Sharon Baum, a veteran Manhattan luxurious dealer, has died on the age of 85.
The powerhouse dealer spent greater than 30 years as some of the profitable brokers in New York Metropolis, constructing on almost twenty years as a feminine trailblazer in company management earlier than shifting into brokering luxurious offers.
Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman introduced Baum’s dying in an inner memo to the brokerage the place Baum began her career in 1991, lauding her as a personality of fashion and substance. Baum was with the agency for greater than three a long time earlier than becoming a member of Douglas Elliman final yr.
“Sharon was a pioneer in each sense of the phrase: sharp, fashionable and all the time a number of steps forward,” wrote Liebman.
To accompany her offers for premier properties, she sported a diamond pin on her lapel and a forest inexperienced Rolls-Royce bearing the license plate, “SOLD 1,” that she briefly retired following the Nice Monetary Disaster for one thing extra understated.
“She’s so targeted on data and intelligence moderately than pizzazz,” Leonard Steinberg advised the Daily News in 2015. “She has substance.”
Jonathan Conlon, Baum’s longtime affiliate at Corcoran with whom, together with John Gasdaska, she decamped for Douglas Elliman final yr, stated a part of Baum’s legacy is reinventing the occupation that had lengthy been handled as a pastime.
“She was one of many first true professionals who moved into the world of New York Metropolis actual property and formalized it and handled it like a enterprise,” he stated. “She actually helped get the New York Metropolis actual property market and enterprise to start out seeing itself that method and never as this form of social pastime.”
Born in 1940 in Jefferson Metropolis, Missouri, Baum attended Randolph-Macon Girl’s Faculty and was one of eight women in the first co-ed graduating class of Harvard Enterprise Faculty in 1965.
She later joined Chemical Financial institution, the place she spent 17 years and have become the corporate’s first feminine vice chairman. She was the topic of a 1975 Wall Avenue Journal article on the rise of “dual-career couples,” as she and her husband Stephen labored full-time jobs. “Each single minute is taken up,” she advised the Wall Avenue Journal in 1975. “I by no means have time to observe TV or learn a e book.”
Baum made the soar to actual property in 1991, when she joined Corcoran. She shortly rose because the agency’s top-selling agent, which she credited to the huge community she had constructed working in enterprise for almost twenty years.
“What I did was an enormous mailing with very good engraved playing cards that I despatched to my grasp listing, saying I used to be not at Chemical Financial institution, and I’m going into a complete new discipline — and phrase obtained round,” Baum beforehand advised The Actual Deal.
“She single-handedly walked the high-end market into my enterprise,” Corcoran co-founder Barbara Corcoran, who recruited Baum to her agency earlier than promoting it in 2001, advised the Each day Information. “She was that highly effective. She’s some of the well-connected, well-wired brokers in Manhattan. I like her.”
In 1996, she was already doing over $50 million a yr in gross sales, specializing in pre-war co-ops and townhouses. She scored certainly one of her greatest offers in 2006, when she bought the $40 million Duke-Semans mansion on Fifth Avenue. The one agent to obtain the Actual Property Board of New York’s Deal of the 12 months award twice, Baum was additionally awarded REBNY’s Henry Forster award for lifetime achievement in 2011. As of 2024, she claimed over $2 billion in gross sales over the course of her profession.
Often known as the Queen of Park and Fifth avenues, Baum advanced her enterprise with the occasions as cash began flowing downtown, turning her relationship with Gasdaska and Conlon right into a strategic partnership in 2016.
Gasdaska recalled driving by means of the West Village with Baum for a pitch when she requested, “Is that this Tribeca?”
“I used to be like, ‘You don’t come down right here fairly often,’” Gasdaska. “She began to giggle and stated, ‘I don’t prefer to go beneath 59th Avenue.’”
“However she knew what she knew, and she or he knew what she didn’t,” he added.
That didn’t cease Baum from discovering downtown flats for Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence, serving to the previous safe a $20 million penthouse in Tribeca that was as soon as owned by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
When Conlon and Gasdaska decamped for Elliman in 2024, Baum joined, because the pair had began serving to handle her e book of enterprise in her later years.
“Having her be a enterprise accomplice over the previous 9 years has been a real honor in our profession,” Gasdaska stated.
Elliman in an inner memo stated regardless of Baum’s brief time on the agency, “many people are blessed to have identified and labored along with her over the course of her lengthy, trailblazing profession.”
“To name Sharon a legend could be an understatement,” stated Elliman CEO of Brokerage for New York Richard Ferrari.
Baum is survived by her husband, Stephen, their two sons, Ben and Sam, and her brother, David, and his husband, Ronald, in accordance with Elliman.
