group, and that the street becomes a richer place by being planned as a totality. One can only celebrate Mr. Solow’s intentions. He understood, as few commercial developers have, that the essence of decent urbanity is in the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

265 East 66th Street in Manhattan: a black glass residential tower built by Mr. Solow’s company. His first project was a waterfront apartment complex in Far Rockaway, Queens.Credit...via Solow Building Company
Sheldon Henry Solow was born in Brooklyn on July 20, 1928, to Isaac and Jennie (Brill) Solow. His father was a bricklayer who developed homes in Brooklyn but lost them during the Great Depression, forcing him to return to masonry work. Sheldon and his sisters, Renee and Rosalie, attended public schools in Brooklyn. After attending New York University for a year, he quit to try real estate.

His first project was a 72-unit garden apartment rental complex on a waterfront location in Far Rockaway, Queens. He gave away 16-foot outboard motorboats to any family that signed a three-year lease. He then built one-family homes in Huntington, on Long Island, before buying more land in Suffolk County and on Jamaica Bay and erecting more homes.

Moving his business to Manhattan, he built Rivers Bend, a 22-story residential tower overlooking the East River and Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side, in 1964. It advertised amenities like a penthouse swimming pool, wood-burning fireplaces and panoramic views.

He then began assembling properties for a building site on West 57th Street, off Fifth Avenue. It took five years and cost $12 million to buy the properties (the equivalent of about $100 million today). Clearing and construction took several years more. The result was the Solow Building, at a cost of $40 million (about $335 million today), with its sloping facades, views of Central Park and 1.5 million square feet of rentable space. Avon, the cosmetics firm, was an anchor tenant.

In 1974, the Fifth Avenue Association, in its biennial architectural awards, gave the Solow Building a slap on the wrist. “The Solow Building has urban bad manners,” the association said. It praised the building’s “handsome” detailing, including a giant red “9” address marker on the sidewalk, but said that the sloped facades broke the line of the street and that its 50-story height shattered the block’s scale.

The Solow Building, at 9 West 57th Street, with its distinctive sculpture of the number 9 at street level.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times
Mr. Solow hit back, saying his building “may have bad manners, but it has good foresight,” adding: “In 20 years that whole block will be developed at this scale, and I think my building will set the standard.”

He was right. Today, countless midtown skyscrapers are as big, or far bigger, than Mr. Solow’s, and several have sloped facades.

Mr. Solow married Ms. Fonssagrives, a sculptor and jewelry designer, in 1972. Besides his wife and his son Stefan, he is survived by another son, Nikolai Solow, and 13 grandchildren.

For years, his son Mr. Soloviev was largely based in the West, where his family owned a half-million acres of crop and cattle-grazing land in Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. In recent years, however, he has resided mostly in New York and East Hampton, N.Y.

Mr. Solow, who also had homes in Manhattan and East Hampton, gave millions to medical, educational, environmental and Jewish organizations. He was a life trustee of New York University and its Institute of Fine Arts.

While his art collection was not generally open to the public, sculptures and paintings by Miró, the Spanish surrealist, were put on display at the Solow Building in 1990. Mr. Solow called it good for business. “Thousands of people come into the building every day,” he told The Times, “and I wanted them to be able to walk through the lobby and enjoy art.”
 

David Goldsmith

All Powerful Moderator
Staff member

Warren Estis, veteran real estate litigator, dead at 73​

Attorney co-founded one of NYC’s largest real estate legal practices​

Warren Estis, the veteran litigator who co-founded the legal practice that bills itself as New York City’s largest real estate-only law firm, died Wednesday. He was 73.
As a founding partner of Rosenberg & Estis, the attorney served as the lead litigator in cases for New York City’s developers and property owners.

“Warren was a distinguished member of New York City’s legal community and he will be remembered for his wit, intellect and tireless advocacy for the real estate industry,” firm co-founder Gary Rosenberg said in a statement Thursday. “We are saddened by his loss and share our heartfelt sympathies with his family.”

Estis and his partner founded their eponymous firm in 1975, representing owners of rent regulated buildings. The company grew to 85 attorneys in 2019, according to a count of the largest real estate practices by The Real Deal. That placed it third in New York City in terms of the number of real estate attorneys here — behind Fried, Frank, Harris Shriver & Jacobson and Clifford Chance, which are much larger, multidisciplinary practices.

Estis trained the firm’s litigators and oversaw that side of the business. Among his largest clients were the Related Companies, Rockrose Development, TF Cornerstone, J.D. Carlisle and Somerset Partners.
Rosenberg & Estis’ notable work included negotiating the joint venture between the Durst Organization and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to build and lease One World Trade Center, according to the company’s website. It also represented Durst in a joint venture with Bank of America to develop One Bryant Park.

Estis was also a landlord. Along with his law partner, he owned a stake in about 35 residential rental condominiums.
A veteran of nasty squabbles, Estis knew how to take a punch as well as deliver one.
In 2012 the controversial restaurateur Joe Bastianich published a book, “Restaurant Man,” in which he used his sharp tongue on his perceived enemies. In the book, he called Estis “the fucking antichrist of of landlord-tenant lawyers.”

Estis took the barb in good humor, telling Commercial Observer he considered it a compliment.
“It is an honor to be in the prestigious club of those slammed by Bastianich,” he told the publication in a statement. “To have him mention me by name years after the case shows that I represented my client very well, and in many ways it is great marketing.”

Estis was still handling cases as recently as last summer. In August he represented ABS Partners in a rent dispute with one of its office tenants at 270 Madison Avenue.
 

David Goldsmith

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Quontic Bank’s Steven Schnall dies in motorcycle accident​

Entrepreneur built thriving lending business focused on underserved immigrant communities​

Steven Schnall, who as head of Quontic Bank built a thriving mortgage business focused on New York’s immigrant communities, and also moonlighted as a boutique condo developer, died this week. He was 55, and died in a motorcycle accident while on the way back from a biking trip to Canada, sources said.
“Steve was a charismatic leader who inspired progress, got results – and managed to have fun along the way,” George Lazaridis, Quontic’s co-Founder and interim CEO, said in a statement. “He will be greatly missed.”

Schnall’s most recent venture, a lender that he bought in 2009 and rebranded as the online bank Quontic, pioneered digital banking products, including a finger ring that worked as a debit card and making interest payments in Bitcoin.
The Fort Lauderdale native made his first deal in middle school, selling cinnamon toothpicks, and slingshots made from discarded telephone wire, he said on a podcast last year.
His first brush with real estate soon followed. He went door-to-door selling peepholes, targeting large apartment complexes that lacked the simple, low-tech security device.

“We’d knock on the door and somebody would say, ‘Who is it?’,” Schnall shared on the podcast, “Pass the Secret Sauce.” “We’d say, ‘if you had a peephole, you wouldn’t have to ask.'”
After a late ’80s recession deterred him from law school, he left the University of Florida with an accounting degree at age 22 and took a job with PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York.
Ten months in, he quit the accounting firm for a mortgage lending company run by “scam artists” who he realized were selling overvalued mortgages to unsophisticated home buyers.
“I was enamored by how savvy they were,” he said. His partners, however, cut him out of the business and he faced bankruptcy at the age of 23.

With a $15,000 loan from a friend, he launched his own mortgage brokerage and began hustling residential real estate agents for home buyers who needed financing. The company, New York Mortgage, sold its stock to the public in 2004 after Schnall pitched investors on creating a vertically integrated mortgage REIT.
He dived into luxury residential development shortly thereafter, buying 2 North Moore Street, a two-story commercial property in Tribeca he converted into an elaborate mansion. It sold for $24 million in 2010 — then a record price for a townhouse in the area.

Schnall sold his mortgage business in 2007 after cracks began showing in the market. But he dived in again with Quontic after the crash, seeing that immigrants, seniors and gig workers (then a novel phenomenon) were struggling to get loans.
His wife, Sherri, found the land for a six-unit condo project at 15 Leonard Street, which the pair announced in 2012, by going door-to-door in Tribeca. The Schnalls kept the townhouse attached to the building, which attracted pop stars. In 2018, Schnall and another partner, Howard Lev, began developing rentals in Harlem.
He was a finalist for EY’s “entrepreneur of the year award” this year, and was active in the Young Presidents’ Organization as well as with Urban Angels, a meal charity he founded.

Schnall is survived by his wife and two sons.
 

David Goldsmith

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REMEMBRANCE
Robert Toll, Who Headed U.S.’s Largest Luxury Homebuilder, Dies at 81

Robert Toll, who built Toll Brothers into the country’s largest luxury homebuilder and brought a founder’s passion to the business, died Friday at age 81 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease

The entrepreneur, who was known as Bob, and his brother Bruce founded Toll Brothers (ticker: TOL) outside Philadelphia in 1967. They initially constructed two homes that they decided to hold as samples for lots they were developing nearby.

The brothers took the company public in 1986. Since the IPO, Toll shares have risen to $45 from a split-adjusted price of $1.

Bob Toll was CEO of Toll Brothers from its founding until 2010 and remained on the board until recently. He guided the company’s expansion from the Philadelphia area to nearby states and ultimately nationwide. Toll now operates in 24 states.

The company is expected to deliver about 10,000 homes in its current fiscal year, which ends this month, generating $9.7 billion in sales and more than $1 billion of net income. When it went public in 1986, Toll completed less than 1,000 homes and had $124 million of sales and $12 million in profits.

“He brought an incredible passion to the business,” Toll CEO Doug Yearley told Barron’s. As CEO, Bob Toll presided over what Yearley called “manic Mondays,” when he and the rest of his management team would exhaustively go through sales and other key data from the prior week.

“He was very hands-on, driven and super competitive” Yearley said, noting that the CEO would personally review every page of land-purchase contracts.

Yearley said that when Bob Toll would drive through home developments, his car “would screech to a stop” and he would get out and pull weeds from front lawns or plump pillows on the couches of model homes. “He knew that the little details built the brand,” Yearley said.

Toll’s business faces different challenges than its publicly traded peers because it focuses on the high end of the market with homes costing an average of about $1 million. Industry leaders Lennar (LEN) and DR Horton ( DHI) mostly build cheaper, entry-level homes in the Sunbelt costing about $400,000 each.
Toll’s challenge is to build 10,000 homes a year while allowing customization and meeting the needs of often demanding buyers. To build on that scale, Toll has a developed a home component assembly business and other manufacturing operations while operating its own architecture and engineering businesses. Another challenge is to get land in desirable areas, where zoning restrictions and antidevelopment activists can be problematic.

When he was CEO, Bob Toll would hold forth on quarterly conference calls like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, mixing details of the business with a range of other topics including one digression to Middle Eastern politics. He owned 7.9 million Toll shares, a 6.6% stake, worth about $355 million.

The former CEO spearheaded Toll’s expansion including the development of what it called City Living—condominiums in New York and a few other cities.

An opera buff, Bob Toll was a financial supporter and board member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He and his wife Jane recently pledged more than $50 million to the University of Pennsylvania’s law school through their foundation.

Some used to deride Toll Brothers’ luxury homes as McMansions, but the former CEO brushed off the criticism, saying the company was “building the American dream.”
 

David Goldsmith

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Olympia & York patriarch Albert Reichmann dies at 93​

Billionaire led largest private commercial landlord in New York before sale to Brookfield​

Albert Reichmann, the patriarch behind the firm that was once New York City’s largest private commercial landlord, has died at 93.
The Olympia & York patriarch died on Dec. 17 in his family’s hometown of Toronto, his grandson confirmed to the New York Times.

The developer made his name with major bets across the world, including the World Financial Center in Manhattan and the Canary Wharf section of London. He built a family net worth estimated by Forbes to top out at $10 billion before the company landed in bankruptcy in 1992 and sold to Brookfield Properties in 2005.
Reichmann was born in Vienna, Austria in 1929 after his family fled Europe shortly before the start of World War II. Reichmann and his wife ultimately settled in Toronto in 1959.
Albert’s brothers, Edward and Louis, helmed Olympia Floor & Wall Tile in Montreal at the time, while another brother, Ralph, led an affiliate in Toronto. Albert started York Factory Developments with money from his father before the family’s companies merged in 1964.

Viewed as a quieter leader of the company, Albert was responsible for administration and internal issues at the firm. His brother Paul, who died in 2013, was seen as the charismatic dealmaker of the pair.
One of the company’s most prominent projects was the World Financial Center in Manhattan, designed by famed architect Cesar Pelli. The property is still around today, but goes by Brookfield Place following Brookfield’s acquisition of the company’s portfolio.
“There have been two great real estate deals in the history of New York,” Battery Park City Authority CEO Meyer Frucher told the Times in 1987. “The first was when the Dutch bought the island of Manhattan. The second was when the Canadians bought the island again.”

The company also rehabilitated the Docklands in London, recruited to the Canary Wharf project by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The company’s development portfolio also included Exchange Place in Boston, the Olympia Center in Chicago and First Canadian Place in Toronto.
The company filed for bankruptcy protection in Canada in 1992, boasting 23 million square feet of Manhattan office space at the time. The recession of the late 1980s doomed the company, particularly after the slow lease up of Canary Wharf.
 

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Famed architect Rafael Viñoly dead at 78​

Uruguayan behind 432 Park and 125 Greenwich designed noteworthy buildings around the world

Rafael Viñoly, the Uruguayan architect who shaped skylines from New York to Seoul, has died at 78.
Viñoly died Thursday in New York City, his family said. The cause of death was an aneurysm, according to El País Uruguay, which was among the first to report the news.

Some of Viñoly’s best-known designs include 20 Fenchurch Street, a London office tower nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” building; the supertall Manhattan condo tower 432 Park Avenue and the Tokyo International Forum. His work brought both acclaim and criticism.

“He was a visionary who will be missed by all those whose lives he touched through his work,” Viñoly’s son Román, a director at his father’s namesake firm, said in a prepared statement. “The firm’s partners and directors, many of whom have collaborated with him for decades, will extend his architectural legacy in the work we will continue to perform every day.”

Viñoly was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on June 1, 1944. He studied at the University of Buenos Aires, where he received a master’s degree in architecture in 1969. By then Viñoly had already established himself in Argentina, co-founding Estudio de Arquitectura with a half-dozen partners in 1964.

He moved to the U.S. in 1978, settled in New York a year later and started Rafael Viñoly Architects in 1983. His first big project in New York was at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
He would go on to design the Bronx County Hall of Justice, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. Later in life he began designing luxury condos, including 432 Park Avenue, a boxy 1,396-foot-tall tower developed by CIM Group and Harry Macklowe. Viñoly also designed 125 Greenwich, a luxury condo tower in Downtown Manhattan that recently restarted construction after years of delays caused by financing issues.
Viñoly won numerous awards for his work, including a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects’ New York chapter in 1995. Outside of architecture, Viñoly enjoyed playing classical piano.

He is survived by his wife, Diana, his son, Román, stepsons Nicolás and Lucas and his brother Daniel.
 

David Goldsmith

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Sam Zell, billionaire real estate investor, dies​

Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate who earned a multibillion-dollar fortune and a reputation as “the grave dancer” for his ability to revive moribund properties has died due to complications from a recent illness
By
The Associated Press
May 18, 2023, 11:10 AM ET
• 4 min read
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FILE - Sam Zell listens during an interview by Maria Bartiromo, during her "Mornings with Maria Bartiromo" program on the Fox Business Network, in New York, on Aug. 15, 2017. Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate who earned a multibillion-dollar fortune and a reputation as "the grave dancer" for his ability to revive moribund properties, died on Thursday, May 18, 2023. He was 81. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)The Associated Press

Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate who earned a multibillion-dollar fortune and a reputation as "the grave dancer" for his ability to revive moribund properties died on Thursday. He was 81.
Zell died at home due to complications from a recent illness, according to Equity Group Investments, a company he founded in 1968.

Bearded and blunt-spoken, Zell reveled in bucking traditional wisdom. He had a golden touch with real estate, and got his start managing apartment buildings as a college student. By the time he reached his 70s, he had amassed a fortune estimated at $3.8 billion.
Zell sold Equity Office, the office-tower company he spent three decades building, to Blackstone Group for $39 billion in 2007. It was the largest private equity transaction in history, and Zell personally netted $1 billion.
A month later, he made another deal that ultimately tarnished his image: the acquisition of the ailing Tribune Co. for $13 billion. The media giant filed for bankruptcy the following year.
Real estate was his trademark, but as he noted in an interview shortly before making the ill-fated Tribune deal, it represented only about 25% of his holdings.

“I’m a professional opportunist,” Zell told The Associated Press at the time. “I’m pretty sure that no matter what topic you pick, we’re involved in some way or another.”
Zell was born in Highland Park, Ill., on Sept. 28, 1941, four months after his immigrant parents arrived in the United States. They fled Poland before the Nazi invasion.
His father was a wholesale jeweler who dabbled successfully in real estate investment and the stock market. The young Zell took pictures at his 8th-grade prom and sold them, and later took to buying Playboy magazines in downtown Chicago and reselling them to his classmates in Hebrew school in the suburbs for a 200% markup.
His first successes in real estate came while he was a student at the University of Michigan. After managing the building where he lived in exchange for free rent, he moved on to managing other properties, ultimately incorporating an apartment-management business and then selling it.

After working briefly at a Chicago law firm, he teamed with his Ann Arbor fraternity brother Robert Lurie and they began acquiring distressed properties from developers who were bogged down by high interest rates. That practice continued through the recession of the mid-1970s, with great success.
He later co-founded the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in 1999 with Lurie’s widow, Ann.
Zell’s reputation grew, and in 1976 the contrarian investor talked about his penchant for spotting and pursuing opportunities in an article that he entitled “The Grave Dancer.” The nickname stuck.
After the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, Zell went on a buying spree of real estate properties. He also encouraged institutional investors to pool their money for commercial real estate in the early ’90s when it was on the outs.
Zell loved risk, both in his business dealings and his personal life. He once acknowledged riding his motorcycle as fast as 145 mph on a trip across the South American pampas.
His love of motorcycles caused him to form a group called Zell’s Angels, consisting mostly of business tycoon friends who would go on rides with him around the world. He was an avid skier, racquetball player, paintball enthusiast and sports fan over the years, with stakes in the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox.
Zell was fiercely protective of his personal life. Reports said he was married at least three times and had three children. He maintained homes in Chicago and Southern California.
“Sam Zell was a self-made, visionary entrepreneur. He launched and grew hundreds of companies during his 60-plus-year career and created countless jobs. Although his investments spanned industries across the globe, he was most widely recognized for his critical role in creating the modern real estate investment trust, which today is a more than $4 trillion industry,” Equity Group Investments said in a written statement on Thursday.
Zell is survived by his wife, Helen; his sister Julie Baskes and her husband, Roger Baskes; his sister Leah Zell; his three children, Kellie Zell and son-in-law Scott Peppet, Matthew Zell, and JoAnn Zell; and his nine grandchildren.


 

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Keller Williams real estate agent died in plane crash that left ‘crater’
By Mary K. Jacob
June 5, 2023 2:56pm Updated

Adina Azarian, a Keller Williams agent and longtime real-estate professional whose business spanned New York City and Long Island, has been identified among the four who were killed in a tragic ”ghost plane” crash that triggered a sonic boom from F-16 fighter jets flying over Washington, DC to intercept it.

“We are deeply saddened to confirm the tragic loss of our beloved agent Adina Azarian, and her daughter, Aria,” Keller Williams said in a statement to The Post.

“Adina was an iconic real estate agent in New York City and Long Island. Our thoughts and condolences go out to the family, friends, and colleagues of Adina during this incredibly difficult time. We ask for privacy and respect for the family’s wishes as they grieve the loss of their loved ones. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all those who have expressed their condolences and offered support during this time of mourning.”

In a separate external email sent to all Keller Williams employees, Azarian, 49, was described as a “vibrant personality” with an “unwavering commitment to her clients [that] set her apart in the real estate industry.”
Adina Azarian.

Adina had worked mostly the Hamptons. She had been with Keller Williams since 2011. Prior, she had worked in the Manhattan real estate market for 20-plus years.

Most of her listings spanned the $1 million to $3 million range.

John Rumpel, of Encore Motors of Melbourne Inc., confirmed that his daughter, his 2-year-old granddaughter and a nanny were aboard the doomed flight along with their pilot. It crashed in Virginia.
Adina Azarian with her daughter.
John and Barbara Rumpel’s daughter and granddaughter were killed in a small plane crash Sunday.

Rumpel told the New York Times his family was returning to their East Hampton home Sunday after visiting him in North Carolina.

The private aircraft had departed Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Elizabethton, Tenn., heading for Long Island’s MacArthur Airport, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

It reached the New York area before making a nearly 180-degree turn and flying toward Virginia, according to the flight-tracking website Flight Aware.

After the plane entered a restricted zone with no response from the pilot, two F-16s were deployed and were authorized to travel at supersonic speeds — causing the sonic boom that was heard across the nation’s ,capital and neighboring communities in Maryland and Virginia.
John and Barbara Rumpel.
John and Barbara Rumpel also lost their other daughter Victoria at age 19 in a 1994 scuba-diving accident.

After flying over DC, the “ghost plane” continued its chaotic descent, at one point falling more than 30,000 feet per minute before crashing.

The horrific crash site had at most only four recognizable pieces from the plane, with a first responder noting: “There was nothing really bigger than your arm.”

Rescuers were only able to reach the site — in a rural part of the Shenandoah Valley — on foot, and no survivors were found, just human remains, police said.

“May the memories of Adina and Aria bring comfort to their family and friends, and may their spirits live on in our hearts forever,” the external statement by Keller Williams read.
 

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Real Estate Weekly disappears without explanation​

Trade publication offline, out of print for months with no editorial staff after nearly 70 years

Real Estate Weekly, the long-running trade publication that documented more than seven decades of New York real estate, has quietly gone dark.
The newspaper’s website has been offline for several months now. And the bare-bones print operation appears to have fizzled out following a string of difficulties.

Chris Hagedorn, the publisher of REW and and a handful of other small papers, is not making a concerted effort to bring the publication back online, sources told The Real Deal. He is said to be open to offers for the publication’s assets, but is not currently soliciting buyers.
The publication has no editorial staff and has not posted an article since September. For the past few years, most of the site’s content has been press release reruns.

“I think it’s a sad day. It was an honor to work there,” said Linda O’Flanagan, former editor of Real Estate Weekly. “It paved the way for tremendous journalists who have gone on to greater things.”
Hagedorn declined to comment.
Real Estate Weekly had billed itself as the longest-running real estate publication in New York City, having started in 1955. The newspaper closely documented the city’s real estate business with a keen eye toward the dynastic families that dominated the industry in those days. It was founded by Charles and Al Hagedorn Jr., Chris’s father and uncle, respectively.
“It was to some the bible of New York real estate,” said Roxanne Donovan, a former editor of Real Estate Weekly and founder of the real estate public relations firm Great Ink. “Every deal got into that paper.”
The publication claimed on its now-deactivated subscriber page that its weekly print edition reached 30,000 readers. It carried a $49 annual subscription rate.

Real Estate Weekly, like others, struggled to adapt to the emergence of digital media. It never built out a digital newsroom, according to sources. Others say that Chris Hagedorn did not embrace the glad-handing responsibilities of a publisher, such as attending or promoting industry events. This was in contrast to his uncle Al, who died at 83 in 1996.
Nevertheless, the publication was once an organ for industry information, where dealmakers checked for the latest news and advertised in its pages. It was a training ground for many of the journalists covering the industry, as well as many influential real estate publicists.
The New York Post’s Lois Weiss and the Wall Street Journal’s Konrad Putzier worked there, as did George Shea of Shea Communications.
“People had a fondness for Real Estate Weekly. When you worked for Real Estate Weekly, people were happy to see you,” Donovan said, recalling meetings with Donald Trump, Seymour Durst, Bernard Mendik, Charlie Benenson, Aaron Gural and Lew Rudin.

It existed long before competitors Bisnow, Commercial Observer, Crain’s New York Business and The Real Deal came on the scene.
The Hagedorn family was once ranked by Forbes as one of the 200 wealthiest families in the U.S. Through their company Hagedorn Communications, the Hagedorns also owned local newspapers, including the Town & Village, a weekly newspaper covering Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.
The company owned its own printing press in New Rochelle, which allowed it to publish daily newspapers when union printers went on strike in the early 1960s.
 

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Alice Mason, legendary Manhattan real estate agent, dies at 100​

Broke down barriers and connected the elite in New York City

Legendary real estate broker and socialite Alice Mason died on Jan. 4 at the age of 100 in her Manhattan home.
A prominent figure in the real estate scene, Mason was known for her ability to navigate the exclusive world of Manhattan’s co-ops, particularly the upscale buildings lining Park and Fifth Avenues, starting in the 1950s, the New York Times reported.

Mason told The Real Deal back in 2010 that her success in real estate was changing New York by getting people to live together in an era when many prewar buildings were monied silos.
“When I started there were four managing agents and they only hired people in the social register, because they mainly worked in all those prewar buildings that were mainly WASP-y buildings,” she told TRD in The Closing.

“When I had Alfred Vanderbilt for a client, I called many buildings and they said, “We would never take a Vanderbilt or an Astor — they’re the 1880s, and we’re the 1620s.
“I sold him an apartment at 31 East 79th Street, a penthouse. I knew a lot of different kinds of people, and I decided they all should be able to live in the same buildings. Building by building, I got different people in.”
Mason may have been motivated by a secret she kept — her Black heritage — for nearly 50 years, even from close friends like Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, and Gloria Vanderbilt.
By the 1980s, during the Reagan era, Mason had established herself as a master in the field, running her own firm, Alice F. Mason Ltd., representing high-profile clients in exclusive buildings like 740 Park, once home to the Rockefellers and the Bouviers.
Described as more of a matchmaker than a traditional real estate broker, Mason orchestrated complex maneuvers to help clients secure coveted apartments. For instance, she advised a fashion mogul to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and prepared a Saudi prince for a co-op board interview by tricking him into thinking it was a cocktail party.

Mason’s influence extended beyond real estate, hosting meticulously orchestrated black-tie dinners in her Upper East Side apartment. Attendees included a mix of power brokers, moguls, journalists, authors, diplomats, and heads of state. Regulars at these events included Norman Mailer, Helen Gurley Brown, Vanderbilt, and Walters.
“I had irrepressible joie de vivre and bubbly enthusiasm that was contagious, and a natural irreverence,” she wrote in her biography, according to Air Mail, “so people were attracted to me and they shed their inhibitions, and so no matter how famous and high profile they were they loved laughing and talking with me as I added fun to their lives.”
While Mason was an ardent Democratic fundraiser, she also held unconventional beliefs, such as her interest in numerology. She correctly predicted Jimmy Carter’s presidential win in 1976 but was disappointed by his loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Her rent-stabilized apartment on East 72nd Street, where she hosted legendary dinners, remained a constant in her life even as the neighborhood changed.

Refusing to leave, Mason paid $2,476 a month for an apartment that, in the same line, was recently on the market for just under $10 million.
Mason was married three times.
In 2009, Mason closed her firm at the age of 86 as the real estate landscape evolved.
 
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