When Louise Sunshine relinquished control last year of daily operations at the Sunshine Group and merged her property marketing company with the mega-brokerage Corcoran Group, many observers thought the 65-year-old real estate marketing titan was being eased into retirement.
But at least one colleague guessed otherwise. James Lansill, Sunshine’s senior managing director, quoted George Bernard Shaw when discussing the new role of his former chairwoman and CEO. The playwright said that the reasonable person adapts to the world, while the unreasonable person persists in trying to adapt the world to herself — therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable person.
The same could be said of Sunshine’s attitude toward what would normally be her retirement years — she hasn’t retired; she has adapted retirement to her own needs through the force of her personality.
“I hope that I will be able to stay on for the next five years” at the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, said Sunshine. She sold her 16-year-old company in 2002 to NRT Inc., the same company that owned the Corcoran Group, one of the city’s largest brokerages. The two companies didn’t merge until three years later.
Sunshine now serves as creative strategist for the combined marketing groups while her formal title is “chairman emeritus.” She will be 70 at the end of her five-year stint. Part of Sunshine’s vision is the creation of a marketing think tank that would explore case studies in new real estate and resort property development.
“I’m looking forward to creating a marketing think tank, which will be affiliated with a university, and which will fuse fashion, art, design and architecture, and become a lifestyle think tank,” said Sunshine, the doyenne of high-end New York real estate marketing.
Her boss, Corcoran Group CEO and president Pam Liebman, said she anticipates Sunshine staying on for at least five more years. Liebman, who was under the misimpression that Sunshine was about 62, laughed when corrected. “She’s got a lot of energy,” Liebman said. “When we first started talking a lot in 2002, she was 62, and I think I’ve aged more than she has since then.”
There’s support in the firm for a marketing think tank, said Liebman, and Sunshine knows the talent she’d invite to work for such a group. However, she declined to offer names or specify which university might be home to the think tank.
“I think so much about real estate today is about lifestyle, not about bricks and mortar,” said Sunshine, a former housewife who married her sweetheart as a psychology major right out of Brandeis University. Before her real estate career, she raised three children, and then got into political fundraising for the Democratic party in the early 1970s.
After working on Gov. Hugh L. Carey’s campaign, she was made state treasurer of the Democratic Party and Democratic National Committeewoman from New York. She was also appointed to the state’s Job Development Authority and the board of the New York State Thruway Authority.
As a top fundraiser, Sunshine functioned as liaison between the governor and his donors, one of whom was Donald Trump. Only months into the Carey administration in the mid-1970s, Trump, who had graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, convinced Sunshine to come work for him for a meager salary of $24,000.
“He was a great teacher, I was a great student, and I learned a lot about marketing from him,” Sunshine said. “He is a marketing genius. And we just got along. We just did everything together.”
Sunshine, whose grandfather owned the Barney’s department store and whose father was active in commercial real estate, connected Trump with the owners of the former Bonwit Teller site, where the developer built Trump Tower. Sunshine began marketing residential properties for the Trump Organization.
“I started his residential division and helped him to develop what we all came to know as the ‘Trump factor,'” she said.
At the Sunshine Group, which Sunshine founded in 1986 and which had done about $8 billion in sales by 2004, that catchphrase became “all square feet are not created equal,” she said. “That was my version of the Trump factor.” Sunshine decided she would focus on marketing high-end condos at her company.
“I think it’s because I have a personal preference for excellent design and architecture,” said Sunshine, who has a collection of chunky coffee-table books on architecture and design that fills up a wall in the conference room of her offices at 41 East 57th Street.
Sunshine has also pioneered use of digital reproductions of fine art to market luxury properties not yet in existence through virtual images. She also branched out into a more pragmatic application, popularizing computer-generated simulations that show not-yet-built apartments with a degree of realism that can seduce potential buyers.
That has led to some questions. The New York Times in 2004 reported discrepancies between actual views and digital views shown in marketing materials for the condominium development Windsor Park, which is a block from Central Park at 58th Street and Avenue of the Americas.
After building up her company, marketing properties in New York, Florida, Connecticut, Las Vegas and California, Sunshine decided to sell in 2002 to NRT Inc., a subsidiary of the Cendant Corporation, the nation’s largest residential real estate brokerage company.
“It was really great that somebody else recognized that the Sunshine Group had created standards for the industry and was a very successful company,” she said. “I felt I had grown the company as far as I could grow it, and it was poised to grow a lot further.”
Sunshine said that when she sold the Sunshine Group to Cendant, the company had about 10 significant developments in its portfolio. Since its merger with Corcoran last year, it has 60 to 70, she said.
“Since the companies have merged, we’re a much stronger company, because we have all the benefits of the Corcoran Group, such as their market research,” Sunshine said.
Even if there was tension when the companies merged, it seems to have dissipated. “Louise and I had been very close for years, and that’s one of the reasons she chose to sell to NRT,” Liebman asserts. “She wanted to work with me, and I wanted to work with her, so she and I are great friends as well as colleagues.”
Sunshine continues to work with the developers she has courted for years such as Izak Senbahar, for whom she is currently working on four projects, including the luxury spaces at 165 Charles Street.
“Louise is the ultimate brain trust for luxury product,” Senbahar said. “She really knows luxury and luxury living.”
Sunshine said she’s pleased that she has been able to mentor some younger women who have landed in leading roles at the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, including Kelly Mack, the group’s president.
“One of the great satisfactions that I’ve had this year is the thing that I’ve always enjoyed most — mentoring other women,” said Sunshine. Her daughter, Suzanne Sunshine Mendel, is the vice president and head of the New York Tri-State Region Nonprofit Practice Group at CB Richard Ellis.
It’s ironic, then, that all of Louise Sunshine’s mentors are men. One of them is Thomas Barrack, founder, chairman and CEO of Colony Capital LLC, who met Sunshine in the late 1980s when he sold the Plaza Hotel to Donald Trump.
“Louise’s approach to business I would summarize very simply,” Barrack said. “She does not confuse efforts with results. She does not suffer fools. She just gets it done. In the development business, when you’re dealing with strong egos, she knows how to control and subdue the massive egos of the developer rock stars.”
Even if Sunshine has been grooming her successors, she seems to have at least nine lives, or, to quote another literary great, Dylan Thomas, she appears to have determined she will not “go gentle into that good night.”