Real Estate Mogul: Barbara Corcoran (2017)

Hey, really quick before we start the show, just want to let you know that tickets for our one day How I Built This Summit are now on sale. Don't miss your chance to meet world changing entrepreneurs and hundreds of other builders just like you. It's happening October 16th in San Francisco. It's being sponsored by American Express, and you can get your tickets at NPR.org slash summit. Wara Corcran came into the studio for her interview, She was Well, kind of as you expect.

interesting, funny Full of stories and a lot of bad language, which we had to cut out, but we did keep some of it in. So just a warning if you're listening with younger listeners. This episode originally ran in April of last year, but it is well worth hearing again if you've already heard it. If not, enjoy. She came to me and she knew I had to fire a lot of people because you could just see that everybody knew something was gonna shake out. And she said, Why don't you publicly fire me if you fire me? She said no one else could be angry with you when you fire them.

And she was right. So at that Monday morning meeting we always had at nine thirty, I said So I'm surprised how bad things are, we're gonna have to make a lot of changes. Uh, and it's gonna be very hard for me to do, but the hardest change of role is me firing my mother.

From MPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. they built. Guy Raz and on the show today, how a Jersey girl conquered the streets of Manhattan. Built a real estate company worth millions and then Reinvented herself as a shark.

I'm Shark Tank. One of the most surprising things about the entrepreneurs we've interviewed so far, at least surprising to me. Is that most of them aren't necessarily book smart. Street smart, yes, all of them.

But only a handful of the people we've had on went to elite universities or were academic geniuses. Most of them had just figured stuff out along the way. And use the tools they had. Which brings us to Barbara Corcran, who is probably the most likable shark on the TV show Shark Tank. As you're about to hear, Barbara wasn't the best student. In fact, she didn't excel at school at all.

But what she had or rather has is something so much more valuable. Charisma. It's how she'd eventually build one of New York's most successful real estate firms, but more on that later. Barbara grew up poor of

Big Irish Catholic family. Nine brothers and sisters. A cramped apartment in Edgewater, New Jersey. But even though They had almost nothing?

She remembers a childhood that was Basically happy. I mean we all had our issues as every family does. Um, but uh it was well organized. My mother was like a drill sergeant, so even though we all lived in such close quarters, it was meticulously clean and everything was put in order when my mother snapped her fingers. Okay. We had a side yard. uh which we controlled. It was a skinny little side yard, but most of the houses in Edgewater were back to back, so we felt wealthy. even though we were renting the ground floor, we felt wealthy by comparison. And also, uh, my dad was a printing press foreman and had to wear a suit to work, and every other guy in the town seemed to work for the aluminum factory or the uh coffee company in a uniform. So I kinda thought of us as like the Kennedys, like

Whoa, we were something, you know? At school it was a different story. Barbara struggled a lot. But every day when she get home from school. Come on.

was right there. She never told you what was wrong with you. She always told you what she thought was amazing about you and she pinned one thing on each kid. So each kid knew what their thing was, you know? My thing was she said I had a wonderful imagination. So when I couldn't pass any subjects in school and I was really upset, I remember distinctly when the nun from Hell, Sister Stella Marie, told me I'd always be stupid and I was so upset to hear that word stupid that get a label finally. And uh my mother said, Oh, don't worry about it. With your imagination you learn to fill in all the blanks. So I didn't learn to read or write, but I thought, Oh good, I could fill in the blanks and I I fell for it, you know, and she's right because I did have a good imagination, or at least maybe I learned to have it because of her. By the time she was twenty two, Barbara was working as a waitress at a diner in New Jersey. And one night during a shift.

An older man. Dapper, confident, charismatic. Walked in for a bite to eat. And when Ramon Simone uh walked into my life and sat at my counter Call what you want, it was a lucky break. It was like you could tell.

That he was something else. And he had a suit on. And he didn't have just a suit. He had like a pressed collar. With a shiny tie and shiny shoes.

And he had oh navy blue aviator shades so I couldn't really see his eyes. Also he told me he was from the Basque Country. It wasn't in New Jersey. And he told me it was a warrior tribe of some kind. I'm like, Whoa, cool. Now later I learned his name wasn't Ramon Simone with an accent. His mother Vicky, who I got to know many years later, said his name was Ray Simon. Big difference, right? But good good for him. He fixed it up. And he wasn't from the Basque Country, he was from hundred and forty fifth Street, Harlem. But good for him again. What a merchandiser, right? Yeah and so he had a lot to teach me.

Okay. And I got a new family which were his three girls who moved in with us after I moved in with him. I didn't know he had children. This is your first true love. Yeah. Well I'm not even sure he was a true love, but Um someone who was different than anyone I had ever met before, older. successful in life, had a big car. I hate to be so uh trite as to say that impressed me, but it was a Lincoln Continental

with real leather seats and when he offered me that ride home from the diner that first night, I remember thinking he had sprinkled talcum powder on the s on all of his seats because I was sliding around. That's just called real leather, you know? So so when you m you moved in with him, was that I mean w was that what W your life was gonna I mean did you have bigger ambitions.

Um, to know, honestly, I have never had that thought. And I I can even say, uh, along the way of building a successful life it's not like I really had any big thoughts about want to be successful. I just had more of a curiosity as to see how far I could go. That was it. How curiosity. No one in my family had ever gone to college. When I got into a college, I just couldn't believe it, but it was a old girls uh college that had previously the year before been a nunnery that made nuns. I forget what you call that. And there were only thirty spots. They were just opening. They took me. I I basically now realize they took anyone.

But um that was just a lucky break. And it didn't interfere with my work. I was holding three jobs all the way through college. I was gonna always work round the clock. So It just kinda happened, you know, that I one thing led to another. So h how did you find your your way to to real estate?

I was working as a receptionist for the Jafuni brothers here in New York City, answering their phones a million times a day. Good morning, Jafuni Brothers. And who were the Jafuni brothers? Joseph Jafuni was a large real estate holder in Manhattan. He owned probably fifty apartment buildings in New York. Yeah, they were there very wealthy. It was Joe and his other uh kind of gadfly uh brother Andrew, who ran the business, but Joe was really the power and he hired me and then within a couple of months Ramon said to me, You know, with your personality, Barbara, you'd be great at real estate sales. I said, Okay, I'll try it. I mean why not add it I think I had counted up twenty two jobs, maybe twenty three by then. I thought why not, and I'll give it a whirl. And Ray gave me the thousand dollars I started my own firm. Just like that. Yes.

So okay, so Ramon. gives you a thousand bucks and then Uh h how did you how did you start your own real estate firm? Um the only person I knew was uh Mr. Jafuni. And I asked him if he would just let me rent one of his apartments, the same building where I answer the phone every day. And he gave me a listing to try to rent, apartment three L. And so when I saw three L and what he was asking, I think it was three thirty a month or something roughly there.

I looked at him thinking, Oh, how do I s it's it was a dungeon. He gave me the worst one. Maybe it was a challenge, maybe nobody could rent it, who knows? It was in the back. It was like a super apartment. But when I saw the listing and looked in the New York Times and saw reams and reams of ads that s read identically one bedroom three forty, one bedroom three thirty five, one bedroom. It was all the same. I'm thinking how do I spend my three line ad wisely because remember I had a thousand dollars. I divided it by my overhead and I knew I had it seven weeks to stay in business, according to my math, okay? And And so I asked him if he'd build a half wall to divide the, you know, straight part of the living room from the L next door. uh with a double entrance and I told him I thought I could get him three sixty a month, which is another twenty, twenty five dollars more than he wanted. Yeah. And he said he'd yeah, he'd build a wall. And I got it for him'cause my ad then read one bedroom and den

for the same price that everybody else was offering a one bedroom and I got that first Sunday I must have gotten sixty phone calls from my lieutenants. And so I easily rented that apartment and then got others and got others and it just built from there. And you were you were basically making a commission off each rental. I made exactly what the um what the monthly rental was. And when I rented that first apartment I did the m the smartest thing in the world, knowing I was ahead of the game because I collected the commission within a week. That's what's beautiful about rentals. You don't have to wait for a sale closing. So I collected that check for mister Jafuni. I cash at City Bank and I ran right over to Bergdorf Goodman's and I blew it on a new coat and it was the smartest thing I could have done because I dressed like a poor kid from Edgewater. Nothing look you know, I just looked not the part.

but I bought the fanciest damn coat, a brown and white herringbone with real pearl buttons down three quarter length with fur, real fur, not fake fur. And I wore that coat for the next three years. And you wanna know it was the smartest thing I could have done with the money,'cause in it I felt powerful. It was a weird thing. I just felt like I'm cool, man, I'm a cool girl, you know. And by the way, what did you what did you guys call the business? Uh it was called Corcoran Simone, yeah. With an accent on the Simone. I kept the accent'cause I really thought it was pretty sophisticated. Right, but this is because'cause Raymond owned on part of this, right? Yes. So so while you were like while you were going out and and working as an agent to rent apartments, what what was Raymond Simone doing?

Well Ramon Simone. Um Ramon Simone was building one family houses in New Jersey, usually clusters of three or four houses and making a very good living. And that went on for probably three years or so, as I recall and then one day we drove to his accountants office. office in Hackensack, New Jersey, and he had me wait in his car with the car running. He comes out and he said, Well guess what? I'm bankrupt. What I thought it was a joke. And we moved immediately out of his fancy apartment. and moved into his mother's hackensack house and that was the bad years where we he kinda had to go not under cover, but had to come up from the earth all over again. And he did. He was a great entrepreneur. But it took about three years and those were the the very, very tough years. But lucky for both of us, um the rental business was paying for itself and we were able to eke out a salary. Were you you were running this from your

From from that apartment? Uh no, no, oh no, no, no. I had an office. I initially ran Corkin Simone uh from an apartment I shared with two roommates. uh on eighty sixth street. But then when I could afford to, I sublased a desk from an accountant on East Sixtieth Street. And by the time uh we moved into Ramon Simone's mother's house, we still had the office on sixtieth street. We we already had I guess maybe ten or eleven desks occupied by rental agents. So you were going into Manhattan every day. Yes, definitely.

It was like uh it was like the land of Oz. You know, the minute I step foot into Manhattan Uh I I saw for what it was. He was like, Where have you been all my life? Wow. the the violent nineteen seventies in New York, when New York was bankrupt, like the son of Sammy or like what was it like to I mean, was w was it hard to to get tenants to rent a parray to imagine today, of course, but back then was it

Was it hard to get people to rent? No, what saved my ass in those days was you had corporate America uh very well implanted in Midtown. Granted it was dangerous, you wouldn't dare park your car on the street, you know, it gets broken into sirens were always going off everywhere. So it was not easy. But fortunately you had employees young employees coming into New York City who had to live there working for these corporations. If not for that, I don't think I would have stayed in business because I went door to door and knocked on all these corporate personnel departments to try to get business. I saw where the traffic was coming from and I had great accounts that fed their people to me, one after another after another. And so I had a huge edge over my other small competitors because I had a steady stream of people coming at me. Yeah. That was key, or I don't think I could have stayed in business. So how did you make the transition from renting, from looking for renters to selling apartments? really quite by accident, I had gotten a referral of a young engineer from Union Carbide, I don't recall his name, and I lined up a whole bunch of stuff to show him like I usually did,'cause I had learned by then in sales if you could control someone's time

they can't go to anyone else. So I would say I'll pick you up at the Drake Hotel. It's now a new name, uh at nine o'clock and be aware we won't be finished till at least five thirty. This way you can't even entertain going with another broker in town. And then I would tell'em midway to I've got everything set up for tomorrow just control. Park'em in your garage and don't let the character out, right? So I had this young guy and I showed him the first two apartments. He said, Well, when am I gonna see the ones for sale? I said, Oh no, these are for Rent. He said, No, I want to buy something. I I was like, Oh crap. So I said, Well that's excellent. So I said I was gonna take him on a tour of all New York'cause it was very important for him to learn all the neighborhoods to see what he could choose from, to see what he reacted to best, and that the next day we would show him the sale apartments. Of course I had no sale apartments. So I got him in a taxi, walked him around every street, showed him every every place in town, and then that night I went home and I hit the floor running. I dropped him off at like five fifteen as early as I could. Called every single

apartment where the owner ad, which was very common in those days, and said, I have a young engineer he's looking exactly for your apartment on Sutton Place. He's looking for a small chair. I'd read him the ad back and go, but he must see it tomorrow. Yes, come on over. And I booked everything that night and the third apartment we saw he bought the next day. That's what got me in the sale business. And when I got that commission check in my hand, it was thirty-eight thousand five hundred, so what's that, six twelve? Mm, I can't do the math anymore, shame on me. But six percent of that. Do you know what I I got that check in my hand on closing and I thought God has given me this to open up a sales department and I hired two sales agents and that was the birthing of the sales business. Wow. And all the while you're still I mean

You st I mean, Ray is still part of this thing, he's still in your life. Yes, Ray was still part of my life because that was within the first seven years. We stayed together for seven years. Until he married my secretary, which was really like so emotionally uh discouraging for me, a real upheaval. Wait. He he cheated on you?

With your secretary? Yes. Mm. She was kind of innocent. They fell in love. I was angry with him, but of course directing my anger at her as women tend to do. And so um when I wanted to fire her, because I said I I can't come in the office every day and see your fiancee. They were getting married in three months was very fast. I'm mortified. I was mortified. And uh and then he moved Tina into our combined office. I had to look at them through the glass wire, which was really it's such a stupid thing. I must've been so young at heart to be so injured over some stupid thing. But here's the thing, I said I have to fire her. He said, No, I'm the controlling partner. You can't fire her. I mean he he owned half of this company and No, he owned fifty one percent.

That's how I found out the value of that 1%. Oh, that's how it works. Yeah, but that didn't last for long. One year later I I stomped in there, finally built my courage and told him I was ending the business. Well. I said Right.

I'm gonna end the business today and this is how we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it like a football drawer. We got Fourteen salespeople, you can pick the first, I'll pick the second, that kinda thing. So we each got seven. Okay. Like there were children in a divorce. They didn't know what was happening. Uh and we also had close to seventy some odd thousand dollars in receivables, which I remember at the time thinking half of that would get me through a month and a half of overhead, you know. And so I had the ability uh to take my half of the money.

And start all over. And lucky for me, I uh went to my landlord in our existing building. We were on the eighth floor and I asked him if I could release another floor. We had always paid the rent on time and he rented me the eleventh floor above Ray, which I love being above him. Isn't that weird? I really need a shrink. He stayed there and renamed it um Pogue Simon because his wife's name was Pogue. And I moved up to eleven, took my seven people. I told him on Monday we'd be Moving and they were like oh Wow, where are we moving to? I said, It's a surprise because it was a surprise to me even.

But by Monday you could open an office in New York. You could buy the desk down on decrepit Forty Second Street and have those guys actually physically run the desk up to the location. You could order a phone, which I did on late Friday morning and had installed on Saturday. And By the time my agents came in, I called them over the weekend, gave them the new address, which was simply a different floor. They came in and they had all their stuff in a neat box on top of the new desk, like nothing had happened. I mean yeah Is it the I mean, are you are you just sort of hardwired as a tough person. I mean th th that

I mean emotionally that must have been pretty pretty rough, right? I mean in this is a guy that you're with for seven years Um you think you're in love and and in meanwhile He's Having the fair.

Well, he hey listen, the truth be known, I'm not at all a hard person. I mean the idea ask any woman who's been cheated on any guy, right? You feel like such a fool and you burn so deeply inside. No I could barely walk. I was so decimated by that. it wasn't that I even so much lost faith in him. I mean, you're allowed to fall in love, let's be real, right? With somebody else. But it was that I fell out of love with myself. I actually thought

My God, I was nobody before he found me. He got me to believe in myself. He put me in business. He, you know, was my mentor. He was a man of the world, you know, and all of a sudden It was like

I'm nobody. I never I actually questioned Whether I was capable of anything. Until He insulted me on the way out the door. What are you saying?

He said you'll never succeed without me. Wait, he he He was having an affair and then he rubbed a salt in your wounds by saying, You're never gonna succeed without me? Yes. And you know what?

He knew me, remember. We lived together. almost seven years. I was his business partner. He may have even been wanting to motivate me, knowing that I'm good when I'm insulted. And you know I have learned that because every one of my great successes building the business, the ones that were bell weather changes that I thought, wow, did that make a change, they were Always a result of an insult. So it was like it was like fuel to your fire. You he he he says this and you are I mean, uh of course, obviously devastated inside, but you You just think I the the greatest revenge is I'm gonna prove That

Well it wasn't even a revenge thing, honestly. It was like I couldn't stand the idea that he might see me fail. It was more the opposite. And you wanna know something, I gotta believe that was all tied into because it injured so deeply and became my motivation. I have to believe that that was tied into being the dumb kid at school because he was basically damning me to hell. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how I felt in school every day. Like I'm a loser, you'll go nowhere. And so he hit my hot button, for sure.

You know, for sure. So did you from day one when you go to the eleventh floor and you start your Your company. Mm-hmm. Uh are you thinking uh I mean I mean was he your main competitor? Was his company the one that you were up against? No, no, no. I moved off of that. I just I was in survival mode. Figuring out the math

Knowing I had six a six week run to stay in business. You had six weeks, you that's how much cash you had on hand. Yeah, because I had a bigger overhead by then. You know, in the beginning when my thousand dollars gave me a little bit long longer run, because it was just one ad per week in the New York Times, three line ad, whatever it costs then, and my sublease charge for my desk. So now it was more complicated. When I moved to the eleventh floor, I also had fourteen desks. But I only had seven agents. That's a problem. You know, it's a big overhead, no no income. And classified ads were really expensive at that time. Well, they always were going up in price, yes. So they didn't go very far. But you know, that was the bloodline of the real estate business. It was pre the Internet. If you wanted to get a lead you you put an ad in the paper. Were you freaking out?

You know, surprisingly no, I never freak out about pressure. I never have because um it is what it is. You know, I kinda have a matter of factness. In other words, I'm thinking, Okay, give it a shot. If I'm gonna fret about oh my god, oh my god, it's gonna get against me, if I get cocky and big head like oh this is no big deal I'm gonna get cocky. So I just kinda okay, this is what I got. Let's see how hard and fast I can run. However, I did have one vision, I must admit, the day I opened the Corcoran group

I remember sitting at that desk and paying the extra dollar a month for a pink princess phone, you paid a dollar extra to rent it. If it was pink,'cause it looked fancy. And I remember answering that phone sitting there. And thinking. I'm gonna be the queen of New York real estate. Barbara Corcran in a moment, how she actually did become the queen.

I'm Guy Raj and you're listening to How I Build This. from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So at this point in Barbara's story, She may have thought she was gonna be the queen of New York real estate, but It was gonna be an uphill battle.

She'd broken up with her mot, they'd split everything up. She had a pink princess phone in her new office, and She had to figure out how to get more attention for her company. in one of the world's most competitive markets. I distinctly remember the day I sat and paused and said to myself, Holy shit.

We are gonna be a success. I came up with the idea of taking our eleven sales for the year. We had eleven sales so far, whatever time of the year that was, and dividing by eleven, which was good, I was always good at eleven times table. And I came up with an average sale price and I typed it on a piece of paper and I named it after myself the Corcan Report, and it looked lonely. One number, average apartment price. I didn't even say Corcoran Group, I just put average New York City apartment price, and on the top I put the Corcran Report. And then I thought it needed something more because it looked empty and I put a market I can't even remember some long winded like market report of conditions and trends in the greater New York City market era, some long thing to fill up the page. And I mailed it out to everyone who wrote for the New York Times that day. Everyone. And I never heard from the Times at all.

But about two weeks later, I opened up the real estate section, which was a gigantal thick portion the main generator that in the automobile section for the New York Times before the internet. And I opened it up and the front page read, New York City prices hit all-time low because we're in a recession again. And the first line said, According to Barbara Corcran, president of the Corcan, I'm like, holy shit. I can't believe this.

I knew my business was gonna be successful. You you just made this n this I mean you just t took your sales numbers, which was ten properties for a year. No, eleven properties. And you divide that divide that up and then you said, Hey, this is the average price of a Manhattan uh you know Well I didn't really say an average I put I put average New York City apartment price. And now that sounds misleading. I could see now from where I sit, that is misleading. I didn't intend it that way. You know, I did intend to trim it up with that long conditions and trends, but I You know, it was amazing to me.

That the newspaper printed my number. They liked your who's s send us this newsletter. Yeah, but also there were no numbers. Remember there was there was no public data of apartment prices and it in the vacuum of no numbers I supplied a number and they wanted to do a story on the bad market and I put a label on it. How bad it was, right? So so did you start getting calls uh from people who said, Oh what is this Corkin Group? We got instant credibility. We called for listings on the uh for sale by owner ads. And most of them had heard of us in one day simply because it was in the Times.

Well, everybody read the Times, the front page. If you were looking to sell your home, you're reading the front pages of the New York Times. Real estate section, without a doubt. And when they didn't hear of us, My brokers started saying things like, I'm sure you've read about us in today's times or last week's time. That didn't take them long to use it. So we got listings more easily, we got credibility more easily, and we got more phone calls, and all because. We were quoted as an expert. That's it. Wow. And so presumably that was the birth of the Corcoran report. You you d didn't stop sending that that news letter out. I got it out every three months. Wow. And eventually it was enormously credible, uh you know, based on thousands of sales. You could really trust the information. But initially if I had been a big company and I'd run it by attorneys vetting

committee decisions, it would have never gone out. The beauty I had as a little guy is I had the freedom to run. But Barbara what was it like if this is the late seventies in New York, I mean was the real estate business was it a more welcoming place for a woman to to be leading a company or was it still I mean, you know, you hear about the that time and you you hear how women were sort of, you know, relegated to being secretaries and typists and things like that. Did you feel like you were Respected and treated.

You know, with dignity. Do you know I never paid attention to that. I didn't give a crap really. You know the uh the whole business was ninety percent female. It wasn't like women were not in the real estate brokerage field. But it just happened that all the firms were owned by the men. The bosses were all men, okay? So yes, so there weren't female owned businesses that I competed with, but that was That was not even an important detail. What an important detail in my mind was was that I had fourteen agents and the largest company in town at that point, Douglas Elman, had like Maybe eighty, ninety agents, that seemed to me like IBM itself. How am I going to compete with them? My eye was on that ball.

How did you know? Barbara how to even run this business. I mean I know we're talking now right in early nineteen eighties and you've been working with Ray for a few years, but I mean

You don't have an MBA, you don't have formal business background. How did you know how to r you know how to deal with the management issues, how to deal with how to pay people, w how to price things, how did you know that stuff? It's uh I think you make it sound more sophisticated than it is. Yeah. All you needed to know. is how to work with people. And that's all the business ever is. All the work I do today it rests entirely any success or failure, rests entirely on my ability.

to work with the people at hand. So learning how to recruit people. I learned how to recruit because I made friends with every store clerk, every waitress, every stewardess, everyone I ever met, I made friends with because I'm very friendly. And if I saw a spark in them Which w said to me sales personality, I would say, have you ever considered doing real estate sales? I recruited everywhere. Everywhere I went, I recruited people. And from what I understand, you yourself actually didn't go out and sell many houses. Or maybe. I sold I sold the engineer his first house. Yeah and then from Merrill Lynch I got a referral of David Palmer, who's a really big wig, and I sold him Two apartments side by side on the Upper East Side and East Eighty Ninth Street. Two new con and two new co ops in like condominiums. And uh that was it.

property. Why should I? You just you hired people to because that w I guess you recognize that your talent was not Yeah. selling property but in what, managing people? No, I was great at renting apartments. However I realised that if I were to continue to sell because it's time consuming to be a great salesperson.

very time consuming. I realized that if I were to continue doing that I could only build my business on the side. And I just took a leap of faith, especially when I sold David Palmer two apartments side by side for total value of it was a little bit more than three hundred fifty thousand, which today would be the equivalent of, say, a ten million dollar property. That was a landslide victory. for me. I took that check, I remember collecting it from the developer on eighty ninth street and walking it to sixty street when my office was skipping down Madison Avenue and singing Georgie Girl. To myself. I quit that day sales and I decided to use that money to hire three new salespeople right there I knew I could afford it and then I hired six more and then ten more. And then before you knew we had a thousand people. I don't want to make it sound like it's overnight, but it was just that same methodology. Whenever I had spare money, I would divide it by an overhead monthly.

figure out how many bodies I could afford like a mother paying for the kids and then I would go out and hire that many people. Yeah. That's it was a simple formula I never changed and it was really very useful. Yeah I'm I'm wondering.

I mean sounds like like in the first few years there was, you know, quite a bit of success. But I I mean in a short period of time you must have hit the the stock market crash of nineteen eighty seven, right? I mean that was a huge c crash. I mean how how did that affect your business? That was a bloodbath. Uh for a good reason. When the economy crashes or even really wavers, a terrible thing happens if you're in the real estate brokerage business. Uh buyers and sellers do nothing.

Mm. Nothing is terrible for brokerage. uh a big seller's market is great'cause it's action, a a horrible market is great'cause people have to sell. But in the beginning when nothing happens, you go out of business. Well what happened was the great majority of my competitors went out of business. Uh the bad news to that is it's hard to stay in business of very good news in that. is I realize I lost half my competitors. That's a motivator.

Oh well I was really on the brink of declaring uh that it was over, but I was ashamed in trying to make back the money I owed uh to various suppliers like my ed agency, uh, the New York Times. But I owed over three hundred thousand dollars. And there was no business coming in. There was no business. No. When the when the market stops it's like

It's like the silence. Yeah. It's a terrible, terrible thing. And you have to remember you have salespeople, many of them uh supporting their family who have no money coming, that's the worst part. Never mind the business. It's uh it's a pressure on the people. Did you have to let people go? Oh my gosh, I always let people go anyway. But it was interesting. I had my mother working for me then for two years of my life, uh because all of her kids were grown and she was working at the five and ten on two hundred and fifteen street and walking across the George Washington Bridge and she was getting older and said, Mom, you can't do that, you gotta come and work with me She she was delighted.

So she was the file clerk and boy did she keep Oh God, she kept great files. She color coded them, tagged them. She was a genius at that, alright. But anyway, when the shit hit the fan, which is what my mother always called it, by the way, and I get it from her, I'm a filthy male. Um, she came to me, uh and she knew I had to fire a lot of people'cause you could just see that everybody knew something was gonna shake out and it was fast and she said Why don't you publicly fire me if you fire me? She said no one else could be angry with you and you fire them. And she was right. I thought what genius.

So at that Monday morning meeting we always had at nine thirty, I said, uh, you know, every uh it's no surprise how bad things are, we're gonna have to make a lot of changes Uh, and it's gonna be very hard for me to do, but the hardest change of role is refireing my mother'cause I can't afford to keep her on. I mean you must have been really close to going out of business if if if you had to make that decision. Well, I was going out of business. I owed the three hundred some odd thousand, but I came up with a great idea to sell uh Bernie Mendic's uh

He was one of the he uh until his death about uh I guess ten years ago, he was uh The largest developer in New York. Him and H la uh Larry Silverstein were partners for many years, who built the World Trade Center. I'm sure you know that name. Anyway, um he asked me to look at eighty eight apartments scattered throughout the city and a number of properties and he said, I want to find out from you how you can sell them. I knew every broker in town had been in to see them. There was no way to sell them. No one is buying them. They were the dregs of the market. So they were in uh C rated buildings. Everything was wrong with it. Anyway, I went and I visited maybe eight or nine of the apartments w through the Supers and right away I thought oh. They were dumps, they could not be sold. We needed a market to sell them, a desperate market. We had no market.

So anyway I went back and I told him there was no way to sell it except a public auction. If you want to do a public auction. He said we can't do a public auction, we don't want the publicity of A failure. And I said, Well there's no other way. I can't sell these and I'll never forget what he said. He said, Barbara, you're a smart girl, you'll figure it out. And I went back and thought about it and boom, right in my head, uh came uh a memory of my mom taken like seven or eight of us, however many were born then down to Toms River, New Jersey, watching a puppy sale with the farmer lady across the street from my grandpa's house. And my mother sat us on the grass and watched all these fancy New Yorkers arguing over puppies. They're little Jack Russell puppies, really cute.

And anyway, um my mother said to us look at all these fancy people, do you know why they all want those puppies? It's because Louise was smart enough to invite them all here at the same time. Hm. And so that popped in my head. And I went back to Bernie Mendick the next day and I said I have a plan.

I'm gonna price all the apartments alike. Same price. Well, I price all the one bedrooms alike, all the two bedrooms. They were like a ten thousand dollar difference between the categories. Right. But some were on twenty second floors with gorgeous views, some were on the third floor with no kitchen, they were so uneven. Yeah. First come, first serve, we're gonna have a secret sale, we're not gonna advertise it. I'll announce it to my salespeople, only let them bring the best customers, but I need you to give me two years free maintenance. You're not gonna unload these for two years anyway. Maintenance is like uh association fees. Months. Yeah, like a condo fee. Monthly maintenance fee. I said because it's gonna erase the terrible maintenance in the head nobody thinks beyond two years. And pricing them all alike, it's gonna create a hype. Yeah And so he said, Okay, give it a whirl. And I said we haven't a secret sale to my salespeople. I was really going to that Monday announce we were closing the business. That's how close we were'cause I felt unconscionable. But pressure's a wonderful thing in life, isn't it? Makes you think. And so I announced it to my people, I said, but get there early

And don't bring too many people, just a family member if you want, and your single best customer. Don't bring, don't spread it around. We don't have enough to go around. And I'm telling you, I arrived on 81st Street where we had that makeshift office that morning at 7 a.m. and we had a line of 60 people waiting. To see those apartments. To see those apartments. And I'm telling an hour and a half I had more than a million dollars in net commissions. Wow. And I and I closed. It was a closing, and they signed the contract, and boom, it was like a fire sale, and but boy were people happy. They got the deal of the century. Yeah, I bet they're really happy today. But not as happy as I was that day. Yeah. Because I went from being Near desperation of being filthy rich in real estate. Filthy Rich. You got it. I went right out and I rented myself a full floor at six sixty Madison Avenue'cause I had the cash to do it.

And it it like everything I've read about you, people say, you know, Barbara's talent wasn't about selling homes, it was about marketing. She was an incredible marketer. Is that absolutely right. Where did you is it just an instinct? Is it just trial and error? Is it is it just being, you know, kind of a hustler? Uh no. I think it has more to do with Uh creativity. It's not a black and white game marketing.

It's a s a softer side of things, right? It involves exaggeration. involves uh an acumen for seeing what a storyline is or what would capture people's interests. It it definitely includes people smarts. And you know what I actually started re realizing I was best when things were bad? Because I would go into any bad real estate cycle in say say fifteenth position pecking order within the industry, and I would come out of it in eighth position'cause a lot of people got knocked out. Yeah. So you you decide

I guess in Or two thousand, two thousand two sell the Corking Group to get out. Yes. Why did you decide to sell? I mean you love the game. You love that That

So why did you Two things happen. One, I had my first baby at forty six. I gave birth to my son Tommy after eight years of in vitro. That was nothing short of a miracle. Something I desperately wanted to finally happen. Once I had that child my heart changed, believe it or not. And it played out my heart every day. I was home at my grand old age nursing my son and feeling guilty about it because my kids at at work were Whiz Barbara, Whiz Bara and so it took me about four years And then um a wonderful thing happened one evening. Esther and I were doing the Corcan Report numbers as we Esther was your partner. Yes, Esther, my business partner. We were doing the Corcan Report numbers one night, which took us hours because We wanted to have accurate numbers. They were very particular, both of us. I don't know why my first report had no accurate number, right? It was just like fly. Um by then we were very respectable in making sure all of our numbers were accurate. And we also did monthly a report of who control the market share on listings because there's no MLS in New York. MLS is the multiple listing service that showed you who had what listings. Like you you couldn't just go to one place to see all the listings. No. And we broke the market into price categories on east and west side, uptown

uh downtown. So we had those categories. And we would go through the listing count together and she'd say Five seventy five upper west side. I put a stroke. But we had a categorized by all the top agencies in town, the top seven. And then that night we did all the add up and we could clearly see that Corcoran was number one. We had more listings in every category, from the highest to the lowest, uptown, downtown, east to west. Not by a lot, but a smidgen over Brown Harris, Douglas Element. And I turned to Esther and I said, let's sell this joint. Just like that. Yeah.

Big thoughtful move, but also To be uh fair, it was the first year that I had made over a million dollars myself. And I figured It's probably worth something. You sold it for sixty six million dollars, which is important. Because I remember being on a ski lift with my roofer brother John who still lives in Edgewater.

We were out in Utah, I think, and we're going up at Chairlift and I get on my cell phone a call from my attorney who said I've got great news. You said I have an offer of twenty three million dollars, are you seated? And I said, turn twenty-three million dollars? He goes, yep. twenty-three million dollars old cash. And I said to him, great, come back when you get sixty six million. Cash. And he said, Why 66 million? I said,

Because it's worth it. And I hung up. And I said to my brother John, just got a twenty three million. Think of that, John. Imagine us having twenty three million dollars. And he said, But why'd you say sixty six? I said, Oh,'cause that's my lucky number. And would you they those those accountants kill themselves to try to figure out why sixty six it wasn't till the closing I was

got great satisfaction tell them a whole bunch of oh it was my lucky number. And it was I proved it. Did you when when you sold the company, did you Did you regret it? Um, I would have to answer that honestly on some level yes, and in a more important level, uh not. I felt an enormous sense of freedom to be a phenomenal mother. Uh and so that was exactly what I wanted and I had the enormous satisfaction of knowing I had become the queen of New York real estate. And financially

Now sad for life at that point. Yes. But I never understood that how much I loved the people I worked with and how much that team meant to me. Mm. It was my lifeblood.

I had found them, recruited them, trained them, lived with them, gotten through good times, bad times. I had sales managers, eleven of them that I adored and they adored me. We were such a tight team. And I felt terribly lonely and I really thought I was going to get depressed and probably needed to shrink. because I really didn't know what to do with myself. I yearned for good morning, Barbara, good morning, Barbara, good morning, Barbara. And all of the hoopla that went with being somebody in a business, it was gone. So that part I thought, what did I do? What did I do to myself? Until of course I I don't wanna say reinventing myself, uh starting all over again and trying to build a new career. I mean that's that's a thing, right? Because I mean, obviously you did g go on and and and build a second career'cause I think most people listening to this would know you as as one of the sharks on Shark Tank, not as the head of the uh of the Corcoran group. Yes. Do you uh when when you're on that show, do you I

It seems like you have a bias toward people who you know, who have similar backgrounds, who come from no Money. I'm very biased. They have a much better shot at succeeding. Why?

Mm, a lot of reasons. Uh they're more desirous. They've never had the fancy vacation, the delicious new car, the uh the private schools, the higher education in many instances, and they aspire to it. uh so um they get more satisfaction out of climbing that ladder and getting to it.

Um and They've uh sineir parents struggle. Uh through life to give them whatever they've given them. They're more appreciative, they don't take things for granted. Yeah.

And you know what else, uh w which I should have started with? The totally free From expectation. Do you know how How lucky I was to never for a second. ever think I wonder what my parents think of this.

All it was was just let's see how far I could go. Yeah. I had nothing to lose and nowhere to go but up. Do you know how freeing that is to take risks? So they're they're not risk aversive. And you strive harder. So So I really am biased. I'm not saying that you can't succeed. I mean, God willing, I have uh I have privileged children and I hope they'll succeed. Uh, it's much harder for me not to let them feel my success even if I don't say a word, you know. And so they're not as free as I was. You know, God bless them. It's harder for them. Do you feel I mean, when you were a kid you were told that you aren't smart, do you feel now

That you've convinced yourself that you are smart. Well, yes and no. I'm certainly street smart, I'm certainly people smart. Um I have an instinct. when trouble is brewing, whereas the best accountants in the world will wait till the wall hits'em. Hm.

So I trust my math instinct, okay. I think I'm a smart person for sure, but more than that, I think I'm an enormously hard working person. And I have great confidence from my ability to work hard through anything. And I think I'm very good at not feeling sorry for myself. And I think that's important. How how much of your of your success do you think is Just skill, intelligence, hard work, and and how much of it is luck.

Well, I do believe in luck. I've had many, uh, many, many lucky breaks, including meeting Ramon at the diner that night, right? That was the beginning. Okay. Or the very good luck of having my parents as parents. Mm-hmm. Not bad, right? Yeah. Once you grow up.

Uh you make your own luck. Definitely you make your own luck. Uh I think all the lucky breaks I had were more a result of me staying in the game. and just believing something would break, just hanging around long enough. That's more important than luck, in my opinion. Being aggressive at every opportunity And standing up for yourself, yes, more important than luck.

Barbara Corcoran, by the way, she was initially rejected for her spot on Shark Tank. They went with a younger woman. So Barbara wrote a letter to the producer. And I said I consider your rejection a lucky charm.

Because everything that ever happened in my life Came on the heels of failure. The next day He called her. Said he reconsidered and well.

You know what happened. And please do stick around because in just a moment we're gonna hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're gonna update a story we had on the show last year. This one starts about ten years ago when Ariel Rivero was scrambling to get something together for his girlfriend's birthday. I don't believe the gift was actually very good. It was just, I think, like a box of chocolate, just some random gift that I'd given her.

So a box of chocolate's not super creative, right? But Ariel actually is creative. In fact he's a graphic designer, so he thought, well, maybe I'll at least do something cool with the wrapping paper. So I think I had my picture just on my computer. And I just clipped out the head really quick and I I decided to just repeat it on a piece of paper with a funny background. So he duplicated his face fifteen times and then he photoshopped them onto a backdrop. Like a cheesy yellow starburst pattern. And he printed the whole design onto plain paper, he wrapped the chocolates, and then he handed the gift to his girlfriend Vanessa and her reaction? Oh my god, this is hilarious. You know, like what what did you do and why is your face on this, you know? It was so funny. And clearly it worked because three years later, Vanessa and Arielle got married. She also happens to be a graphic designer, and now and again they would do the same thing. They would make wrapping paper for friends and family and put their faces on it. And just about every time we give to somebody they're like, Oh you should start a business out of this. You should you should make a website. You should make a website. So eventually Ariel and Vanessa did

Just that. And at first it was it was tough because we are not web designers, you know. I mean now I guess we are, but back then we weren't. But after some trial and error, they started the website and then they named their business Gift Wrap My Face. So you upload a photo They duplicate it and print dozens of your tiny little faces onto whatever image you choose. We have the statue of David, the Mona Lisa, the Cupid. Bright and groom, we have to do it. Vanessa launched a few years ago. They got a few hundred orders at first, and about a year and a half later Oprah featured the wrapping paper in her magazine. When it finally hit and we see Oprah holding our paper in I think she was in her kitchen holding up a box that's wrapped in our paper, which I know that I printed for her. It was wild. It was really wild.

Even with that boost from Oprah, sales have been kind of modest since the company launched about three years ago. But very soon, Vanessa and RL are hoping to partner with a printing service. that will let them move their production out of the garage. In the meantime, they both still have their day jobs, and another pretty important one. Raising their two kids ages six and three. So it's either talking about the business or talking about the kids. That's pretty much our life now.

To find out more about the company, Gift Wrap My Face, head to our Facebook page. And of course, if you have a story about something you're building, please tell us about it. Go to build.npr.org and thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, you can go to howibuilthis.npr.org. You can also write to us at hibtnpr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show is produced this week by Run Dabdon Patta with original music composed by Ramteen Arab Lui. Thanks also to Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, San Azmech Kantor, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

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