With the stock market picking up steam and the worst of the recession apparently in the rear-view mirror, high-end home purchases are on the rise. According to CNBC, sales of homes worth more than $1 million nationwide have risen in most states and real estate professionals say people are bidding up the price for expensive homes for the first time since the market crash. Pamela Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group, told CNBC that the firm saw sales of luxury co-ops double in the first quarter of 2011. [more]

A former agent with the Corcoran Group, Jason Riggs, has filed suit against his former employer, alleging that he was the target of ongoing, cruel taunts about his weight, according to the New York Post, and that he was ultimately fired due to weight discrimination. The suit says that Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman would make repeated disparaging comments about Riggs’ purported weight problem, calling him “too fat” and telling other employees at the firm that he had “ballooned up.” Riggs was fired in October 2008, according to the Post.

While a tough 2009 made people reset their expectations, Pamela Liebman, the Corcoran Group’s president and CEO, told the Palm Beach Daily News she thinks the number of transactions nationwide will likely rise this year, though the dollar volume will not. Palm Beach, in particular, has been slow to recover. “It still feels the drag of the overall housing glut in Florida,” Liebman said. Her near-term outlook for Palm Beach and Delray Beach, however, is upbeat. Corcoran, which was the listing broker for the 2009 record $24 million sale of La Bellucia mansion and is also marketing Bernard Madoff’s five-bedroom Palm Beach home, has worked on getting buyers and sellers on the same page. “I think for a long time in all of our markets, whether it was Palm Beach or the Hamptons or New York City, there was a lot of talk about people wanting luxury and ‘the biggest’ and ‘the best’ — the biggest apartment, the best views, the most oceanfront,” Liebman, 47, said. “People are buying properties again for themselves to enjoy, not to make a statement about their life and how much money they have.” Leibman, who said she stays in her Miami home at least twice a month, said that international buyers — many from South America and Russia — are in the market, as are Europeans “but not as strong as they were.”
[Palm Beach Daily News]

Around 1,500 real estate pros packed Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall recently for The Real Deal’s 5th Annual Forum. The topic? “Distressed Opportunities: Taking Advantage of Distress and Searching for Recovery.” With Fox Business News anchor Brian Sullivan moderating, some of the industry’s most notable figures were on hand to discuss those opportunities. The panelists were leading economist Nouriel Roubini, Prudential Douglas Elliman residential broker Dolly Lenz, the Corcoran Group CEO Pamela Liebman, Coney Island developer Joseph Sitt, Plaza developer Miki Naftali and Moody’s economist Mark Zandi. [more]

When construction of single-family homes rose for the fifth consecutive month in July, analysts were excited. And as projections show that August will mark the fourth consecutive month of growth in sales of existing homes, that excitement is holding strong, according to the Economist. But as the unemployment rate in the U.S. fails to rebound (the current rate is at 9.7 percent, according to public data), there is reason to believe that the housing recovery is tenuous. “We’ve finally found a level where people want to do deals,” Pamela Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group, said. But the Economist argues that fledgling U.S. unemployment figures and lack of available credit make that hard to maintain.

From left to right: Barack Obama, Mort Zuckerman, Amir Korangy and Darcy Stacom made the New York Observer Power 100 list.

From the New York Web site: The Real Deal’s Amir Korangy made the New York Observer’s Power
100 list of the most powerful people in New York real estate, released today. President
Barack Obama ranks first on the list, which includes politicians,
developers and brokers, followed by Stephen Ross, CEO of the Related
Companies, and Mort Zuckerman, chairman and CEO of Boston Properties.
Twelve women made the list, including Corcoran Group CEO Pamela
Liebman, Elliman CEO Dottie Herman and CB Richard Ellis Vice Chairman
Darcy Stacom. The Observer also held a poll inviting readers to vote
for the most powerful people in New York real estate, and The Real Deal’s Web editor, Lauren Elkies, was named the city’s most powerful real estate blogger. [more]