When Penthouse founder Bob Guccione’s former 25-room mansion first hit the market in 2006, New York’s moneyed elite turned up their noses — and largely ignored brokers trying to sell it. It’s not easy convincing someone to shell out $50 million for a property usually mentioned in the tabloids in the same sentence as “porn magnate” and “out-raunched Hugh Hefner.”
But where others saw pasties and G-strings, Paula Del Nunzio of Brown Harris Stevens saw the upper-crust cachet of another former resident. Why focus on the owner of a porn mag, when in a previous life, the property belonged to the insurance magnate Jeremiah Milbank?
“The fact that Bob Guccione had lived there, to me, was not key to the building — in fact, it was very un-key,” Del Nunzio said. “The thought was, if we could get the attention off the Guccione aspect and onto the building itself, it would be easier to see what an extraordinary structure it was.”
After Del Nunzio took over, the Guccione mansion, a 20,000-square-foot, 25-room Beaux-Arts townhouse at 14-16 East 67th Street, suddenly became “The Milbank Mansion: A New York Monument.” In March, the mansion finally sold to hedge fund titan Philip Falcone for $49 million — not the originally listed asking price of $59 million, or even a record, but certainly in a rarefied price range.
Chalk up another monster sale for Del Nunzio, the top-grossing townhouse broker in the city.
The petite, Vassar-educated former ad exec with the clipped English and prim manner knows a thing or two about marketing homes to New York’s mega-rich. She has the bearing of somebody used to informing others of what she considers tasteful and convincing them to agree. (As the wife of Paul Balser, a founding partner of Ironwood Partners, a private equity investment fund, she can do more than just advise others on how to spend big money.)
Dressed in a tan pantsuit and white shirt with an understated but colorful scarf, Del Nunzio recently sat in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel for a rare interview — her first, she claimed — pursing her lips at personal questions and attempting repeatedly to bring the topic back to a $64 million townhouse on East 68th Street she is currently trying to sell.
“I’m not reluctant to talk about myself,” said Del Nunzio, who was also reticent about having her photo taken. “I think what’s interesting is the product.”
It’s that focus on message — and the way she wants it perceived — that has helped Del Nunzio sell or sign deals for 26 houses valued at around $500 million over the last 28 months.
She holds the record for the most expensive mansion ever sold — the $53 million Harkness Mansion at 4 East 75th Street — to investment banker J. Christopher Flowers in 2006. And she’s hoping to break it soon with that $64 million listing: a 19,300-square-foot building designed by Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert and renamed (by Del Nunzio) the Henry T. Sloane Mansion.
Among her fellow brokers, Del Nunzio is perhaps best known for a maniacal work ethic. Last fall, the Wall Street Journal placed her fourth on its nationwide list of the most prolific real estate sales professional by sales volume, behind Roger Erickson of Sotheby’s International Realty in New York (No. 3) and Ralph Oliva of Coldwell Banker in Chicago (No. 2).
Dolly Lenz of Prudential Douglas Elliman in New York was No. 1 on that list. She sees a kindred soul in Del Nunzio.
“She’s all over everything; she works like an animal,” said Lenz. “To me, she’s a great role model. People make fun of her; people are jealous. They say she sleeps in the office. You walk in in the morning, and they say she hasn’t left. But I see it as a positive.”
Ruth McCoy, Brown Harris Stevens’ executive vice president and managing director of sales for the East Side, confirms that “it’s not uncommon to find her here at 8:30 in the morning in the conference room with a client.
“She is like a ball of energy,” McCoy said. “I think I get here early, but she’s here before me and has clients lined up already.”
So what’s she doing with all that time?
Research, apparently. McCoy said Del Nunzio is “extremely thorough in her knowledge. She seems like more than an encyclopedia. She seems like she has her own little Google inside her brain, information about buildings, listings of them. She individualizes the properties.”
Fellow Brown Harris Stevens super broker Fritzi Kallop said, “She’s a great broker. She knows the townhouse market upside down.”
Being a superbroker, said Lenz, means “you can’t be caught sleeping on anything.”
“If a client said, ‘Gee, somebody just listed a similar property for 20; why is yours worth 25?’ If somebody asks that, you better have an answer; you better get inside that house; you better know whether their staircase is wide,” Lenz said. “These are about very sophisticated, brilliant deals, and the clients believe they know, and they know when you know.
“It’s an all-encompassing and all-consuming job,” she added.
Certainly, that was not the job description Del Nunzio was looking for when she first got into real estate.
After graduating from Vassar with a degree in English literature, she studied chemistry at Columbia University, then film production and finance at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. She spent her early career in advertising, making movie trailers and even at one point spinning out brief profiles of U.S. companies for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to promote entrepreneurship.
By the late 1980s, however, Del Nunzio was looking for a change — and ironically believed real estate would offer a more relaxed lifestyle.
“I was doing film production, which takes up all your life, so I wanted something that I thought would leave me more time to live,” she said. “I was wrong.”
Del Nunzio is vague about the events of her early career. She “began as any other broker begins” in 1989 to 1990, she said. “There was no big break. There were just years and years of work.”
One thing she will confirm, however, is that in real estate, she found her ideal job.
“Basically, I always wanted to do something that was a business-creative fusion,” she said, “something with an entrepreneurial component but also a creative solution — those rocky waters where art and money meet.”
Success came after “working for 18 years, by eschewing and forgoing a lot of vacations, by having a good memory, listing very carefully and, as always, working very hard. It will work for any business, the same technique,” she said. Del Nunzio’s marketing savvy and advertising chops have played a role in her recent success with high-end properties, some of her colleagues said. The key to selling a property, Del Nunzio explains, is “deciding what is unique about each one and bringing assets to the fore in how you advertise it and present it.”
“If you say limestone C.P.H. Gilbert and you love limestone, you’ll come running,” Del Nunzio said. “If I just say it’s there, you won’t know.”
With the Sloane Mansion, Del Nunzio hopes she will break the current record for the most expensive townhouse ever sold. On her Web page, the listing contains the stats off to the side, where they are easy to find: 11 wood-burning fireplaces, a roof deck, garden and limestone façade. But the text itself focuses on the man who paid for its construction 162 years ago, his family and the scandal surrounding his wife. The scandal is safely in the past, yet her narrative is crucial to selling a picture of the property that appeals to deep-pocketed clients, visualizing Gilded Age, old-money names like Vanderbilt, Rothschild and Astor.
Sloane’s father, Del Nunzio explained, founded a luxury furniture company that became an “arbiter of taste for 60 years,” supplying the Breakers, the White House and Czar Nicholas II. Sloane built his mansion after his first wife, Jessie, divorced him and married Perry Belmont, a former congressman, just hours later.
According to Del Nunzio’s listing page: “Mr. Sloane never married again, and he prevented his two daughters from seeing their mother until they were 21, unless she could prove she was ‘leading a moral life.’ He then devoted his attention to his thriving business and to planning and building a masterpiece for himself, this time selecting C.P.H. Gilbert to realize his vision.”
To bring the campaign into the present, Del Nunzio has engaged Scully & Scully, a prestigious furniture firm, to stage the main floor of the building.
It may be tough for Del Nunzio to beat her own track record, but the $500 million in sales she’s completed over the last 28 months are a challenge she hopes to top in the months to come, she said. “Right now I have a huge, beautiful inventory, so I’m hoping to break that record in the next 28 months. I have some of the best houses I have ever had. These houses are so unique and so rare, they will find buyers in any market condition.”