Barbara Corcoran
a titan in real estate and business
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Barbara Corcoran is a titan in real estate and business, renowned worldwide for her keen foresight, pivotal decision making and unrelenting spirit in the face of great challenges. She describes herself as being someone who just keeps ‘pushing and pushing’, and that some of her best traits are that she is simply ‘dogged and determined’.
Tough Lessons Amidst
a Tough Upbringing
With roots stemming from Edgewater, New Jersey, Barbara Corcoran was born into a working-class Irish-Catholic family. The second of 10 children, she was the sibling in charge of fun, staging plays in the basement and chalk sidewalk games, and even setting up a ‘rock store’ in the side yard alongside her four brothers and five sisters. The family sometimes relied on free food deliveries from a friendly local grocer as they faced financial struggles. While her mother, Florence, was a homemaker (and someone Corcoran often credits as her biggest champion), she remembers her father working a flurry of jobs throughout her childhood.
Her determination both in life and her illustrious career was largely built from her experiences as a young girl, struggling with dyslexia (which was undiagnosed for years) throughout her academic life. She attended a local Catholic elementary school and went to a couple of different high schools, failing several courses and maintaining a D-student status.
Although she fared a little better in college and graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas College in 1971 with a degree in Education, she would always remember being called “the dumb kid” that couldn’t read or write, a lasting memory that would fuel her insecurity of being perceived as not smart enough. That said, she now credits her lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the incessant bullying from teachers and classmates for being the catalyst that cultivated a rich imagination and instilled in her a more competitive, creative spirit that served her well in business. The bullying, she would say years later, only “drove her to work harder and learn the skills she needed to succeed.” Her mother, who passed away in 2012 and from whom Corcoran inherited a formidable work ethic, was always quick to encourage her despite her troubles at school, constantly reminding her daughter of her ‘wonderful imagination’ with which she would eventually ‘learn to fill in the blanks’.
‘Filling in the blanks’ would start with the two or three jobs that Corcoran juggled in order to put herself through college. Once she graduated, she taught school for a year before going on to garner a vibrant catalog of work experiences; by the time she was 23, she had 20 different jobs under her belt and an endless supply of stories to tell, from selling hot dogs to being an orphanage housemother. She once held down a flower business job out of her car, beginning her days early in the morning to head to the flower district to choose and arrange the bouquets herself, and personally deliver them to customers every week. However, the business was short-lived because the flowers would wilt in her car, which didn’t come with air conditioning. Her favorite job during those years was waitressing, because of the commission basis she got to enjoy and because waitressing, she says, ‘is the best job to learn about people’, and effectively serves as an important crash course in sales and entrepreneurship
While her experiences as a young adult indicate that she may not instantly have known what path or interests she would pursue as a career, one thing she always recognized from a very early age was the desire to be known by the public someday. At the age of 9, she was incredibly taken by a neighbor’s fresh new cement retainer wall. She scrawled her name in large block letters with a wooden stick before being discovered. Because her family was unable to compensate the neighbors for the ‘billboard’ art, Corcoran ended up repaying them with free labor for the rest of the summer. Still, the mistake made her realize that what she really wanted was to be known, for her name to be recognized by everyone. It’s also why at age 23, she set her sights on becoming known as ‘The Queen of New York Real Estate’.
Her status as real estate industry royalty has well-known, surprisingly humble beginnings. In 1973 at age 23, while waitressing at a diner, she met the older, handsome Ramone Simone who would become her first boyfriend. Soon, he would also become her first business partner. She was working as a receptionist for the Giffuni Brothers’ real estate company in New York City, when Simone offered her a $1,000 loan to start her own real estate business, giving him an equity stake. The business was launched as The Corcoran-Simone Company, and in its early days,
Corcoran placed her first business ad in The New York Times, knowing she had to make it count. She asked her former boss for one of his listings to advertise, an apartment next to the superintendent’s which had a typical New-York style L-shaped living room with a small bedroom. She asked if she could put up a fake wall in the living room, got approved, then wrote an ad that simply had one short line: “1 BR Plus Den: 340”. 80 calls and two days later, she had a check for $340.
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“You’ll never succeed without me”
In 1978, the company had grown to sustain 14 rental agents and was a booming business when Simone announced to Corcoran that he was going to marry the company secretary. Even though he said she could take her time moving out, Corcoran packed her things within an hour and left and, a year and a half later, she decided to split the company in half after what she concedes was the hardest time of her life. One of her brothers likened the splitting up of the company to a sports team trade-off, where Corcoran built Team A and Simone got Team B. Corcoran herself said she “put the rules down…to end the business. [He] picked the first person [her secretary].
I would pick the second.” The former couple divided their receivables and what cash they had left. His parting words to her are infamous and well known to those who know Corcoran’s story: “You’ll never succeed without me”, a threat she would remember every time she started to fail at something. It would serve as a reminder to always keep going until she fought her way through. It would also become one of her golden tips to future entrepreneurs: “Feel sorry for yourself for 24 hours…then move on.”
A Pioneer Ahead of Her Time
Branching out on her own was the first step to showing her former partner he would never see her fail, but it wasn’t easy. The Corcoran Group was a brand new company with no prior reputation of its own and desperately in need of a sales team. Corcoran tackled the issue by coming up with an ingenious recruiting strategy, taking out an ad that simply said, “Sales, Real Estate. ONE EMPTY DESK. Exceptional company. No experience necessary.” When applicants called in, the receptionist had been given a script, written by Corcoran herself. When they were connected to ‘the company President’, they were informed that the position had already been filled, despite the ad being out for less than 24 hours. Corcoran would explain that the company had a long waiting list and that positions were quickly filled, but if they wanted to meet up when another position opened up they were free to leave their contact information. Corcoran was able to set up 16 appointments within a 3 hour window this way, with each candidate showing up to see 3 other people already waiting for the interview. When they were handed an application form, Corcoran further filtered the candidates by noticing which ones were prepared by bringing their own pen to use, and which ones used a pencil.
Her uncanny instincts and strategic risk taking would bolster and magnify her company and the Corcoran reputation for decades to come, with many of her experiences becoming a beacon of light to budding entrepreneurs in real estate and beyond. As her reputation grew in her new business, so did word of mouth referrals. New clients were approaching her at her apartment to ask her to rent out their units; so much so that the building owner sent her a letter threatening eviction. Bewildered, she asked him what the problem was. Mr Joseph Campagna, the owner, was under the assumption that there was prostitution being solicited in his building due to the amount of people coming in and out of her apartment. Corcoran decided to take no offense and instead asked him who was renting out his apartments. When Mr Campagna mentioned an exclusive agent who was getting guaranteed commission upon closing and managing all his properties, Corcoran asked why there were so many vacant apartments in the building still. She convinced Mr Campagna to let her have one of the apartments to rent out for herself, having walked in his office with an eviction threat and walking out with her first exclusive agreement on the building.
Focus on the bigger picture
In the 80s, foreigners were coming in and discovering the exploding landscape of Manhattan real estate, and Corcoran saw opportunity quickly. She would go to Bloomingdale’s every week and pace the luxury boutique aisles, listening to all the different languages being spoken by shoppers and asking store clerks for help in identifying which dialects they were. She would return to her office, write copy and then run ads in those languages in small newspapers that were catering to those nationalities. She would also recruit salespeople fluent in those dialects to help bolster sales in those communities.
Another example of Corcoran’s ability to focus on the bigger picture is her attempt at co-broking with other real estate firms. Co-broking is where all the brokerages would share listings with one another; an unpopular idea at the time as brokers hoarded their own listings, but it was an impediment Corcoran saw that made everyone less money. She decided nevertheless to share all her company’s listings (against her agents’ wishes) and shared them with a whole community of brokers, expecting them to reciprocate her move. They did not. However, the action made such an impact on the lives of those wanting to
buy homes, that after a year and a half of this practice, she took it to the Real Estate Board of New York, who sided with her and mandated that firms start sharing listings, (stopping short of establishing a formal MLS). Consequently, more and more women started joining real estate in leadership roles, inspired by the example that Corcoran was setting in the industry.
The Corcoran Report
One of her greatest feats in real estate came in the form of the Corcoran Report, a handbook of New York industry market trends that she started in 1981.
This biannual survey of intensive real estate statistics and analysis (with her name on it) would be widely quoted by statistic-needy media professionals, brokers and buyers, and firmly established Corcoran as the ‘Queen of New York Real Estate’. It is one of the first creative uses of content marketing by a real estate company, and earned the Corcoran Group valuable credibility as they continued to release the report every 6 months for the next 30 years.
The Sale that Made History
Barbara Corcoran continued to build her empire over three decades, knowing exactly how to make headlines and keep her brand in the press. She had a natural knack for press stunts, from staging a faux-exorcism of an apartment to a dog-training class for residents of one of her apartment buildings, to hosting her own mock funeral; no matter what it was, she made sure journalists had front seat access to it all while maintaining a keen sense of humor. It was while she was at the top of her brokerage game that she finally sold the company she founded on $1000, for a staggering $66 million to the National Realty Trust (NRT) in 2001, just a few days before the September 11 terrorist attacks. Even though the Corcoran Group was sold in the midst of expansion, Corcoran felt the time was ripe as she and her husband, retired Navy Captain Bill Higgins, had
welcomed a son via in vitro fertilization in 1994, and would soon adopt a daughter. Corcoran’s fame and fortune, however, continued to grow as she signed up to be one of the original cast of investors on the hit reality show Shark Tank, in 2009. Since then, she’s invested in over 80 businesses on the show, transforming many of her partners into millionaires. Even with the show, Corcoran brings the many life lessons she experienced to her decision making process in choosing who to partner up with. For example, she remembers her mother Florence’s resilient character and it’s why she doesn’t suffer complainers, (the only type of employee Corcoran will warn just once before firing), because ‘complainers see life through a negative lens … they don’t fix anything.’
right-side up partners
The financial hardships she and her family struggled with throughout her childhood also became an important lens through which she examines the entrepreneurs on Shark Tank, with Corcoran believing that those who come from poverty work harder because they have ‘nowhere else to go but up’ and ‘need to succeed’. In her office, all her Shark Tank partners are framed up on the wall, but while some are hung right-side up, some are upside-down, and that was intentionally done to remind Corcoran of newer lessons she learnt through becoming an investor to so many. Upside-down partners viewed her as a business guru, eventually becoming the worst kind of partner because they ‘hung on my every word’, but had an inability to take a hit and keep going, instead wallowing in self-pity.
Right-side up partners were those who, not only are thriving businesses today, but asked Corcoran many, many questions and were not afraid to veer slightly away from her advice to follow their own instincts, a trait she’s come to appreciate about her partners. Another insight she’s gleaned is about negotiations; while upside-down companies represented entrepreneurs who did anything to get the money and sell stock, ultimately blowing the money away, right-side up and successful companies would take the investment but ‘sit on it…keep it in reserve for a rainy day.’
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keen insight into what makes people tick
In real estate, even today, women dominate sales, but companies are largely owned and managed by men. Corcoran has managed to climb her way up, using the hard-earned skills and observations she garnered through a tough upbringing to deflect decades of gender bias. From memories of her father being the occasional drinker and being verbally abusive to her mother, to ex-boyfriends leaving with parting words intentionally aimed at putting her down, to all the cross-section of humanity she would encounter as a young waitress, Corcoran was always resolute that she would beat the misogyny that often popped up on her path to entrepreneurship.
It also happens to be her biggest deal-breaker and why she would opt out of investing in a company on Shark Tank, because ‘a guy founder who doesn’t make eye contact with me or the women on the set’ is a bad sign for a business partner. Her keen insight into what makes people tick is what aided her in so much of her success, something that fellow Shark Tank judge Mark Cuban echoes. “Barbara’s got the best people skills”, he says, “Her ability to recognize the good and bad in somebody and what they’ll be like as an entrepreneur, as a person…she picks up on that stuff in a minute.”
Legacy
Today, in addition to everything she already does, she is also a best-selling author, a podcast host, a speaker and a leader empowering other women entrepreneurs, like partnering up with Systane on the Real Relief for Visionary Women, which gives women an opportunity to grow their businesses with a monetary grant, reminiscent of the way she got her own big break. During the speaking gigs she gives, she often espouses the benefits of examining and learning from one’s failures, because she learnt so much about failure from real estate, an industry full of rejection.
She knows first-hand the reason why some of her salespeople would make millions of dollars worth of sales just off apartments while some of her hardest workers earn just over 60k. It was not due to lack of ambition or hard work, nor the number of contacts coming through. Instead, over the decades, she realized that the most successful people were simply ones who, like her, spent the least possible amount of time feeling sorry for themselves in the face of incredible challenges and obstacles, and found within themselves the resolution to just keep moving forward.
