Dolly Lenz

If Dolly Lenz did not exist we would have to create her. The woman is a real estate mega-broker of mythological proportions: She has said that she has done $7 billion in sales, has personally owned 70 to 80 properties, and currently keeps 12 BlackBerrys; her name is in the news weekly, especially in the Post’s real estate column; her old falling-out with ex-protégé Michael Shvo is still realty’s juiciest feud; Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, a client, nicknamed her “Jaws.”

So imagine the gasps echoing around upscale Manhattan this month when the annual Real Estate Top 200, an objective ranking (by sales volume and what’s called transaction sides) sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, Real Trends and Lore Magazine, didn’t have Ms.  read more »

Sweaty BALLS! Is it time yet to empty our checking accounts (of course we don’t have any investments, real estate or 401(k), ya big silly) and flee to, eek, Quebec? Or better yet—Pompeii? Or should we just close our eyes, pretend nothing is happening and drop a couple thou on a big fancy benefit? In midtown, Hollywood grande dame Glenn Close is recognized for her contributions to the arts (lorgnettes! boiled bunnies!) at the Princess Grace Awards Gala at Cipriani. Co-chairs include Manhattan mega-broker Dolly Lenz and Law & Order creator Dick Wolf. Further west, the cologned smoothies at GQ throw a sedate  read more »

After two heirs to the Seagram liquor fortune sold their townhouses last summer for 11 times what each had paid a decade earlier, or after a hedge funder set a co-op record twice this year by buying a penthouse for $46 million and selling it for $2.9 million more, brokers nodded their heads and repeated their eight-word mantra for New York’s absurdly bubbly high-end real estate: So many eager buyers, so few trophy properties.

According to numbers prepared for The Observer by research site StreetEasy, the days of easy luxury apartment sales are over. As of Monday, Manhattan had 168 super-luxury listings (apartments and townhouses asking at least $15 million each).  read more »

Dolly Lenz, the only New York City broker with a Blackberry ad, $748,319,000 in yearly sales (though that was 2006, to be fair), and a sworn indifference to dominating top-broker award ceremonies, appears a bit more than halfway through David Patrick Columbia's famous social diary today.

"I started out the evening at a cocktail reception at the penthouse apartment of Ann Ziff who was hosting it with Thomas Renyi (as Committee Chairs) and Cheryl and Philip Milstein (as Dinner Chairs) for 'Lincoln Center’s Night of Dinners Celebrating Fifth Years,'" Mr. Columbia wrote. It isn't clear if Ms. Lenz spends every night in the company of such excellent surnames, but she's center and smiling in a big photograph with Ms.  read more »

Remember that rumored $90 million listing at 15 Central Park West? It was nothing.

Dolly Lenz, New York City's most gargantuan real estate agent, broke astounding news at Portfolio's Four Seasons get-together this morning: "There are a few apartments on the market at 15 CPW, a new development on Central Park West, asking somewhere between $80 and $125 million--three different apartments--and one quietly on the market at $150 million," she said.

Wowzah. Brokers have already made it known that two condos in the Robert A.M. Stern-designed blockbuster building are being offered at $80 and $90 million, so Ms. Lenz's quote not only means that there's a third apartment on the market in the building for somewhere between $80 and $125 million, but that there's a fourth spread whose owner wants $150 million.  read more »

In the next few weeks, when the Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev buys Donald Trump’s gargantuan Palm Beach estate Maison de L’Amitie for a reported $100 million, it will be the biggest sale ever of a single-family home in America.

“You don’t have to worry about me at all,” Mr. Trump told The Observer, when asked about the country’s real estate woes. “We’re doing well.”

Besides the bizarreness of a record-breaking sale during a mostly cruel year for real estate, there’s the astounding fact that the listing broker, Lawrence Moens—Mr. Trump calls him Larry—had only been showing the property since March.  read more »

So sayeth Dolly Lenz regarding the Bear Stearns mess. The deific broker, whom my colleague Max Abelson sat down with earlier this year at the Four Seasons, was on CNBC and said:

"A lot of this has already been factored into the market. I think we're going to be perfectly OK, if not possibly better off."

Hat tip Curbed.

The Piano Man is good at writing charmingly saccharine and enduring karaoke standards, but isn't as gifted at selling his real estate. Maybe his luck will change now that nearly a year and a half after listing his 14.2-acre waterfront estate in Centre Island for $37.5 million with Daniel Gale/Sotheby's International Realty, Mr. Joel has turned to the omnipotent Elliman broker Dolly Lenz to sell the estate, according to a listing on her Web site.  read more »

This morning, no surprises, omnipotent Dolly Lenz was named Prudential Douglas Elliman’s number-one broker. And she doesn’t quite care.

“I only got there for the last few minutes. I was in a meeting, literally, with a major banking group, and should not have gone,” she told me, two hours after the ceremony. “They texted me when it was time to get in the car and get there”--she has four Blackberries. “I literally got in the car and went down there and left. I heard no speeches, heard no awards.”  read more »

The only thing more exciting than today’s news about the upcoming sale of Bob Guccione’s townhouse (or about Sharon Baum's Vespa), is Prudential Douglas Elliman’s annual awards ceremony, taking place right this moment, until noon, at Cipriani 42nd Street.

It’s the stuff real estate dreams are made of! Annual broker awards, especially at a monolith like Elliman, are about money, status, competitiveness, salesmanship, hierarchy, and of course, self-celebration.

Yet Elliman, it turns out, does not appreciate it when real estate reporters try to attend. After a series of e-mails and phone calls last night with Elliman’s public relations team, I was turned away at the softly red-lit entrance to the 65-foot-high, 87-year-old ballroom today at 9:12 a.m.—first by one well-dressed woman, then a second nice woman and suited man came over too.  read more »

Location: According to rankings just printed in the Wall Street Journal, you did $748,319,000 in sales last year, the most in the nation--and four times higher than the second biggest broker. What explains that?

Ms. Lenz: I don’t stop working. My 90-hour week, or 80-hour week, is everybody else’s three weeks.

I’m very tenacious. If I think there’s a reason for me to be there, I’m going to be there, and you’re not going to be able to get rid of me. I live in the future, so I’m not living here and now and dealing with this deal right here and now, I’m living over there with all the things that could come up between what’s happening now and what’s happening three weeks from now.  read more »

Last Wednesday, The Observer met epic broker Dolly Lenz, vice-chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman, at Table No. 1 of the Pool Room in The Four Seasons, where she eats 20 times a month.

Co-owner Julian Niccolini brought over truffles, desert plates, wine and scotch, while Ms. Lenz waxed poetic. The full interview will be published in The Observer's print edition this week, but here are some morsels about Michael Shvo, jealousy, and $8,000 purses.

The Observer: According to rankings just printed in the Wall Street Journal, you did $748,319,000 in sales last year, the most in the nation--and four times higher than the second biggest broker. What explains that?

Ms. Lenz: I don’t stop working. My 90-hour week, or 80-hour week, is everybody else’s three weeks.

I’m very tenacious. If I think there’s a reason for me to be there, I’m going to be there, and you’re not going to be able to get rid of me. I live in the future, so I’m not living here and now and dealing with this deal right here and now, I’m living over there with all the things that could come up between what’s happening now and what’s happening three weeks from now. I’m overcoming all those obstacles today, so when you give me the obstacle I already know it, and I’m like boom, boom, boom, boom--playing a chess game, a three-dimensional chess game.  read more »

To paraphrase Beresford resident Jerry Seinfeld: What's the deal with Dolly Lenz?

In August, the Broker of Brokers told The New York Sun that the higher-end real estate market in New York had stumbled sharply:

"I've been doing this 20 years — I've never seen anything change this fast."

This morning, two months later, the New York Post has Ms. Lenz saying:

"I'd say traffic has more than doubled than this time last year, which is beyond comprehension," says Prudential Douglas Elliman vice chairman Dolly Lenz.

 read more »

Keanu Reeves' house looks like a mausoleum; Mariah Carey wears halter-tops to funerals.

These things and more we learned, assuming the brokers aren't goosing the truth a bit, in tomorrow's Real Estate section of The New York Times.

In a rather breezy, loping piece by Teri Karush Rogers (I know, we should talk), brokers serve up their usual self-serving tidbits of non-information about celebrities, sprinkled with a few good little snippets--notably from Elliman's Dolly Lenz.

Dolly says:

[She] once advised Mariah Carey to arrive for an interview with a Manhattan building's co-op board "dressed for a funeral." She appeared "in a halter top and mini-mini-miniskirt," Ms. Lenz recalled.

"I said, 'I told you to come dressed for a funeral,' " Ms. Lenz said. "She said, 'This is the way I dress for a funeral.' " She was not approved.

Right! Remember that? From The Economist, Sept. 8, 2005:

A few years ago Ms Lenz sold Barbara Streisand's apartment on Central Park West to Mariah Carey, another popular singer, only to have the deal blocked by a residents' committee which balked at the team of bodyguards accompanying Ms Carey to her interview.

This rejection tale gets racier and racier!  read more »

This week, The City section offers a glimpse of artists moving out to Bushwick! Ok, that’s been happening for years, but it’s always comforting to read about “risk-oblivious youth” being all communal and artsy together in a rundown neighborhood (and almost as uplifting as Rent on the big screen). But then in the Real Estate section, the “art world avant garde” suddenly flee to Staten Island. Now that's shocking! Even intrepid, young gentrifiers that have conquered many neighborhoods before might pause at the idea of taking a ferry home. Either way, both articles come with slide shows.

Carrie Chiang and Dolly Lenz get called out for hogging all the best listings, in The Times. Why not share some with the ever-growing number of wide-eyed brokers?

Seems like most celebrities took the weekend off. However, Mike Myers has left his Morton Square rental, according to New York magazine.

Christopher Caldwell examines the architecture of Le Corbusier as a catalyst to the French riots, in The Times magazine. It's not like they were burning cars in Marseille. Or at least not as many as in the International Style enclaves.

While sleeping tight, New Yorkers are unwittingly letting the bedbugs bite. But the author already had us with the lede, mentioning both “hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels.”

And after 42 years on the job, a long-time Plaza doorman find a new job, opening doors down the street. Take that, stupid condo conversion!

-Michael Calderone

Image courtesy of Stay Free! magazine.  read more »

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