Sharon Baum, a veteran Manhattan luxury broker, has died at the age of 85.
The powerhouse broker spent more than 30 years as one of the most successful agents in New York City, building on nearly two decades as a female trailblazer in corporate leadership before moving into brokering luxury deals.
Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman announced Baum’s death in an internal memo to the brokerage where Baum began her career in 1991, lauding her as a character of style and substance. Baum was with the firm for more than three decades before joining Douglas Elliman last year.
“Sharon was a pioneer in every sense of the word: sharp, stylish and always several steps ahead,” wrote Liebman.
To accompany her deals for premier properties, she sported a diamond pin on her lapel and a forest green Rolls-Royce bearing the license plate, “SOLD 1,” that she temporarily retired following the Great Financial Crisis for something more understated.
“She’s so focused on knowledge and intelligence rather than pizzazz,” Leonard Steinberg told the Daily News in 2015. “She has substance.”
Jonathan Conlon, Baum’s longtime associate at Corcoran with whom, along with John Gasdaska, she decamped for Douglas Elliman last year, said part of Baum’s legacy is reinventing the profession that had long been treated as a pastime.
“She was one of the first true professionals who moved into the world of New York City real estate and formalized it and treated it like a business,” he said. “She really helped get the New York City real estate market and business to start seeing itself that way and not as this sort of social pastime.”
Born in 1940 in Jefferson City, Missouri, Baum attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and was one of eight women in the first co-ed graduating class of Harvard Business School in 1965.
She later joined Chemical Bank, where she spent 17 years and became the company’s first female vice president. She was the subject of a 1975 Wall Street Journal article on the rise of “dual-career couples,” as she and her husband Stephen worked full-time jobs. “Every single minute is taken up,” she told the Wall Street Journal in 1975. “I never have time to watch TV or read a book.”
Baum made the jump to real estate in 1991, when she joined Corcoran. She quickly rose as the firm’s top-selling agent, which she credited to the vast network she had built working in business for nearly two decades.
“What I did was a big mailing with very nice engraved cards that I sent to my master list, saying I was no longer at Chemical Bank, and I am going into a whole new field — and word got around,” Baum previously told The Real Deal.
“She single-handedly walked the high-end market into my business,” Corcoran co-founder Barbara Corcoran, who recruited Baum to her firm before selling it in 2001, told the Daily News. “She was that powerful. She’s one of the most well-connected, well-wired brokers in Manhattan. I adore her.”
In 1996, she was already doing over $50 million a year in sales, focusing on pre-war co-ops and townhouses. She scored one of her biggest deals in 2006, when she sold the $40 million Duke-Semans mansion on Fifth Avenue. The only agent to receive the Real Estate Board of New York’s Deal of the Year award twice, Baum was also awarded REBNY’s Henry Forster award for lifetime achievement in 2011. As of 2024, she claimed over $2 billion in sales over the course of her career.
Known as the Queen of Park and Fifth avenues, Baum evolved her business with the times as money started flowing downtown, turning her relationship with Gasdaska and Conlon into a strategic partnership in 2016.
Gasdaska recalled driving through the West Village with Baum for a pitch when she asked, “Is this Tribeca?”
“I was like, ‘You don’t come down here very often,’” Gasdaska. “She started to laugh and said, ‘I don’t like to go below 59th Street.’”
“But she knew what she knew, and she knew what she didn’t,” he added.
That didn’t stop Baum from finding downtown apartments for Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence, helping the former secure a $20 million penthouse in Tribeca that was once owned by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
When Conlon and Gasdaska decamped for Elliman in 2024, Baum joined, as the pair had started helping manage her book of business in her later years.
“Having her be a business partner over the past nine years has been a true honor in our career,” Gasdaska said.
Elliman in an internal memo said despite Baum’s short time at the firm, “many of us are blessed to have known and worked with her over the course of her long, trailblazing career.”
“To call Sharon a legend would be an understatement,” said Elliman CEO of Brokerage for New York Richard Ferrari.
Baum is survived by her husband, Stephen, their two sons, Ben and Sam, and her brother, David, and his husband, Ronald, according to Elliman.