What is your full name?
Frederick Warburg Peters.
What’s your family history?
I decided to name the firm after my middle name because the Warburgs have
a lot of resonance in New York. My great-great-grandfather, Jacob
Schiff, was the head of an investment banking firm, Kuhn, Loeb &
Co. (It merged with Lehman Brothers in 1977.) He was probably the most
significant Jewish investment banker in the city at the turn of the
last century. My great-grandparents, Frieda and Felix Warburg, were
also big philanthropists in New York, and their house is now the Jewish
Museum. My father [C. Brooks Peters] was a New York Times reporter (who
was credited with contributing to the Times’ foreign reporting Pulitzer
Prize in 1941).
What’s your birth date?
February 9, 1952.
Where did you grow up?
Manhattan.
Where do you live?
86th Street and Central Park West. We’ve been in the apartment for 31 years. We bought it two weeks after we got married.
Are you going to stay there forever?
Yes.
Feet first, that’s how I’m leaving. People say to me, ‘Isn’t it hard
for you not to move when you see so many apartments?’ But the truth is,
I look at them and think, ‘Hmm, can we sell this?’
Do you have any other homes?
We own a house in Sharon, Conn. [in Litchfield County].
What’s a weekend like in the country?
Weekends
tend to include a lot of reading, at least one trip to the nursery,
hours of planting and weeding, and garden tours and house tours.
There’s a fair amount of meal preparation, and we’ll often go to the
nearby town on a Saturday or Sunday night for dinner and a movie.
How do you get to work?
I
walk through the park every day [to his office at 969 Madison Avenue at
76th Street]. It’s like the best commute you could ask for. I’m a big
user of public transportation. Diane [Ramirez, president of Halstead
Property] and I leave [REBNY's ] board of directors meetings, and the
cars are lined up outside with all the drivers, and we cross the street
and get on the subway.
What restaurants do you frequent?
We
go to neighborhood places. [My wife] Alexandra and I have a place we go
to all the time on the East Side — E.A.T. [at 1064 Madison Avenue,
between 80th and 81st streets]. Not with each other necessarily, but I
often run into her there. Another place in the neighborhood of my
office I like is Serafina [at 1022 Madison Avenue at 79th Street]. I
have a standing date, even though we haven’t done it much lately, with
Barbara Fox [president of real estate firm Fox Residential Group] once
a month there.
Is your wife OK with that friendship?
As
my wife likes to say, ‘I have a career in which I take women alone into
apartments.’ She had to make her peace with that long ago.
Do you consider yourself a cynic?
No,
actually the opposite. I think often, people’s best quality and their
worst quality is the same. And for me, in business, I’d say it is that
I give everyone a million chances.
Are you tough during a job interview?
As
an organization, we aren’t great at weeding people out once they’re
here, which means that it’s better to not make too many mistakes up
front.
What’s the craziest thing one of your brokers has done?
I
had a broker who had a kind of breakdown in 2003 [reportedly getting
naked, screaming and relieving herself on furniture and in a closet] in
the apartment of a client. That’s all I’m going to say because there’s
ongoing litigation.
How do you express anger?
I’m embarrassed to admit there’s probably an annual moment in the office when I scream.
Would you rather be right or happy?
Happy. I feel like in my middle years, which hopefully these are, I am trying to cultivate a more Zen attitude.
How are you doing to do that?
I have done yoga for 15 or 16 years.
Are you a big clothes shopper?
I
was an incredible shoe groupie for many years. A year ago, I had this
catastrophic break with my ankle, so that’s broken me of my shoe habit.
I haven’t been able to wear anything except Merrells or sneakers.
Are you a metrosexual?
I suppose. I don’t quite know what that means.
If you weren’t in real estate, what would you do?
Run
an orchestra. Run an opera company. In addition to being a shoe
groupie, I’m an opera groupie. That’s just another nail in my
metrosexual coffin, isn’t it?
