When you have a baby, you are afraid they are going to get into your medicine cabinet or accidentally roll off the bed. You have to keep a close watch. Even when that baby grows up, as a parent you are still afraid they’re going to get hurt.
That’s the way I feel about my one-year-old daughter, Sophie, and it’s also the way I feel about The Real Deal.
Even though it’s reaching a milestone moment this month with its 100th issue, I still worry about the stray typo or flat headline that is going to jeopardize the magazine’s survival
and consign it to the dustbin for readers.
Those heightened fears stem from the very early days of the magazine, back in 2003, when it was headquartered out of founder (and publisher) Amir Korangy’s apartment. As The Real Deal‘s only other full-time employee (alongside part-time ad man Yoav Barilan, now our director of marketing operations), I knew we had only a few chances to get it right before we would lose readers’ attention, run out of money, or both.
So for me, this issue is a great celebration of the magazine’s resilience.
The backbone of The Real Deal these days is the gifted group of 25 full-time staffers, plus dozens of freelancers.
I’ve found that talent attracts talent: The more gifted people the magazine has hired over the years, the more it has been able to hire even more gifted people. It’s been the secret of our editorial success.
Those are the people who put together our pages. Then there are the people who grace our pages.
Certain figures have loomed largest on the New York real estate scene since we began publishing. Starting with “The best of 100 issues”, we look back at the most colorful characters and biggest stories we have chronicled over the course of nearly nine years.
For me, one of the standouts is developer Harry Macklowe. Talk about resilience. Macklowe, of course, made the biggest gamble in the New York real estate world at the height of the boom, buying $7 billion worth of Midtown office buildings from Sam Zell before he famously defaulted and gave it all back to the bank the next year, in 2008.
Now, following his spectacular defeat, Macklowe, who is known as a very creative deal-maker, is back with several projects in the works, including a $360 million development at 737 Park Avenue. This was all preceded by an earlier, even more severe flameout of his career in the 1980s.
Real estate is a long-term game, and most successful careers have second or third acts (usually with less extreme risk-taking than Macklowe exhibited). But some of the other colorful characters we look at — superbroker Michael Shvo, who epitomized a slick boom-time mentality, for instance — have been one-act stories. Or at least, so far.
This milestone 100th issue for the magazine also coincides with the somber 10th anniversary of 9/11.
The two events are linked in some ways : The fortunes of the magazine and the city have both been shaped in the crucible of the post-Sept. 11 world. (One of the reasons Amir said he founded the magazine was that he couldn’t find a job after 9/11.)
There have been a lot of economic highs and lows over the last decade. And the city is coming off a particularly rough month — having witnessed the nation’s sterling credit rating get downgraded, with the expected knock on Wall Street and the real estate market (see “Hurricane hangover fades but economic turmoil persists”). Not to mention the two natural disasters — a hurricane and a minor earthquake — that also exposed our vulnerability, even if they didn’t cause that much destruction.
The city has proved amazingly resilient over the past decade — which in turn impacts the real estate market.
The World Trade Center rebuilding, which is finally happening in full force, is, of course, an example of this (we take a look at the finances of the project in “Pricing out the World Trade Center”). So is the continuing ascent of Brooklyn and other new neighborhoods (see “The best of 100 issues”).
So here’s to the 100th issue, which is, incidentally, our largest issue in the past three years. And here’s to the next 100 issues. Enjoy!