Shvo Motion

Tabula Rasa Michael Shvo on the East River, Long Island City. He plans to carve out a piece of the skyline for himself. And he just might pull it off.

Related Stories

• Top O' The Market: A Consumer's Guide

True, Manhattan condos are insulated to some degree by factors unique to that market, including the record bonuses on Wall Street, the influx of foreign buyers drawn by a weak dollar, and the relatively low incidence of speculation. But despite the rampant, hopeful talk among brokers of a "soft landing," the market is still a pale imitation of its robust 2005. Traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which recently began trading futures and options contracts on housing prices in 10 U.S. markets, including New York, are predicting declines in all 10 over the next 12 months, with the composite index predicted to fall 6.8%. In November, the inventory of unsold Manhattan condos was up 70% from the previous year.

It's tempting to write off Shvo as another ego in a business saturated with them--tempting, that is, until the sheer scale of his operation sinks in.

With nearly 30,000 new units either under construction or being planned in the city over the next few years, there's "a cold breeze on sales of condos," says Ron Cohen, executive director of commercial real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. "And when you have such big negative carries, as in construction costs and debt service, marketing becomes a critical factor. Every day that those units are not sold, there are huge repercussions."

But a cool breeze is mere refreshment to Shvo. If he can continue to come up with "irreplaceable properties," he says, the buyers will be there. And if the competition to create the next buzz-worthy project in New York is heating up, the rest of the country remains a blank canvas, just waiting for him to arrive with his real-estate Shock and Awe road show.

"I could do a New York project with my eyes closed," he says, with customary humility. "But in Chicago, Houston, or Mexico, we walk in with an attitude that has never been explored. It's like having sex for the first time."

New York competition is heating up, but the rest of the country is a blank canvas, just waiting for his real-estate Shock and Awe road show.

Alan Becker, director of Becker Arquitectos, the winning bidder on a spread south of Cancún that was the former Mexican Camp David, says he was in despair, trying to find somebody with the required zeal for his high-end hotel/residential project. "I interviewed six top-of-the-line companies," he says, "and it was always very cold. Ten minutes after the introduction, they wanted to know square feet, absorption rate, etc. But for me, the first stage is to be passionate about the project. It took Michael and me seven minutes to agree on everything. We still haven't talked about square footage."

As the amenities arms race keeps expanding, the points of differentiation increasingly move into the psychographic space. You are where you live. "We've moved beyond the cachet of a neighborhood to the cachet of a building," says Klingmann. Marketers now strive to aggregate like-minded buyers under a single roof--vertical villages of simpatico souls.

"It's all about that feeling that you're not just buying an apartment, but joining this superexclusive club," says Lockhart Steele, publisher of the real-estate obsessives' Web site Curbed.com. "Where Shvo is for real is that he caught on to that before most people and was able to break away and infuse his projects--even if from a literal design standpoint they didn't deserve it--with this kind of rock-star ethos, just by being associated with them."

That's why, in Shvo's book, selling amenities is so 2005. "People want to feel they own something that has a personality and a story," he says. And that means more than just the usual appliance upgrades, or adding a health club. "What are you going to say, 'I bought in the SubZero building' or 'the granite-countertop building'?" he sniffs. "People are looking for self-definition. They're looking to belong."

The Imagineer

"I have this aversion to kitchens." Resplendent in one of his many $5,000 Brioni suits and a $170 pink silk basketweave Hermès tie, his wavy hair slicked back like Tom Hanks's in The Da Vinci Code, Shvo has stepped into high-intensity broker mode in the sales office of a 1920s neoclassical building called 20 Pine. Next to him stands a wall of cabinetry that, but for a slender faucet and discreet Miele cooktop, could be a high-end entertainment unit. No sign of a fridge. No inkling of a dishwasher. Not a telltale knob or handle or dial mars the surface of the rift-cut white oak.

Despite the camouflage, this is, indeed, a kitchen, albeit one unlikely ever to see a toaster oven, let alone a box of Annie's mac-and-cheese bunnies. "The target clients in this building are mostly singles and young couples--alpha males--not people who cook," he says, with some distaste. "So I didn't want to see any appliances. It took me six months to try and put an oven behind the cabinet because of code. But it was worth it, because a kitchen's not a very pretty thing."