Barbara Corcoran

Corcoran starts the brokerage after working as a waitress and receptionist. She gets a $1,000 loan from a friend and gets her brokers license.

I started my brokerage firm in New Jersey immediately because my boyfriend had a friend who was an attorney, and as an attorney he was able to license me. So I just went and took the test. In those days, you have to appreciate 35 years ago, there were no barrier entries at all. If you could walk and talk you could pass the test. And I could do both, so I sailed through it.

Corcoran Group sells 84 cooperative apartments, at prices ranging from $48,500 for a studio to $245,500 for a three-bedroom unit. Corcoran has been hired by MacArthur Associates, which sponsored the cooperative conversion for the buildings, to market the unsold units amid a real estate downturn. She says the ‘sweepstakes atmosphere’ of the one-day sale helps create interest in the properties. Corcoran:

The goal of the owners was to sell these apartments in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of money spent on marketing or improvements to the units. I estimated that the advertisement cost alone for an auction would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $600,000 or $700,000. So we decided to try the one-day sale. It has worked.

Corcoran sells the firm, now Manhattan’s second-largest independent residential real estate company, for a price reported at close to $70 million.

Not being national was shortsighted. The local business has changed. And we couldn’t grow as aggressively as we wanted without help.

She plans to stay at the company and remain chairwoman:

I can’t imagine doing anything else

Corcoran gives the New York Times a tour of the three-bedroom apartment on 94th and Park, overlooking Central Park and the Manhattan treeline. Since buying it in 2001, she has redecorated in pale blue, cream, and yellow with white Swedish country furniture.

To me, it’s just my dream. All my life I’ve wanted a pretty house, and I never could afford one. Of course, the only thing my brokers could agree on when I bought it was that I had overpaid.

She paid $3.5 million for the 3,500 square foot apartment in July 2000.

Corcoran publishes Nextville: Amazing Places to Live the Rest of Your Life, identifying eight trends that the Baby Boomer generation is making as they begin to retire. The book encourages people to pursue their dreams, whether that means retiring in a city or college town, living green, or staying put in their home town.

What’s stopping you from taking the big step and moving to the perfect place to begin the best chapter of your life?

Corcoran buys the five-family limestone townhouse at 408 Stuyvesant Avenue near Fulton Street in the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, Bedford-Stuyvesant, at a cut-rate price from the original asking amount of $2.1 million.

Corcoran and her husband buy the ground-floor apartment in their coop building to use as personal and office space. Corcoran:

It’s the ultimate luxury to be able to separate when you want to

It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and was previously a doctor’s office. A private door opens directly onto Park, rather than going through the building’s lobby. The property was listed at $975,000 but Corcoran paid only $900,000.