The Name Rings a Bell
Joshua Bright for The New York Times
Raphael De Niro has sold $600 million in properties since getting his broker’s license. But he says, “No one is buying a $10 million apartment because my dad is Robert De Niro.”
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: January 28, 2011
One recent Wednesday morning at the Greenwich Hotel — the understated chic celebrity magnet that Mr. De Niro helped his father, Robert, open in 2008 — Ms. Zellweger leapt from her couch when she spotted him. She hugged him. She introduced him to her boyfriend, Bradley Cooper, and to Mr. Cooper’s parents. She ticked off prices of various apartments for sale that Mr. De Niro, a real estate broker, had e-mailed to her. Then she smiled and gushed, “You know your stuff.”
Mr. De Niro was unfailingly polite but all business. He chatted briefly and moved on with a tour of Manhattan real estate that had played a major role in his life: the SoHo loft his grandmother renovated in the late 1960s; the once-drug-infested playground near where he grew up and where he now takes his toddler son, Nicholas; the Mercer Street building where he made one of his first sales; Tribeca Grill, the restaurant his dad created in 1990, which helped transform the neighborhood.
Each downtown block, it seemed, had a story: climbing up the water tower on the roof of his father’s Hudson Street loft building; bringing his G.I. Joe figures to his grandfather’s studio on West Broadway, where he played among easels, stacks of books by Joseph Conrad and Brendan Behan, and a pair of squawking green Amazon parrots.
“It’s exactly the way it was,” Mr. De Niro said as he walked among the paintbrushes, canvases and old-school kitchen, which the family has preserved as a kind of shrine since his grandfather Robert De Niro Sr. died in 1993.
Of the restaurant, where Grandpa’s moody paintings still hang, he said: “We had a lot of family meals and birthdays here. We still do.”
Enough nostalgia. Mr. De Niro headed uptown to show off some of his newer listings. In the six years since he got his broker’s license, he has sold $600 million in properties, landing among the top 10 sellers each year at Prudential Douglas Elliman, one of the city’s largest firms. Next month, his 11-person team — which includes his wife, Claudine DeMatos, and two De Niro cousins — is expected to make the company’s top 5.
In a real estate market where infighting and lawsuits are standard tools of combat, Mr. De Niro, at 34, has emerged from the recession as the broker of choice for downtown developers and high-profile clients.
Plenty of rival brokers attribute Mr. De Niro’s success to his last name, saying many of his sales began with referrals that his father or Elliman’s top management had handed him. But connections alone cannot explain multiple eight-figure deals when similar properties sit idle for months.
Mr. De Niro, a cigarette smoker more introspective than gregarious, made many of his sales in the stomach-churning real estate days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. He refused to share the names of clients, but they include megalomaniacal financiers who spend years waffling over purchases, boldface names who bring entourages on apartment tours and temperamental celebrities (Naomi Campbell, a former companion of his father’s, was one).
Yes, he acknowledged, his father’s stardom has opened doors, and sellers and buyers alike often ask him for favors like tickets to the Tribeca Film Festival, of which Robert De Niro was a co-founder. But now, he said, he is largely operating in a stratosphere where people are unmoved by fame.
“People can say whatever they want, but at the end of the day, no one is buying a $10 million apartment because my dad is Robert De Niro,” he said. “Many of them have more money than my dad.”
His dad, for what it’s worth, says he always tries to help his son. “I put him in touch with people,” Robert De Niro said. “Sometimes they don’t even call him back.”
Several early skeptics who dismissed Raphael De Niro’s credentials have become fans. Developers including Steve Witkoff, who converted the Cipriani building at 55 Wall Street, and Richard Born, who built the Richard Meier towers on Manhattan’s West Side, count on him for his habits of arriving five minutes early to appointments, returning their calls faster than anyone else and playing down his pedigree.
“Anybody can be out there selling a home when times are good,” said Gerard Longo, another major developer, for whom Mr. De Niro has sold at least $80 million in condominiums over the past two years. “He has clearly become a go-to guy in tough times.”
THE De Niros never had a portfolio to rival the Trumps, or the blended fortunes of the Tishmans and the Speyers, but real estate runs deep in De Niro blood. The family, Raphael De Niro said, talked about real estate as “an art, like finding jewels where people may not have found them.”
Driving through the still-sleepy downtown streets that Wednesday morning, Mr. De Niro talked about how his father’s parents were involved in the conversion of SoHo from a manufacturing district into an artists’ haven decades ago. His grandmother Virginia Admiral, who lived and taught art classes in the loft she renovated at Spring and Lafayette Streets, he recalled, “would always say that all great fortunes were built on real estate.” His great-uncle Jack DeNiro, often called by the family “Jack of All Trades,” worked in commercial and residential real estate here and in Florida.
Raphael’s mother, the actress Diahnne Abbott, renovated the West Village town house the family bought in the 1970s, removing ugly metal cabinets and painting over lime-green walls. Robert De Niro had transformed a raw two-story space at the top of 110 Hudson Street, and he was buying up a series of buildings in TriBeCa that he converted to restaurants, offices and, eventually, the hotel.
Raphael was 10 in 1986 when he moved to Manhattan — to that ivy-covered town house — from what he remembers as the idyllic streets of Brentwood, Calif. When he talks about this, Mr. De Niro’s face tightens. He describes moving back to New York City, commuting on the subway uptown to the Bank Street Grammar School, and being “thrown into the fire.” He hesitates before describing how he remembered New York City in the 1980s.
“It was dirty,” he said. “It was loud. There was a lot of drug use. There were a lot of murders.”
His parents, and his paternal grandparents, were divorced, but he had a cocoon of relatives whose homes formed “a huge triangle.” He lived on one corner of the triangle with his mother and sister, Drena De Niro, in the town house near the James J. Walker Park. He headed to SoHo to run errands for his grandmother while she was teaching, or to play at his grandfather’s studio, filled with art and poetry. The third point of the triangle was his father’s growing TriBeCa empire: Raphael still remembers conversations about how the bar for Tribeca Grill should look, and about the design of offices for film companies at 375 Greenwich Street.
(He and Ms. DeMatos, whom he met through a nightclub owner in 2004 and married in the Bahamas in 2008, live a few blocks up Greenwich, in a 2,500-square-foot apartment they bought for $2.9 million in 2009; they are expecting their second child in March.)
The De Niros were always wealthy, but Raphael always worked. From age 10, he helped set up tables at street fairs. As a teenager, he folded and unfolded rugs at a store on Bleecker Street. He briefly was a doorman at a building in the East 70s, until residents found out his father’s identity.
There also were somewhat more glamorous jobs, though Mr. De Niro said that “seeing it from my perspective as a kid didn’t make it that glamorous.” He glued clamshells onto a set for the 1993 movie “A Bronx Tale,” which his father directed. He was a production assistant on “Witness to the Mob,” a 1998 television movie about Salvatore (“Sammy the Bull”) Gravano, which his father produced. He appeared in films starring his father, like “Awakenings” and “Raging Bull.”
Chuck Low, an actor, a downtown developer and a friend of Robert De Niro’s, said he thought Raphael could succeed as a professional actor, but knew that he was not interested. In 1995, Mr. Low took him, instead, to a Wall Street trading floor; Mr. De Niro shakes his head at the recollection.
“There was something about it I didn’t like,” he said. “I come from a world of artists and hippies and liberals.”
When he was younger, he was tormented by the New York tabloids.
In 1991, when he was 15, newspapers reported his arrest for spraying graffiti on an N train in the Canal Street station. Asked about the incident, Mr. De Niro said his juvenile record was sealed and should never have been published, adding, “I was totally a victim of my circumstances.”
The New York Post reported in 1998 that he got into a fistfight outside the nightclub Veruka, and four years later that he got angry at a friend for spending too much time in the bathroom at Wye Bar. “I was never arrested; I was never convicted of anything,” he said of these episodes. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Through what Mr. Low called Raphael’s “growing pains,” the young man started thinking more seriously about real estate (he had taken courses on the subject at New York University before dropping out). When Mr. De Niro talked about properties, Mr. Low recalled, he “asked the right questions.”
IN 2003, Mr. De Niro started helping his father with plans for the Greenwich Hotel. Mr. Born, a partner on the project, said Raphael back then seemed to be “a little bit of a wild kid” and he at first thought of him as “our partner’s son who initially wanted to sit in on meetings.”
Then the younger De Niro started asking questions. Why would the hotel ask movie stars paying $500 a night to pay for incidentals like minibar snacks? Why not provide a professional gym rather than a typical hotel treadmill and weight stand, given that many guests had to stay in shape as part of their profession?
“He clearly knows a lot of celebrities and understands their lifestyle,” said Mr. Born, adding that he started finding the son’s input “materially beneficial.”
Mr. De Niro began thinking about becoming a broker. In 2004, he met Gary Cannatta, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, through a friend over drinks. Mr. Cannatta encouraged Mr. De Niro to get his broker’s license and hired him later that year.
His first exclusive listing was 303 Mercer Street, a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment owned by the model Carmen Kass, the girlfriend of a good friend. Mr. De Niro sold it for $1.65 million, which he said was less than the $1.8 million asking price but more than what Ms. Kass had paid, which was about $900,000. Also in 2005, he helped the magician David Blaine find a pied-à-terre in Chinatown for $1.675 million, which Mr. Blaine said in an interview was “exactly what I needed.”
On his first anniversary at Prudential Douglas Elliman, Dottie Herman, the chief executive, wrote him a personal note: “I couldn’t be prouder to have someone like you in our company.”
Mr. De Niro was gracious but cautious. He initially turned down Ms. Herman’s request to appear in Avenue magazine, and he had passed up the chance to represent his father on a 2004 deal.
Developers started seeking him out. Mr. Born, who had met Mr. De Niro while working on the hotel, asked him in May 2008 to find a buyer for a 12-room unfinished duplex penthouse at 166 Perry Street. The sale closed last March for $14.8 million (far from the asking price of $24 million for the completed apartment, but a rare luxury sale at the time). “He’s the guy who pulls someone out of a hat,” Mr. Born said.
Indeed, what people in the industry say is most impressive about Mr. De Niro is how his career thrived as the market tanked with the economy in 2007 and 2008.
Mr. Longo, who converted the Pearline Soap Factory in TriBeCa into condominiums, said he was hesitant, at first, to work with Mr. De Niro. He could not imagine how anyone, never mind a relative neophyte, could sell eight lavish 3,000-square-foot spaces in the stagnant climate of early 2008.
By late 2009, Mr. De Niro had sold them all, mainly to finance executives. The prices were discounted 15 percent to 35 percent from the original asking price, according toStreetEasy.com. Justin Timberlake bought one of the apartments.
So when Mr. Longo finished the nearby Fairchild apartment building at 55 Vestry Street in April 2009, he enlisted Mr. De Niro to sell its 21 apartments, most priced from $2.5 million to $5 million. Mr. De Niro has sold 18. The average discount has been 10.2 percent, according to StreetEasy.
Mr. Longo said he most admired Mr. De Niro’s emphasis on making the buildings “a part of the fabric of the community.” He had Mr. Longo rent a booth at the Tribeca Film Festival to advertise the project and donate money to Tribeca Partners, which cleans up neighborhood streets. He also supplied buyers with information about local day care centers. “No one was moving property, and he clearly was,” Mr. Longo said.
NOW, Mr. De Niro is moving uptown, working stretches of Midtown, the Upper East and Upper West Sides and the “gold coast” apartments ringing Central Park. While driving north, he explained that “$10-million-plus buyers want to be uptown.”
At the Time Warner Center, Mr. De Niro has a listing for a 4,800-square-foot apartment on the 76th floor with five bathrooms (asking price: $38 million). He was also selling an apartment two floors below — that has been taken off the market — with 3,000 square feet, three bathrooms and a view that is “almost like being in an airplane” (asking price: $18.5 million).
Standing in the silent halls of the sprawling 74th-floor space, Mr. De Niro pointed out the reservoir in Central Park and the bridges on the horizon that looked like Tinkertoy constructs; and, to the north, the seven-bedroom penthouse at the Park Laurel that he sold a year ago for $24 million (it was listed for $28 million).
These are never easy sells; with some high-end clients, he said, “you have to swallow your pride.”
The son does not much resemble his father, but sometimes, when he is talking, or not, De Niro expressions familiar from the big screen appear in his face. Raphael said the two men talk nearly every day and “have traveled the world extensively together” — they are clearly very close.
The elder Mr. De Niro said he did not push his son toward or away from real estate. “I was very careful not to say anything to influence him,” he said. “As a parent, the most important thing is that he’s happy with what he’s doing.”
The younger Mr. De Niro can never be sure, of course, how much sellers — or buyers — care about his name. But these days, when he appears in the tabloids, it is almost always about real estate.
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