Barbara Corcoran Profiled

Barbara Corcoran grew up in a brown clapboard house in a two-block wide New Jersey town, with ten brothers and sisters and two staunch Catholic parents who slept on a black vinyl sofa in the sitting room. In that improbably happy home, with her Uncle Herbie and Aunt Ethel and their two daughters on the top floor, and her nana in a front room on the second floor, and the Roanes and their two sons living in the back, she came to discover her special gift: imagination. She was ten when she snuck up to a freshly-plastered neighbour's wall and, taking a big stick, wrote in block letters across its full length: Barbara Corcoran. Therein, one suspects, lies the seeds of her success: great dollops of fearlessness, confidence, naivet‚, and self-expression. "I looked at that wall and I knew it was waiting for me", she says. "You know what, everybody in town talked about me for weeks. Despite the punishment I was real pleased with myself, because I was, like, famous". That little act of vandalism in 1959 was a taste of things to come. These days Barbara Corcoran gets to put her name up in big letters all over New York without censure or reproof. She is the Martha Stewart of real estate, minus the talons and scandal, her ubiquitous photo and name adorning more city buildings than Donald Trump's. In the parlance of the press, she is the broker to the stars, whose client list includes Madonna, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Pamela Anderson, and Giorgio Amarni. How did she do it? How did a New Jersey girl who couldn't read at the age of seven, and whose mother, upon seeing her report card, cheerfully remarked, "straight Ds aren't bad", come to dominate one of the world's most competitive real estate markets? A city where even the rich and famous aren't guaranteed a free pass from the notoriously hardnosed co-op boards that have famously rejected Mariah Carey, Calvin Klein, Cher and Gloria Vanderbilt, among many, many others.

"I always just kind of wanted to be Queen of New York real estate", she says, as if wanting and being are just two sides of the same coin. "I know it sounds ridiculous, but that's how I saw myself, even when I was in an apartment on 86th street with my two room mates and my little Princess phone. I swear to God, I would answer the phone and see myself on a stage, in beautiful clothes, and then I would imagine people coming up to kiss my ring because I'd seen people kissing the Pope's ring". So call her the Pope of Real Estate in a city where property is a religion. A Pope with suitably humble beginnings who began her business with a $1000 from a boyfriend who introduced himself as Ramon Simone from the Basque country, but turned out to be plain old Ray Simon from New Jersey with a flashy, buttercup-yellow car. As Corcoran learned from that relationship, both to her cost and her advantage, appearances can be deceptive. This is how they met: Barbara was working as a waitress in a New Jersey diner when Ramone Simone strolled in, romanced her off her feet and whisked her to New York, where she was installed for a week at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. It was her first time in the city she grew up overlooking from across the Hudson. She celebrated by going to Bloomingdale's to purchase a purple outfit and waltzing down Lexington Avenue singing "Hey there! Georgy girl, swinging down the street so fancy free." Within a week she had her first job as a receptionist for a pair of wealthy landlords. Eight months later she convinced Ramon to give her $1000 to kick-start her own company, Corcoran-Simone. This is how they separated: Barbara was straining spaghetti when Ramon told her he was marrying Tina, her secretary. Naturally this made life rather awkward, to say nothing of painful for Corcoran who continued to work with Ramon for a year and a half until she found the confidence to demand her share of the company and set up in business on her own. Showing an early predilection for thinking big, she called it The Corcoran Group, dividing the existing staff with Ray the way kids select football teams at school, one name at a time. She let Ray keep Tina. His last words to her were, "You'll never succeed without me". The words did not prove to be prophetic. Last year The Corcoran Group sold almost $3 billion worth of apartments in New York.

We meet at The Pierre, a starchy Fifth Avenue hotel straight out of Edith Wharton, where Corcoran used to take rival brokers she wanted to bag for her own company. She arrives slightly breathless, her slim, boyish figure exacerbated by her blonde bob. "I haven't been here for years", she whispers as we take our table. "All the food is good, but if you want something really hot forget about it because the kitchen is a mile away, so order something that you won't mind being a little less hot". We opt for salad. Few writers have captured the essence of Corcoran's persona as well as Jennifer Belle in her brilliant novel, High Maintenance, in which an aspiring real estate broker is mesmerised by an ad featuring a very pregnant Corcoran: "The single most successful woman in New York real estate, attractive, rich, pregnant, proud, and well dressed. Nothing was going to stop her from being that way. Nothing was going to stop her in her short blond Cathy Rigby Peter Pan hair. She was a cross between an Olympic gymnast and a boy who wouldn't grow up, flying over the city's rooftops every night... she was pure energy, drive and confidence." As with many things about Barbara Corcoran, however, that ad was slightly deceptive. Not false, exactly, but not quite true either. Although she was pregnant, the photographer exaggerated the effect by bulking up her sweater with a pillow. "At nine months pregnant you wouldn't have known it", she says. "I carried so small that I never wore pregnancy clothes". Like Ray Simon's reinvention, this is too good an allegory for the way the industry embellishes the truth to let it pass, but Corcoran is the first to admit that in real estate, presentation is nine-tenths of the law. She makes selling apartments sound like theatre. "My gift is that I use my imagination to create bullshit, and you know what? People love it", she says. "I'm not saying I would lie, but give me an inch and I'll make a mile out of it, because people like that, it's what they go for. So when we had seven brokers, people thought we had 30; when we had 30 people thought we had a hundred." Just little fibs then, like the time she gained the trust of a pair of wealthy property developers by telling them she'd once been a nun. True, she was taught by nuns as a girl, and her father was head of the choir, but that was about as close as she ever came to a wimple. Likewise she put the Corcoran Group on the map by issuing annual reports on the average sale price for Manhattan apartments. As it happened, none of the sales were hers, but if people wished to believe they were, so much the better.

It's tempting to trace the genesis of Corcoran's talent for creative thinking to her father, Edwin, whose Walter Mitty-like flights of fantasy were a constant source of family amusement (and probably some despair). Once, after he was fired from yet another job as a printer, he came home to announce that he was starting his own business, Pre-Press Preparations, that would have two staff - both played by him. After speaking to Peter Peterson of Pre-Press Preparations clients would be transferred to the president, Edwin W. Corcoran. His first commission - a box for belt buckles which Barbara and her brother, Tommy, helped design - earned a big fat cheque for $1000. "He passed it around the dinner table just like the priest would pass around the chalice, and he said, `We're rich, and we're going on vacation', and that's exactly what we did", says Barbara. "We went on vacation for a week to the Brighton Beach hotel at Asbury Park, we blew the thousand dollars and he never got paid another dime, but you know what? It was the single best memory of our childhood." Corcoran credits much of her success to her mother's tenacity, love and homespun philosophies. Yes, they were poor, but boy, were they happy. She even remembers her parents alternating between each of the bedrooms (six girls in one, four boys in the other) to sing them to sleep each night. The one time her much put-upon mother walked out on the family she was back within the day, saying only, "Moms can't quit". "My parents' expectation of me was that I'd be a nice girl, nothing more", she says. "That's not a tall order. It's harder if you're the child of privilege because they often come saddled with expectation. I was kind of like a kid jumping off a diving board never having done a bellyflop, but what did I have to lose?" What Corcoran inherited from her mother above all was a talent for recognizing peoples' strengths. Early on, for instance, she earmarked her future business partner after spotting her well-ordered handbag during a job interview. "I just looked at her bag and how neat it was, and the way she tucked away her money, and I thought, `I want my money in that lady's purse'". A year later that lady was in charge of the company's purse, and Corcoran hasn't signed a cheque since. Money, she admits, is not her forte. Addressing Harvard business graduates recently she had to ask someone in the audience to remind her of the difference between a bull and a bear market. "I built that business my entire life, and never once read a financial statement", she says. " If someone had asked me to read one I couldn't have understood it, and even worse, I didn't want to understand it". Nevertheless, Corcoran found that making money came easily, thanks to her judicious appointments and an inherited ability to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. "We're walking towards Fifth Avenue", she'd say as she lead prospective tenants across First Avenue and 86th street. Or she'd point to a grocery store and announce, "So conveniently located", and by the time the clients were in the shabby unremarkable apartment they'd already decided to buy it.

There is pandemonium at Bloomberg Radio. Barbara Corcoran is late for an 8pm interview and the presenter is finding ways to pad his show. A harried young man rushes up to ask if I'm with Barbara, and is pushing me towards the studio to take her place when I point out that I've never sold an apartment in my life. The presenter, an expatriate Brit introduces himself with a big handshake and a quick biography, including the fact that he's the voice on the New York subway warning riders to "stand clear of the closing doors." Eight minutes into the show Corcoran arrives in a fur coat and is bundled into the small studio where she is characteristically blunt when asked to explain her mission statement. "I'll be damned if I ever have a mission statement", she replies. "We've had a few meetings over the last few years to discuss our mission, but somehow in the midst of all that hype it feels like such bullshit, it just seems like an exercise in importance rather than something that amounts to anything". On air, the word bullshit is bleeped. Perhaps because of her experience with Ramon/Ray, Barbara is suspicious of pretension and slickness in people. A waiter who continually gatecrashed our conversation at The Pierre with witticisms of his own was given short thrift. "I think he's about the fanciest waiter that I've ever met", she said. "Now, when I've hired fancy sales people like him they're dead on arrival. Even in a fancy town like New York people like plain stuff." This is a bit rich considering the slick, showy vocabulary of property ads, but that's all part of the unspoken contract with the buyer, a willing and necessary suspension of disbelief. We need to be told that the dark, dank broom cupboard of an apartment that we're about to buy is really a bijoux den superbly located within a mile of the nearest subway, but we need to be told it by someone we trust. "I think most people trust women more readily than men, and you wanna know why? Because you don't see that many women going to jail", says Corcoran. "You know what else, I think women by their nature are generally phenomenally good with detail, and if you attend to every detail and think ahead and do the little thoughtful things, people feel loved".

Not always, however. Although she has tended to leave many of the celebrities to her senior sales staff, Corcoran recalls badly misreading Janet Jackson: "She arrived with three big guys and a giant dog with long hair shedding all over me in this armoured car with flashing strip lights. She never said a word, just looked at me - I thought I had Michael Jackson in drag". Jackson quickly threw Corcoran's meticulously prepared schedule off-course, complaining that she was hungry and tired of apartment hunting. Desperate to keep the pop star on track, Barbara pretended the best pizza in town was just around the block, while praying for a pizzeria nearby. Luckily there was. "They didn't have a pizza ready, so I bought the pizza from the guy who was ahead of me, and paid him extra just to take it because I had to get right back to that car and keep the appointments going." (Although Jackson didn't buy, Barbara and her stepdaughter did get front row tickets to see the diva in concert a few days later). This brings us, in a roundabout way to Manhattan's notorious co-ops, a curious feature to New York that gives tenants - as shareholders - the right to veto prospective buyers, often imposing insanely stringent rules. Recently, for instance, one of Corcoran's clients was turned down because he disagreed with a clause specifying the brand of toilet paper that was to be used in the apartment - an apartment for which he was willing to pay several million dollars. At his interview with the board he brazenly put the case for relaxing the rules, arguing that he should be able to wipe his derriere with whatever brand of paper he chose. He lost. This may seem excessive, but it's not the worst. Corcoran rattles through half a dozen such examples, from co-ops that require dog owners to submit a certificate from a dog obedience school, to a recent and appalling example of discrimination. "A couple were going in front of a board and one of the board members questioned the charities that they were donating too. They wanted to know why they gave to the autistic society, and the young couple said, `Because our son's autistic', and the board member replied, `Well, I hope that doesn't mean that he'll be living here'. They said, no, that he was in a home, but they were turned down anyway." Stories like this reinforce New York's reputation as a tough, unforgiving city, though Corcoran says it's the easiest and most supportive city in the world for someone going into business. "You really could be anyone from anywhere with absolutely no background. They don't want to know where you're from, they just want to know what you can do", she says. "It's the best city in the world for the entrepreneur coming from nowhere, it really is".

Nevertheless, Corcoran came close to losing it all when the market took a sharp dive in the late 80s, bringing her to the verge of bankruptcy. The crunch came in January 1991. In the four years since the stock market crash of 1987 prices had fallen 35 percent, and Corcoran had resorted to moonlighting on the side in order to pay the bills. She sold her one bedroom condo on the Upper East Side and moved into a cousin's rent-controlled apartment. Some of her staff even offered to lend her their own savings. In the end, however, Corcoran's imagination - and a bunch of puppies - came to the rescue. Recalling a one-day, one-price-fits-all puppy sale that she'd witnessed from her uncle Herbert's house during her childhood, she gambled that what worked with puppies might also work with apartments. "This farmer had four or five Jack Russell puppies, and she invited all the city folk out to New Jersey to see these puppies at the same time, and they were almost killing each other for them", recalls Corcoran, who received a call early in January 1991 from a developer desperate to sell 88 apartments that had stood empty for three years. "I was with a girlfriend and I was crying over my business, and all of a sudden I thought: `What if I get all these apartments that nobody wants, bundle them together, average out the cost and sell them all at the same price?'". Which is exactly what she did. By telling her staff that it was a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity restricted only to top clients, Corcoran made the dregs of the property market sound like the steal of the century. "The morning we opened the sales office I walked around the corner of 84th street, and it was like a Catholic miracle", she says. "People were lined up as far as I could see. The day before I'd been crying; the next month I was paying off the printer, the advertising agency, I was like King Solomon."

Not long after that the economy turned, and New York entered the longest boom in history. For the city's top sales agents it was a golden era in which it was perfectly possible to become millionaires in less than a year (at least two of Corcoran's brokers make several million a year in commissions). That all ended on 11 September, 2001. Two weeks later, Corcoran gathered her company together, told them she was selling up, and lead them in a chorus of "America the Beautiful". She was 52, and she had just sold her business for $70 million. "It's very exciting chasing your dreams, but it's not as exciting when you hit it", she says. There was her son, too, whose birth seven years earlier had changed the dynamics. Some of her brokers even began complaining that her son was stealing the attention away from them. "I had a hard time with the sibling rivalry between my business and my child", she says. "When I was with my business I felt I should be with my child, and when I was with my child I felt I should be with my business. I wanted to be 150 percent mom and a 150 percent business mom, and I couldn't be both. When you know how good you can be at something it's very hard to be less". What do you do when you achieve your dream? Naturally you set about finding a new one. Barbara's mother always said the joy was in getting there, and now that her daughter is there she is keen for another "there" to get to. "I have to say that when I sold the business my immediate thought was, what do I do now, and when I really had to size up what was important to me, it was that I stayed out there", she says. "I need to be known, I need recognition". Making money is not the point. "I don't know a thing about the stock market, and I don't want to learn even. My thing is people, and once you have money it doesn't seem to have that much to do with people from what I can see". In the meantime she has bought her parents a penthouse condo in Florida, with an ocean view, and started writing a book illustrating the way her mother's sage advice helped her to build the business. By contrast, she credits her father with teaching her to have fun. "He believed that play came first, which drove my mother nuts", she says, recalling a family trip to a lake that was disrupted by a sudden and violent hailstorm. "My mother and all the other mothers were screaming at the kids to get out of the water, and you know what my dad was doing? He started shouting, 'get under the water', and while my mother was pulling us out he was pushing us in. She wanted to kill him, but who had the better idea? My father always stopped for the bizarre and fun in things, and that's always been my attitude: dead tomorrow, what would I have said about today?"