By Janon Fisher 1/17/12 3:00pm

REBNY2012

Pamela Liebman. (Illustration by Joao Maio Pinto)

Pamela Liebman: Kenneth R. Gerrety Humanitarian Award Recipient

On a family trip to Miami when Pamela Liebman was 4, what interested her the most were not the white sand beaches or the clear blue water, but the buildings. “What are those?” asked the future chief executive of the Corcoran Group, Manhattan’s top real estate brokerage firm.

“That’s a condominium,” her mother replied. She said she spent the rest of the trip rolling the word “condominium” off her tongue.

“I think I was predestined to go into real estate,” she said. Years later, when visiting her realtor aunt in Beverly Hills, she said the interest still hadn’t flagged. All the other kids wanted to swim the pool. “I just wanted to go look at the houses,” she said. Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 1/17/12 12:55pm

Commercial Observer

January 4, 2012 (8)

An Evening at the Liar’s Ball: Raucous Behavior! Bottles of Colgin at the 21 Club! Talking Over the Cardinal?

It was a typical evening at the Real Estate Board of New York’s annual gala as John Cardinal O’Connor stepped up to the dais to address a crowd of several thousand of the city’s most ambitious commercial real estate brokers and owners.

But in a ritual repeated more or less each year, the archbishop of the New York archdiocese’s 2.37 million Catholics and one of the Vatican’s most forceful spokesmen in the United States during the 1980s, was summarily ignored by a brokerage community far more interested in making deals than in hearing the Gospel. Read More

By Tom Acitelli 12/17/08 4:02pm

Barbara Corcoran Advises You To Check the Closets

Barbara Corcoran on The Today Show on Tuesday has some sound advice for separating the pre-war from the post-war: "Most homes built before 1945 have nice, beautiful hardwood floors. Those after ’45, don’t. So, if you look in the closets, you’ll see the plywood or the hardwood." (Hat tip: The Real Deal)

By Tom Acitelli 11/21/08 5:46pm

Barbara Corcoran Lays It On Pretty Thick

From amNY: "Is there anything you miss about [1970s/1980s New York]? Oh sure. I really miss having the bag people on every other block. I miss going to the Theater District and not being able to bring my parents because I thought they couldn’t defend themselves if they were attacked. I miss terribly the Read More

By Tom Acitelli 7/16/08 1:17pm

Barbara Corcoran: Get Off The La-Z-Boy And Go Buy!

Barbara Corcoran was on Larry King Live last night as part of a panel on the mortgage mess (transcript here). The founder of the Corcoran Group, now an author and TV personality, couldn’t understand why more people weren’t now buying homes and quickly:

I think you ought to be out there shopping the market Read More

By Max Abelson 7/31/07 8:50pm

Corcoran Sells Herself (One More Time…)

What kind of person is Barbara Corcoran? She founded New York City’s most gargantuan realty brokerage (which she sold on September 9, 2001 for about $70 million) and has written a best-selling business book, If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails. Plus, she’s a pixie-like TV personality with an upcoming CNBC Read More

By Staff 3/09/07 5:29pm

The Afternoon Wrap: Friday

  • Are the Clintons the First Family of Manhattan? They’ve left their presidential mark on fancy restaurants (Tavern on the Green), hip restaurants (Spotted Pig), quasi-hip clubs (Crobar), karao, and even karaoke bars (2nd on 2nd). [Gridskipper]
  • The Atlantic Yards project is hard to wrap one’s arms around (it’s 22 acres big), but Curbed Read More