Skip to main content

Power brokers

By: Tatsha Robertson
Published: 1/9/2006Source: The Boston Globe

NEW YORK -- When Dennis Mangone enters the lavish restaurant in the new Time Warner Center, he's treated like a celebrity: The waiters know him by name, and the host leads him to one of the best seats in the house, with breathtaking views of Central Park and near a famous movie director who's eating breakfast.

Wearing a designer suit and with his hair slicked back, the Bronx native moves with the ease of someone who's comfortable around the rich and the famous. Then again, he should be: Mangone has not only sold a number of apartments in the glitzy building, where condos fetch millions of dollars, he has bought a place there himself.

Mangone, 45, is a real estate power broker, one of a new breed of hyper-aggressive home finders whose ability to close big deals has resulted in legions of admirers and detractors.

The high-end real estate markets in Boston and New York are booming, and the top brokers can get into the best restaurants and celebrity parties without a blink. But only in the Big Apple, where one apartment sold for a staggering $45 million, are brokers accorded the same rock-star status as their celebrity clients.

Vacations in the Hamptons, publicists, private drivers, schmooze sessions with celebrities, and their own faces on billboards can all be part of the fabulous life of a top broker. Some even now have drivers, so busy they are dialing up deals that they can't spare a hand on the wheel.

''Oh, I am just an extension of the product," Mangone averred. An agent for prominent realtor, the Corcoran Group, Mangone, sold $100 million worth of real estate in 2005, including apartments to Pop diva Beyonce Knowles and Latin heartthrob Ricky Martin.

Like the two cities themselves, the power brokers in New York and Boston couldn't be more different. The chatty agent who was showing Charlie Sheen's character an apartment in the film ''Wall Street" was purportedly based on Linda Stein, the quintessential New York City broker to the stars.

Boston's leading brokers, however, need to be more subtle if they want to attract the region's monied blue-blooded clients, real estate specialists said.

''We deal with a lot of quiet money," said Terry Maitland, a broker at LandVest in Boston. He sold $75 million worth of real estate in 2005. His firm typically receives calls from old families and their representatives -- law firms and trust companies.

Still, some Bostonians are learning to be showier: They're placing their photographs on their business cards, which even in this day and age some white-glove brokers still find to be gauche, said Maryann Roos Taylor, a power broker who also works for LandVest.

New York City brokers can be so tied to celebrity clients that they become extensions of their staffs, not unlike assistants and publicists. In other cases, brokers are themselves the stars.

Dolly Lenz, the ''Bono" of New York City real estate, hangs with Usher and Barbara Streisand. Lenz has sold $3 billion worth of real estate over her 20 years. She's been featured on MTV and in countless newspaper articles, and her employer, Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, conveniently includes a video of her being interviewed on CNBC's ''Power Lunch" on its website.

Steven Gaines, author of ''The Sky's The Limit," the dishy new book on Manhattan's real estate world, calls her a combination of ''Babe Ruth and Jack the Ripper. Dennis Kozlowski, the failed Tyco tycoon, once called her ''Jaws."

Lenz declined to comment.

Home buyers and sellers in Boston's expensive market may not have the most favorable impressions of brokers, who collect large fees for showing homes that, until a few months ago, often sold in a hurry no matter what. But top brokers such as Lenz work around the clock, schmoozing with rich clients, ferreting out the hottest deals like some great stock tip. Moreover, in New York they have to plot to get clients past the dreaded co-op boards. But they're rewarded with annual commissions of $1 million to $3 million.

''You can never sit back for one second. The minute you sit back you lose," said Dottie Herman, Lenz's boss at Douglas Elliman.

Daniela Kunen, a Douglas Elliman broker, proves that aggressive doesn't always mean showy.

''I am always on the telephone," she said. ''I am a workaholic. I do not think you can be successful unless you are reachable and hardworking."

She is the company's top seller of cooperatives, and she also quietly dominates the high-end market on Park, Fifth, and Madison avenues.

''Discretion, discretion, discretion!" echoed Stein, known for her A-list clients, including Madonna, Steven Spielberg, Angelina Jolie, and Michael Douglas.

Like Stein, a former manager of the punk band the Ramones, many of the brokers currently at the top of their game in Boston and New York never planned on finding people homes for a living. Lenz was a CPA and Maitland a reporter.

''One of the attributes I carried from journalism to this business is the ability to ask questions, to not inject myself into a conversation and to focus on my clients," said Maitland.

Roos Taylor moved to Boston from the Catskills in 1965 to become an executive secretary. ''It really was a different world for women. I didn't want to be a teacher or a social worker, so I said 'I will go to the best secretarial school,' " she recalled.

Before becoming a fund-raiser for MIT, she built a hefty Rolodex while working as a secretary for a chief surgeon in an area hospital, for Mayor Kevin H. White, and for a former dean of Harvard Business School.

''I've been in Boston for a long time. I know a lot of people of certain stature and profile and can bring it to my business," she said.

Unlike in the past, when brokers had to come from the right circles, today's brokers are finding that the new rich -- hip hop stars, computer tycoons, athletes, and celebrities -- want their brokers to act like a star or know what a star wants, rather than to come from the right address.

Jacky Teplitzky, a former sergeant in the Israeli army who works for Douglas Elliman, is one of the first brokers in New York City to have her own publicist. ''The only way to succeed in this highly competitive business is to differentiate yourself and brand yourself," she said.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that the Boston-New York rivalry extends even to the real estate communities -- at least when it comes to style points.

''We don't have the Hollywood, New York scene here," said Debra Taylor Blair, president of the real estate service Listing Information Network, or LINK. ''We pride ourselves on understated and private wealth, which is reflected" in the buyer's ''choice of broker."

But Gaines defended the flashier style of brokers in his city. ''They are like stockbrokers," Gaines said. ''So why shouldn't they drive in a Rolls-Royce and vacation in the Hamptons?" 

RETURN TO PRESS PAGE