From left: Mary Ann Tighe, MaryAnne Gilmartin, Pamela Liebman and Dottie Herman

Brokering Conde Nast’s relocation to 1 World Trade Center earned CB Richard Ellis’ Mary Ann Tighe the top spot on this year’s Crain’s list of the 50 most powerful women in New York City. Tighe, who is also the first female to lead the Real Estate Board of New York, came in third on the list last year, but that was before the $2 billion Conde lease, which is widely considered a catalyst for the Financial District’s rebirth. Earlier this month, when Tighe became the first female recipient of the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate’s Urban Leadership Award, James Kuhn, president of Newmark Knight Frank, said the lease “might turn out to be the biggest transformational deal in [his] lifetime.” More powerful New York females after the jump. [more]

Dottie Herman, the president and CEO of Prudential Douglas Elliman (credit: Marilynn K. Yee / The New York Times), and Howard Lorber, the company’s chairmanFrom the June issue: Prudential Douglas Elliman has the most agents of any real estate brokerage in the city. Its offerings account for nearly one-quarter of Manhattan’s listed apartments, and it turns 100 this year.

But in recent months, the firm’s top-banana status may have slipped somewhat.

In the last year, Elliman has seen its Manhattan listings decline from 2,010 to 1,320 as of May 2011 — a drop of 34 percent, the largest dip among Manhattan’s major firms. Perhaps more important, the total value of those listings fell sharply, from $3.8 billion to $2.6 billion, according to The Real Deal’s analysis of data from On-Line Residential.

A busier residential sales market may bear some of the responsibility for that slide. Because The Real Deal’s data does not include properties that have recently sold, a drop in the value of a firm’s listings could mean that fewer homes are lingering on the market.

However, even if that’s the case, competitor companies seem to be replacing their sold listings at a quicker clip than Elliman is. [more]

Prudential Douglas Elliman is partnering with United Kingdom-based real estate agency and consulting firm Knight Frank Residential in a bid to promote exclusive properties among their combined international client pools and boost sales. European and other global properties should begin to appear on Elliman’s website in the coming weeks, according to Crain’s. Elliman CEO Dottie Herman said: “There’s a high percentage of international buyers who like to invest in New York real estate. They feel it’s a good investment.” [more]

Though the Mexican empanadas, tequila and piñatas were typical of Manhattan Cinco de Mayo celebrations yesterday, the location certainly was not: a new condominium between 81st and 82nd streets along Park Avenue (see photos above). That contributed to the large crowd at 949 Park Avenue last night — 145 brokers, by the count of Fredrick Eklund, one of three Prudential Douglas Elliman agents exclusively marketing the building — packed into one of the glassy development’s six units, all duplexes.

The crowd was dodging “Million Dollar Listing” camera crews filming an episode for the show, premiering in the fall, as well as the staircase, and a jam-packed elevator corridor where visitors were angling to get to the roof. [more]

Dawn Doherty, former vice president of strategic development at sales and rental listing website Streeteasy, has moved to brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman to assume the newly created role of chief digital officer, Doherty and Elliman have announced.

Doherty was the driving force behind Streeteasy.com, which she joined in 2007, about a year after its launch. “When I first started, the site had under 2 million page views a month,” she said, and “now, it’s about 20 million.” The website will survive without her, she said. [more]

From left: Elliman’s Dottie Herman, Corcoran’s Pamela Liebman, Halstead’s Diane Ramirez and Brown Harris Stevens’ Hall Wilkie

Tight credit, a harsh winter and a return to seasonality led to a relatively quiet first quarter in Manhattan, according to several residential sales market reports released today by some of New York City’s top firms. While reports from Prudential Douglas Elliman and the Corcoran Group show a rosier picture than those from sister companies Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead (which release the same data), experts across the board agreed that the market is stable.

The median home sales price dropped to $782,071 in the first quarter of the year, down 9.9 percent from the same time a year earlier and 7.4 percent from fourth-quarter 2010, according to the Elliman report. [more]

From left: Robert Dvorin, Dottie Herman, Andrew Heiberger and Phillip Acha

A Prudential Douglas Elliman veteran and his team have left the firm in the wake of several high-profile departures over the last few months. Robert Dvorin, who was with the company for eight years and ranked among the top 25 agents at the company in 2008, 2009 and 2010, left to join Town, a relatively new residential brokerage and brainchild of Citi Habitats founder Andrew Heiberger.

Dvorin’s five-person sales team, including his wife, Young Lee, made the move with him. The broker was previously the director of sales at SoLofts and is currently marketing a 33,000-square-foot apartment building at 55 Warren Street in Tribeca for $29.9 million, which he took with him from Elliman.
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New York City’s own Prudential Douglas Elliman was named the number one brokerage in the nationwide Prudential Real Estate Affiliates network this week, Elliman CEO Dottie Herman announced following a ceremony in San Diego, Calif. The company’s Manhattan offices and agents took home a litany of awards and honors, including, for the eighth year in a row, the top office by gross commission income. Elliman’s 575 Madison Avenue office held onto that title (it was also fifth by number of units), besting some 1,940 other Prudential network offices nationwide. It was followed by Elliman’s 26 West 17th Street office at No. 2 and 1995 Broadway at No. 3. And, among individual agents, no surprise here: “stratospheric” superbroker Dolly Lenz was the top producer by gross commission income out of some 62,000 agents in the Prudential network. TRD [more]

Dottie Herman, CEO of Prudential Douglas Elliman, gabbed with “Real Housewives of New York City” star Jill Zarin, who’s currently in Las Vegas, on this past weekend’s “Eye on Real Estate,” her show on WOR talk radio. Herman said that she’s watched Zarin’s show since it’s first season and that she’s “addicted” to it (Zarin said that the show’s delayed return has been due to editing issues). In addition, Herman took callers’ queries. Among the callers during the episode were a central New Jersey caller, asking about real estate tax on inherited property, and a landlord looking to turn his rental property into a primary residence. [WOR]

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]