From left: Dennis Mangone and Michael Bolla
By Sarabeth Sanders and Amy Tennery

Michael Bolla and Dennis Mangone — both larger-than-life types with rosters of high-profile clients to match — have joined the city’s largest residential brokerage, bringing in some celebrity cachet after the recent departure of a certain pair of Israelis.

Those are, of course, former managing directors Ilan Bracha and Tamir Shemesh, who until recently had sat at the helms of Prudential Douglas Elliman’s first- and fifth-ranked teams. Bracha left at the start of the year to launch the first Manhattan franchise of Keller Williams, while Shemesh followed a few weeks later to join the Corcoran Group. Shemesh told The Real Deal at the time that the similarly-timed departures were “purely coincidence.”

So too, it seems, are the new hires, as Elliman has apparently been after both Bolla, who had been running his own boutique brokerage operation for the past two decades, and Mangone, a top broker at Brown Harris Stevens, for years. [more]

From left: Ian Schrager, 285 Lafayette Street, and 40 Bond Street

While the expression “try it before you buy it” is familiar in any industry, Ian Schrager, the co-founder of Studio 54 and the head honcho at his self-titled real estate company, flips the adage for his own purposes: try it before you sell it, he says. Which is why Schrager makes a point to live in his hotels before he markets them to the public, according to the New York Times, and why he now resides at 40 Bond Street, a building he developed. But living in Bond means unloading his former home, a 3,990-square-foot penthouse at 285 Lafayette Street, which is currently in contract. The unit, which he put on the market last May, had an asking price of $12.5 million and was being marketed by Dennis Mangone, a senior vice president with Brown Harris Stevens. [more]

The unit to see the biggest price cut today is a three-bedroom,
two-bath condo at 285 Lafayette Street, between Prince and Houston
streets, according to Streeteasy.com. The price of penthouse A was
cut by $2 million, and the 2,890-square-foot home is now on the market
for $10 million. The pre-war home is listed for 17 percent less than
its asking price of $12 million when it went on the market in May.
Brown Harris Stevens’ Erin Boisson Aries has the listing. TRD [more]