David Schlamm made the right call literally.
The year was 1990, and he was at his first office after having founded City Connections Realty. A woman called the office looking for a rental that his firm was advertising in the Bakery Building on East 65th Street. Schlamm chatted with her and assigned one of his agents to assist her. He had a special request for the agent.
“I said, ‘When you’re working with her, ask her if she’s single and available,'” Schlamm told The Real Deal. “She said she wasn’t single, but she was available.”
Without having met Schlamm and with him having seen a lot of her financial history the woman agreed to a date. They went out on the Upper West Side, and Schlamm called to make sure she had gotten home OK afterward. It was that call, Schlamm said, that cinched the relationship: He and his wife Jill have been married for 13 years and have two daughters. She did, by the way, get the rental she was looking for that day she called City Connections and paid the regular broker’s fee for it. “But,” Schlamm added, “she was the first person I ever took a personal check from for the brokerage fee.”
Schlamm is part of that small coterie of New York real estate professional whose work has pleasantly collided with romance. Others, too, have met their spouses on the job. Some end up working alongside them.
Mark David Fromm and Claudia Saez-Fromm know that path. It started innocuously enough: Saez was in 2001 looking for an apartment. She ended up working with a broker at the firm where Fromm was the managing director. She got that rental, on the Upper West Side and she got encouragement from the broker to give real estate a try herself. She interviewed with Fromm, and, in late 2001, landed a broker position at that firm.
By February 16, 2002 Saez-Fromm remembers the exact date they were dating. By March 2003, they were together at a new brokerage Mark David & Company. “Claudia and I worked together in the same office,” Fromm said, “about eight or nine feet from each other. It was an interesting and challenging situation to deal with each other on a day-today basis.”
They evidently dealt with it well: They were married in June 2005, and are expecting their first child this spring.
In August, Saez-Fromm transferred from the original Mark David & Company office on Madison Avenue to the brokerage’s Soho branch. The couple that once worked less than 10 feet from each other found themselves communicating mostly by phone during the typical business day, often simply too busy, regardless of geography, to meet face-to-face. Still, it works for the couple in a business that now runs almost around the clock.
“[Working together] would either kill our relationship or make it stronger,” Fromm said, looking back. “Very fortunate for us, it made our relationship a lot stronger.”