Barbara Corcoran carries a woman card and she ought to be mighty proud of it. Though she sold her ubiquitous real estate brokerage years ago, Corcoran’s name is as synonymous with NYC real estate as a certain billionaire luxury real estate developer currently being credited with driving the Republican Party into chaos.
The move to her co-op PH at 1158 Fifth Avenue means that Corcoran is finally ready to sell her Upper East Side apartment where she lived for many years with her husband, William Higgins, and two kids. Corcoran has listed the co-op unit at 1192 Park Avenue for $4.9 million and immediately has seen a ton of media reaction to her listing.
For those of us with a bent towards real estate tales, Corcoran’s rise from working-class go-getter to one of New York’s pre-eminent names in real estate brokerages is a classic. And she still has that eye for making a deal. Her new duplex penthouse at 1158 Fifth Avenue had originally been listed for $17 million, then dropped down to $14.5 million in 2013 before being taken off the market. Another brokerage took over later in 2013, listed it again for $14.5M before dropping it all the way to $9,950,000 in 2015 before Corcoran snatched it up for $10 million — a savvy purchase in keeping with her business acumen.
For that story, Corcoran shared with Luxury Listings the exact moment at which her real estate rise was launched:
“Corcoran worked as a receptionist at a small, family-owned real estate firm. After a year, they gave her their worst listing to market. It was a dark L-shaped one-bedroom on the corner of 83rd Street and First Avenue, asking $340 a month. “It sounds absurd now, but that was a good-sized rent in a doorman building,” Corcoran says. “I thought, ‘How the hell am I going to rent this thing? I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.’”
It was 1973, and the New York Times and the Village Voice had a near-monopoly on real estate classifieds. Corcoran placed three-line ads for the apartment. “It was like fishing back then,” she says. “If you wrote a good ad, you got a call.”
She noticed a glut of ads for one-bedrooms priced similarly to her own listing. So she went back to the owner with an idea. “I said, ‘I think I can get you $380 a month if you’ll build me a half-wall in the L of the living room.’ ” Her new ad read: “1BR PLUS DEN $380 A MONTH.”
“My phone never stopped ringing. Who wants a one-bedroom, when they can get a bedroom and a den?” Corcoran recalls. “It worked like a dream.” The family hired her to market the rest of the building, and she was able to slowly hire agents. By the end of the year, she had a four-person team.”
