Clockwise from top left: Stanley Chera, Sheldon Solow, Peter Hauspurg, Gerald Hines, Jerry Wolkoff, and Bianca Yankov
In a year when so many lives were lost, real estate was not spared. The industry mourned both legendary figures and those who died too soon.
But it was the death of Stanley Chera, the 77-year-old patriarch of Crown Acquisitions, that epitomized the year. The real estate titan had decamped New York City for Deal, New Jersey, early in the pandemic at the behest of his longtime friend, President Donald Trump. But on April 11, Chera died of complications from Covid-19. When Trump contracted Covid later in the year, he reportedly asked an aide, “Am I going to go out like Stan Chera?”
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Clockwise from top left: Scott Durkin, president and COO of Douglas Elliman; Bess Freedman, CEO of Brown Harris Stevens; Adam Mahfouda, founder and CEO of Oxford Property Group; Rory Golod, Tri-State president of Compass; Pam Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group; David Walker, CEO of Triplemint
It’s a long-held tenet of the business that agents switch firms when times are bad and few years in recent memory have been worse than 2020.
“When the market is super strong… agents don’t really move,” said Scott Durkin, president and chief operating officer of Douglas Elliman. “That’s a natural evolution of the business.”
The Corcoran Group founder Barbara Corcoran (Getty)
On the eve of Barbara Corcoran’s sale of her eponymous brokerage in 2001, a former deputy nearly scuttled the deal by demanding $1 million or else.
Rather than let the $66 million deal fall apart, Corcoran pulled out her checkbook. “At the eleventh hour, one of the most important people in my business held me up for $1 million,” Corcoran disclosed for the first time on the Dec. 4 episode of “Shark Tank.” “She said, ‘You’re going to pay me $1 million or I’m going to your rival.’ Now what do you think happened? I gave her the $1 million immediately.”