On Feb. 12, after seas of silk-scarved, shiny-shoed, power-suited real estate brokers shuffle into the Pierre’s ballroom, the colossal real estate brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman will name its broker of the year. Just as it’s been since Dottie Herman and Howard Lorber bought the company in 2003, and as it will be until the day onyx bathrooms and heated-floor kitchens all cease to exist, the award will go to Dolly Lenz.
“One of the great killers of all time,” Donald Trump called her at the firm’s awards ceremony five years ago, when Ms. Lenz fought off her slick-haired ex-protégé Michael Shvo, who had threatened to leave if he wasn’t named top broker.
On Feb. 12, after seas of silk-scarved, shiny-shoed, power-suited real estate brokers shuffle into the Pierre’s ballroom, the colossal real estate brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman will name its broker of the year. Just as it’s been since Dottie Herman and Howard Lorber bought the company in 2003, and as it will be until the day onyx bathrooms and heated-floor kitchens all cease to exist, the award will go to Dolly Lenz.
“One of the great killers of all time,” Donald Trump called her at the firm’s awards ceremony five years ago, when Ms. Lenz fought off her slick-haired ex-protégé Michael Shvo, who had threatened to leave if he wasn’t named top broker. He left. Last year, Jackie Teplitzky, an Israeli Army sergeant–turned–broker, complained publicly that the ceremony’s rules had been changed to give the award to Ms. Lenz.
But her biggest problems these days are these days themselves. Back in the bubbly autumn of 2007, Ms. Lenz was reported to have sold $748,319,000 of real estate the year earlier, four times higher than the country’s second-biggest broker. Since then, as the luxury housing market has fizzled gruesomely, she’s been replaced at her three biggest projects: the gargantuan white-brick Manhattan House; the New Age–branded Miraval Living; and Wall Street’s Cipriani Club Residences, where, the brokerage confirmed, Elliman’s Raphael De Niro, the actor’s son, has been the main broker for over a year.
But everyone’s fallen. There are no super-powered super-brokers in the recession. It’s made mortals of all, even the woman who once said things like “I don’t go through a lot of tirades, because I kind of just say, ‘That’s it. It’s over, O.K.? Sorry, can’t do that, goodbye.’” Even the agent whose ex-client Dennis Kozlowski called “Jaws.”
“Who’s to say you go from ’07 and do more? The market is not the same. And it may never be the same,” Mr. Lorber, Elliman’s chairman, said this weekend. “No one’s very happy. Developers aren’t happy, brokers aren’t happy, customers aren’t happy.” He pointed out that it wouldn’t be a disgrace to have sold a little less last year. “It’s like you buy a stock at $1 and it goes to $100—and then to $50. Did you make $49, or did you lose $50? What do you measure from … Didn’t we all like ’07 better than ’08?”
But we are all not Dolly Lenz. She has her own BlackBerry commercial and, she says, 12 BlackBerrys. Her name is all over the real estate gossip pages—and her face is on real estate ads (next to Grace Kelly’s on one Manhattan House piece). When she’s on the Fox Business Channel, anchors say: “The No. 1 real estate agent in the country—this lady is just printing money!” Or: “Let us ask the Dolly.”
“RIGHT NOW, everyone’s losing a few things. She might be losing more because she had more to begin with,” said Claudine De Niro, whose husband and associate, Raphael, took over at the 106-unit Cipriani Club Residences in September 2007. When first asked about the condo, she denied that Ms. Lenz had left the project, pointing out that the broker’s name was still on listings. Later, Ms. De Niro said, “We’re all hurting. No one’s doing great. If they are, tell me who they are. I’ll hire them.”
Even though the Wall Street condo’s Web site says its units are 90 percent sold out, Mr. Lorber puts the figure at 70 to 75. “We said, ‘Maybe try something a little bit different.’ She was busy starting work at Miraval at the time, so we just said, ‘Look, Raphael’s a downtown broker.’”
But Miraval, the condo at 515 East 72nd Street that promises “massage centers, aroma-therapy spas, in-house sex therapists and skyline views,” hasn’t gone perfectly, either. In November, when Ms. Lenz was replaced, only 107 of 365 units had reportedly been sold. “Miraval is now on its third marketing team,” Mr. Lorber said. “So whatever those issues are, they are.”
“She’s a gifted dealmaker, but she’s not a marketing person,” said a source at Corcoran Sunshine, which took over from her at Miraval. “Good at marketing herself: Dolly Lenz as an institution, an epic, mythological figure. But not as far as laying out a strategic vision.”
Then there was the massive Manhattan House, a pale gray, glazed-brick emblem of the bubble’s gigantism. Not only did the Truman-era rental sell for a record $625 million four years ago, but the new owners aimed to turn the thing into a $1.1 billion condo. Besides the project’s sheer size, its furious old tenants, its hefty financing problems and its tepid location between Second and Third avenues, the new co-owners, Jeremiah O’Connor and Richard Kalikow, had a brutal falling-out. Mr. Kalikow left in October 2007.
In late January, the New York Post ran a feature about Ms. Lenz’s personal office in the Manhattan House, with its white silk roses and spotless glass desk. Later that day, according to The Real Deal, she was notified of the decision to remove her. Only a quarter of the 583 apartments had been contracted to sell, and only a third of those had actually closed.
“When they start talking about 25 percent, it’s bullshit,” said Mr. Lorber, pointing out that a chunk of the 583 units had rent-stabilized tenants or simply hadn’t been put up for sale yet.
“Look, as a company, would I have rather not lost it? Obviously,” Dottie Herman, Elliman’s CEO and co-owner, said later. “But, by the same token, if something is not going to sell at a certain price, you might as well stand on your head.”
“It seems Dolly’s timing was bad since it coincided with the financial crisis that no one anticipated or could stop,” said Joseph Aquino, an executive in Elliman’s retail real estate division, and a Manhattan House condo buyer. “The crisis was and still is global, and it was our 21st-century tsunami. It affected all of us.”
“I admire her,” he said later. “They use the following parable when the stock market tanks: ‘When the prostitution house gets raided, they even take the piano player.’”
BUT MS. LENZ has a Gatsby-like knack for transcendence. In a 2003 television interview, she and her husband said they spent, “swear to God, all the cash we had in the bank” on an $8,800 fur coat and nice dress so she could look the part of the power broker, back when she was just starting out. Four years later, asked by The Observer if she ever suffers envy, she said, “I’m just so busy doing ‘it.’ To covet you have to be outside ‘it,’ coveting.”
When she goes on, say, CNBC to tell the post–Bear Stearns world, “I think we’re actually going to be perfectly O.K., if not possibly better off,” she doesn’t just look like a mega-agent, golden hair swooping down just so, perfect nose tilted up toward the camera; she looks like a mega-agent in a Robert Altman film. Even in print interviews there’s an air of ascendancy: In December, when brokers were starting to scamper around with their arms in the air, she told the Post, “I don’t see panic at all.”
And when the Daily News ran a story last year that not only vaguely alluded to an oft-rumored affair between the broker and Mr. Lorber, but asked if she would leave the firm, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know why this starts every year.”
“I guess that’s cute for the bloggers,” Ms. Herman said this week. “But at the end of the day, you know what counts? You know what buyers and sellers care about? They don’t really care what they did or didn’t do. They care about results.”
So what exactly have Ms. Lenz’s results looked like since the November 2007 list put her sales at $748,319,000? She wasn’t included in the most recent list in November 2008—because, it turned out, Elliman declined to submit its agents’ stats.
On Monday, Feb. 9, Ms. Herman was in an office with Elliman’s Manhattan president, Steven James, working on the upcoming award ceremony. When asked, Mr. James said that Ms. Lenz’s total commissions last year were her best ever: “Over $7 million.” He said some of that money had come from deals that were signed before 2008, but took a while to close. When this reporter called back to point out that Ms. Lenz has said her annual commissions have been as high as $9 million or $10 million, Mr. James hung up. “Then don’t use the information,” he said. “I’m going into my meeting. Goodbye.”
“Tell her to show her 1099. All top brokers are curious to see,” one of the best agents in New York emailed this week, referring to the income tax form. Rivals don’t believe, for example, that one year’s sales could have been three-quarters of a billion dollars.
“I don’t know how people think I make it up. They’re out of their minds,” Ms. Herman said later, going over the awards stats in her office. “You know what? It’s just ignorance, I’ll tell you that.”
“Two thousand seven was lower, and 2008 was a bit higher,” she said about the firm’s top broker. In separate interviews, she and Mr. Lorber both offered to find specific dollar figures for Ms. Lenz, though Ms. Herman later apologized and said they were private.
“THIS IS A problem when you’re No. 1: You can go only one way, right? You can’t go up,” said Leonard Steinberg, a colleague who recently got a batch of townhouse listings with Ms. Lenz and Mr. De Niro. “It’s not possible. Sometimes when I don’t sell anything after 12 months of trying, I feel like I’m the biggest loser on the planet. But guess what? I’m not. It’s not me, it’s the market.”
Brokers obsess about other brokers, especially the aggressive ones, and they tend to get practically giddy at the thought of Ms. Lenz falling. “Think Madonna. When Madonna was at the height of career, everyone wanted to tear her down. And they did. And then she came up again. Let’s face it, American culture is cyclical,” Mr. Steinberg offered. “Dolly, for many people, has provided that sick entertainment where they want to see her fail.”
Even Ms. Teplitzky at Elliman argued in interviews that she’d been robbed of last year’s top broker award, thinking she’d done better than Ms. Lenz. “I’ll give it to you straight: Jackie did not know there were a few things Dolly had done that she hadn’t turned in,” Ms. Herman said. “There were a few personal sales that Dolly made.” But which broker beat which didn’t make a difference: Ms. Teplitzky, who has her own team at Elliman, was put in the running for the brokerage’s top group award. She got it, just like Mr. Shvo got it back in 2004.
But Dolly Lenz was still named top individual broker, just like she’ll be named top broker again on Feb. 12.
“The true test is to watch what happens. Dolly’s not perfect, nor am I, nor is anybody. People are good, but we’re all human,” Ms. Herman said. “But I think the test is yet to come.”
Ms. Lenz did not return several calls and emails, and representatives for Mr. Shvo, Ms. Teplitzky, Manhattan House, Miraval and even BlackBerry had no comment about working with her.
On Feb. 6, she was walking near Central Park when another major Manhattan real estate figure, one of the several she’s publicly feuded with, walked by.
“I’ve been told,” the associate said a few hours later, voice genuinely quivery, “that when you’re walking down a hallway, do not make eye contact, because it will remind her to get you. I swear to God, I’ve had a number of people tell me that.”
But this figure’s eyes went up to meet Ms. Lenz’s. She went by without noticing! Or did she? “Something will happen in the next month, guaranteed. I don’t talk this way about other people. There’s something wrong with her. And she scares me.”
mabelson@observer.com
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