Gil Neary, a fixture of the downtown real estate scene and founder of gay-owned residential brokerage Bank Neary, was killed Saturday in a one-car accident in Maine. He was 67.
Neary is survived by his partner of 40 years, Scott Riedel, his brother Matthew Neary, 70, and sister-in-law Ann Neary.
Neary’s longtime friend and business partner Matthew Bank will take control of Bank Neary and “continue the work that he started,” Bank said.
The industry veteran of nearly five decades was a whirling dervish of Downtown.
“He was the kind of person who could walk into the room and in 15 minutes was friends with half the people there,” Bank said.
In Neary’s first office, he hosted extravagant parties, inviting hundreds to peer through the room’s large, loft windows at the Village’s Halloween parade passing below on Sixth Avenue.
Neary’s love of architecture, interior design and people made real estate an ideal career for him. He graduated with a psychology degree from Baruch College, where he also took classes in architecture and design, and joined Bellmarc Rentals in 1979.
His job interviewer noted that psychology and architecture didn’t really go together, to which Neary replied, “Unless you’re planning to go into real estate.”
A brief stint at Metropolitan Living was cut short by the 1987 market crash, and Neary found himself out of a job. He used the opportunity to strike out on his own, founding residential brokerage Coleman Neary with Hayden Coleman and Dan Gerstein.
“I thought, Now I’ll do it myself,” Neary told The Real Deal in a 2008 interview.
Neary’s apartment served as the firm’s headquarters for the first year, and the brokerage found its niche, catering to the Downtown gay community.
The firm sponsored floats in New York’s Gay Pride Parade, advertised in gay publications like HX Magazine and shared office space with Heritage of Pride, the nonprofit that organizes the city’s annual pride events.
The firm’s motto was “a castle for every queen,” and the company developed a business specializing in co-op and condo sales in Chelsea and Greenwich Village.
Bank said that Neary prided himself on the long-lasting relationships he built with clients. Some spanned 20 or 30 years. In June, Neary sold unit L6Be at 1 Morton Square in the West Village for a client he had worked with for decades. The deal closed for $8.5 million.
“If you have a reputation in a neighborhood, people see you and hear you and know you’re around and you’re available,” Neary told The New York Times in 2011.
His brother had another explanation. “He was good at it because he loved it,” Matthew said in an interview Thursday.
Over time, Neary’s firm expanded past the resale market, taking on new rentals at 520 West 48th Street (The Clinton) in 2002 and sponsor sales at 520 West 23rd Street (The Marais) in 2003.
Neary’s heart, however, was always in resales, and he was not afraid to bring his work home to Chelsea Gardens at 255 West 23rd Street, where lived for nearly 40 years. In 2008, he estimated he had sold 98 percent of the 160 apartments in the co-op.
At the time of his death, Neary was president of the board at Chelsea Gardens, where he oversaw the restoration of the building, including its Art Deco lobbies. In a 2008 apartment tour with TRD, he described showing the co-op as a search for buyers who saw the same beauty in the 1939 building that he did.
“Some people say, ‘Ewww, there are fire escapes’, or ‘the bricks are dirty,’” he said. “Other people come in and say, ‘Oh, wow, this is magical.’”
Over the years, Neary’s firm evolved as the original partners departed and new ones stepped in. In 1995, founding member Coleman left to pursue a career in law and the brokerage was renamed DG Neary. Gerstein left in 2017, and Bank, who had joined the firm in 2010 following the shuttering of HX magazine where he was publisher, took on a partner role.
The company received one more rebrand, to Bank Neary, and moved to its current space at 328 West 17th Street. Last year the brokerage did $43 million in sales and $4 million in annual rents.
In addition to his Chelsea unit, Neary acquired property in South Florida and Fire Island Pines, where he was also on the board of the Fire Island Pines Property Owners Association.
A year before Neary’s death he was diagnosed with tongue cancer, from which he was declared cancer free following months of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and surgery.
A memorial service is being planned for October.
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