While the folks behind Streeteasy.com may be most closely associated with real estate
listings and data points, they shrugged off the computer geek image last night for a
holiday party at the Mondrian Soho hotel’s Mister H bar.
Sofia Song, vice president at Streeteasy, said more than 200 of the invited brokers,
advertisers, clients and media guests planned to attend the event, at 9 Crosby Street
between Howard and Grand streets, and the press of bodies last night seemed to bear out
her tally.
Between the ruby-colored wingbacks, gilt-framed mirrors, Persian rugs and bird cages
strung from the ceiling, the space evoked a cross between a boudoir and a colonial
drawing room. Or, as Iman Bacodari, vice president and associate broker for the Jacky
Teplitzky team at Prudential Douglas Elliman, put it, “Chinatown dumpling
shop meets Spanish brothel … with a little English manor sprinkled in.”
A neon sign on a back wall, however, asserted that the space was not a brothel.
Bacodari briefly talked shop with The Real Deal, noting how tools that give buyers
and sellers access to data, like those created by the party’s host, had introduced a deep level of price sensitivity to the market. “People spot deals,”
he said. “It’s become surgical.”
Meanwhile, Ilan Bracha, founder of Keller Williams NYC, gave a succinct evaluation
of the event, compared to the rest of the holiday party gauntlet: “Same people, different
location.”
Still, compared to the small, private gathering the company held last year, the party was
a bit of a splurge. With new clients and new employees heading into 2012, “I think we
were all in a great mood,” said Michael Smith, CEO of
Streeteasy.
Later, The Real Deal caught up with Victor Martinez, an investment banker at Citibank,
who was one of at least two emissaries from the world of finance to attend their first
real estate soiree. (The other we chatted with was from Goldman Sachs.) Martinez was
planning to stop by a Prudential Douglas Elliman office holiday party in Midtown later
that night, although he was waiting for a text from a friend with the full details.
One associate broker from the Corcoran Group, pointing to a tall man with a tangle of
grey dreadlocks, said that man and his family owned half of the Lower East Side — but
he once took her on such a perilous, near fatal drive through the neighborhood that she
vowed never to get in a car with him again. (The broker did not want to be named.)
Some guests took advantage of the free photo booth, while others rummaged through an
open suitcase full of masks and other disguises.
Other attendees included Tamir Shemesh, a senior vice president at Corcoran, and John Gomes, an executive vice
president at Elliman.