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

"The first question is about authenticity," says Patrick Hanlon, author of Primalbranding. "Can he get the icons right? The appliances in the kitchen, the fixtures in the bath. Then, can he be sure he's appealing to a psychographic that actually exists?"

More important, can he continue to differentiate his properties in a market that is increasingly aping his approach? On New York's Upper East Side, for example, Miraval Living, an offshoot of the Miraval Resort in Tucson, Arizona, is developing a luxury property designed for folks whose dream is to live at the spa, with hot-and-cold running yogis. Downtown, club and hotel maestro André Balazs has created the William Beaver House, an NC-17--rated condo building targeting the randy-singles market (the private screening room is furnished with daybeds). On Central Park West, architect Robert A.M. Stern is putting finishing touches on an ultraluxe property that features a David Spon--designed wine cellar with an octagonal tasting room (hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb paid $45 million for the penthouse; Denzel Washington, Sting, and one of the Google guys will be neighbors). In other words, the relentless flood of newfangled amenities (Covered outdoor dog parks! Climbing walls! Murphy offices!) are cries for attention in an ADD market. "If you don't do that now," Miller says, "you can't keep up."

Real-Estate Assassin

"It takes brass balls to sell real estate," Alec Baldwin's character says in David Mamet's movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Shvo's friends--and detractors--are likely to tell you he has what it takes.

The child of two Israeli organic-chemistry professors, Shvo first came to the United States when he was 6 and his father had a short teaching gig at Yale. His most vivid memory of that period, besides the Manhattan skyline, was a seminal performance of Peter Pan on Broadway.

After a stint in the Israeli army, and a program in finance at Bar Ilan University, he set up his own brokerage firm, specializing in trading gas and oil stocks. He made a fortune, he lost a fortune ("I learned how to deal with greed and loss," he says), then woke up one day in 1995 and decided he'd outgrown his little country. He sold his stake in the business to his partner and flew to New York with $3,000.

On the ride into Manhattan from the airport, he asked his cab driver how the taxi business worked. Within three months, he had used his money to lease medallions and was running a fleet of 10 cabs and 30 drivers off a street corner in Spanish Harlem, where he was sleeping on a friend's floor. He plowed every dollar back into the business. At one point, he miscalculated and ended up not eating for three days. "I was too embarrassed to call my parents," he says.

After a brief period during which he managed a bar and got married (a relationship that has since ended in divorce), he interviewed for a job renting apartments. He was an instant success. He'd work 18 hours, showing as many as 40 low-end places a day. He loved the immediacy of the return on his sweat equity. "You could come to work, find somebody an apartment, and get paid three days later. It was totally dependent on how hard you wanted to work."

When his company was bought out by Douglas Elliman, he brought his hard-charging style to posher precincts, eventually forming a group of brokers within the company who reported to him--and gave him a hefty cut of their commissions. The Shvo Group was a Darwinian crucible: Some people thrived, others were crushed. "He treated his employees like s--t," says one. "We worked like dogs. Crazy hours. There were a lot of people crying." His peers maintained that Shvo's rabid style and tactics were anathema even in a sanguinary business. "He drove me crazy," Paul Purcell, Elliman's former president, told New York Magazine. "If you gave an inch, he wanted a yard. There's a psychology behind this, almost a psychosis."

By piling up his commissions and those of his group, however, Shvo logged sales of more than $300 million in 2003--earning him the title of "top producer" at Elliman.

"Real-estate brokerage is an 'eat what you kill' kind of business," Shvo says now, without remorse. "If you're good, you can make a lot of money. But 10% of the brokers do 90% of the deals." He has nothing but contempt for people who approach the profession at less than full throttle: "Do it right, or don't do it at all. There are enough people out there who can do a half-assed job."

That attitude earned him a reputation as "the assassin of Manhattan real estate," a ruthless shark, an unstoppable force of nature, and "master of the f--king universe." It also won him an ethics complaint. In spring 2004, a grievance was filed against him with the Real Estate Board of New York after he met with a developer who had an exclusive agreement with another broker--taboo in the industry. He was forced to take a 90-minute ethics class as penance. (The developer smoothed things over by presenting Shvo with a $30,000 A. Lange & Söhne watch for his birthday.)