From left: Joseph Moshe, co-owner of Rutenberg Realty, and Paul Purcell and Kathy Braddock, heads of the brokerage

A co-owner of Rutenberg Realty is suing the brokerage and firm heads Paul Purcell and Kathy Braddock for almost $2 million, claiming they have failed to pay him any dividends since the company’s founding, a new lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court says.

The suit was filed last Friday by Joseph Moshe, who heads the large Long Island branch of the Rutenberg franchise and is a co-owner of the New York City office. He claims in the suit that Braddock and Purcell are improperly siphoning funds from the New York Rutenberg office, and that they are competing against the firm with their own consulting company, Braddock + Purcell. [more]

Scott Morrow (left) and Jesse Temple

Fast-growing brokerage [more]

Charles Rutenberg Realty shakes up industry with 100 percent commission model

Kathy Braddock with Rutenberg brokers

From the July issue:
When Paul Purcell, the erstwhile COO of Douglas Elliman, decided in
2000 to hire Kathy Braddock as general sales manager, it caused an
uproar at the venerable, century-old firm. Braddock owned a personal
service firm called the Intrepid New Yorker, and she’d worked with
Purcell — who’d started Elliman’s relocation division — for years as
she helped new arrivals get settled in the city. Still, she was
considered an outsider to the real estate industry, and Purcell’s
attempt to hire her caused “a big hubbub,” recalled Braddock. The
unconventional hire turned out to be only the precursor for a much
greater change the two would bring to the industry.

[more]

A new residential online brokerage hopes to unlock a new palette of analytics from which sellers can track how their advertisements perform among buy [more]

From the May issue: A year ago this month, New York’s real estate community experienced one of the darker moments of the recession when Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy — one of the city’s largest and most established firms — announced it would close. However, CBHK turned out to be the only major firm that disappeared. Business, meanwhile, has steadily improved for months. “New York has had a very good rebound,” said Pamela Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group. [more]

Marcus & Millichap’s Adelaide Polsinelli is out working today in the snow

“Snowicane” or not, New York City real estate brokers are hard at work. Unlike teachers or other professionals who can stay home when the weather gets bad, brokers must be prepared to show properties to eager home-seeking clients, rain or shine. “Real estate is like the post office: neither sleet nor rain nor dark of night will keep us indoors,” said Paul Purcell, co-founder of Manhattan’s Charles Rutenberg Realty, who made sure the firm’s office on East 56th Street was open today. (To see a list of today’s real estate office openings and closings, click here.) “We work seven days a week and 24 hours a day,” said Leonard Steinberg, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, who was on his way to show a $14 million listing and had competed two showings this morning. On snow days, “the only difference is that I wear very different shoes,” said Steinberg, who donned heavy-duty waterproof boots to help navigate piles of slush. On days like this, he sometimes hires a four-wheel drive vehicle from a car service to ferry clients from one listing to another. [more]

Howard Milstein is the head of Milstein Properties.

From the February issue: On a winter afternoon last month, sunshine streamed through the windows on the 33rd story of 30 Lincoln Plaza, illuminating the cleaning supplies and paint cans that occupy the high-ceilinged space. Innocuous though it may seem, this out-of-the-way spot is at the center of a bitter dispute now raging between the building”s tenants and the developer, the Milstein real estate family. In their quest to prevent the Milsteins from converting the rental building into condos, tenants have filed a lawsuit claiming that when 30 Lincoln Plaza was constructed three decades ago, the developer ignored city permits and added an illegal extra floor — the 33rd. Litigation is nothing new for the Milsteins. They are one of the city’s oldest and most successful real estate families, but also among the most controversial.  [more]

The Real Deal had a contingent of reporters and editors at the New York Hilton for the Real Estate Board of New York’s annual banquet and awards ceremony (click here to see an article on the event). The Real Deal’s Web editor Lauren Elkies interviewed a slew of real estate bigwigs from Bill Rudin of Rudin Management — who said Jonathan Mechanic of Fried, Frank (who The Real Deal also spoke to) is “the real deal” — to Bruce Mosler of Cushman & Wakefield — who said he loves The Real Deal, to Frederick Peters of Warburg Realty — who said “Virtual Office Web sites,” or VOWS, “will ultimately be insignificant.” [more]

From the December issue: Until last year, The Real Deal‘s annual accounting of real
estate records was a Mad Libs of giddy peaks: The highest price ever
paid for [insert type of real estate] in [insert name of borough] was
catalogued, time and again.
Even in 2008 — before Lehman Brothers fell and the recession
tightened its stranglehold on the city — records were toppled. On the
residential side, Manhattan logged the highest median sale price ever,
$945,276, while on the commercial side, Boston Properties paid $2.9
billion for the GM Building, the highest price ever shelled out in the
United States for an office tower. But many of 2009′s records are record lows, rather than record
highs. For example, the second quarter of the year saw the largest
year-over-year drop — 25.6 percent — ever recorded by appraisal firm
Miller Samuel in Manhattan’s median sale price for apartments. The firm
has been releasing market reports for the last decade. [more]

Looking to drum up some business in these tough times? Try issuing a
market report.

During the roller coaster ride that has been the residential real
estate market of the past year, brokers and consumers have scrambled
for information to interpret rapidly changing market forces. In
response, real estate firms have issued a veritable avalanche of
market reports, each hoping to become the consumer’s go-to source for
information, and grow their brand in the process.

But this information overload may now be backfiring, since there are
now so many reports available, often with wildly disparate information.

“All of these firms believe in [issuing reports] as a way of marketing
themselves and separating themselves from the competition,” said Paul
Purcell, a partner at real estate consultancy Braddock + Purcell and
the co-founder of Charles Rutenberg Realty in New York. “It simply
serves to confuse the consumer, and make them wonder why each firm has
different information.” [more]