Barbara Corcoran, Real Estate Mogul | The Brave Ones

i don't think for a minute i ever thought that i was brave in anything i did i think what i was instead is simply dogged and determined i think it's a waste to live a life and not make it exactly what you want it to be i think that's my great trait that i just keep pushing and pushing until i get everything exactly like i want it oh my gosh barbara corcoran rocks she doesn't think outside the box she thinks outside the box that's outside the box okay the truth were you forced to be here or you just want to get out of a little work first piece of work every big successful thing that really pushed me ahead only came if i had a tremendous belly flop she had some hardship in there in her early days as a young woman young girl that made her who she is she really built a business from scratch from absolutely nothing entrepreneurship and taking risks is not for everyone i knew when i saw a superstar in my midst and i thought this woman is a huge presence she's an achiever and against all odds she gets what she wants another round of applause for barbara corcoran i grew up in a little town in new jersey and i was one of 10 kids we were the largest family in the town it was right on the hudson river we had palisade amusement park up above us on the cliffs it was a little crazy a lot of people a lot of babies always around my mom was definitely the powerhouse in the family she ran the household and we only had two bedrooms and 10 kids that's a hard thing to do worst part about growing up for me was i was at dunstan school i was labeled the dumb the dumb kid just because i couldn't learn to read or write because she had undiagnosed dyslexia i think that was a real drive plus with all of us when we were labeled young those labels stick a little bit i spent the entire day hiding so that it wouldn't be called on because it was so painful to read out loud in front of kids who knew how to read when you couldn't read it was just too painful and her mother she'd say barbara but you have a great imagination i got home and i was the king of the block that's what got my mother to say always to me you're a genius barbara you're a genius and i think that gave barbara the confidence to be who she was and who she is now well i feel like she worked through to put herself through college i can't imagine mom and dad could afford to pay for anyone right now i think she was one of the first ones to go to college wasn't she i got student loans and had at least two or three jobs most of the way through college i was always scrapping for cash and then i remember her when she was like trying to like do her own business stuff the flower business she started so i would go to the flower district in the early hours of the morning they open early decide i would decide which flowers to grab put them in bouquets and she had customers that she delivered to every week now the problem that i remember was that she didn't have air conditioning in her car so the flowers would wilt a little bit you know that was a memorable failure early on waitressing was my favorite job of all the jobs i had uh simply because it was on a commission basis but the night that changed my life was at the fort lee diner which was the night that ramon simone walked in with an axon on each word i later learned ramona was quite a romantic she felt fell hard for him he told me that a smart girl like me would probably do very well and be happy in the big city and so he suggested why didn't you start a real estate business with your personality you'd be great at real estate sales and he gave me the thousand dollars to start he took 51 i kept 49 and we started the corcoran simone company they had both people who did rentals rental agents and a handful of sales brokers the corcoran simone company grew to 14 rental agents and then one day ramon simone came home while i was making pasta for his three children i was a surrogate mom for years and he announced that he was going to marry my secretary i'm sure that it was a very difficult situation for her obviously it would have to be because he was her partner and the other the other woman was also in the office it was like having a train hit me head-on i couldn't even function i couldn't even stand up he told me to take my time moving out i took about a minute grab my toothbrush was out of there and that became for me the toughest chapter of my life i mean that kind of stuff happens to people and they def gets devastated not barbara she got more strength out of it she be she's like a piece of bamboo she keeps growing and getting stronger and then about a year year and a half later i finally decided i'm getting rid of him and i walked in one friday morning and announced i was going to end the business and we're going to chop it in half ramon got the a group and barbara got the b group they got you know they chose almost like a sports team you know one after the other he said you know you'll never succeed without me every time she started to fail she remembered that he told her she would never make it without i can't tell you how often i lean back on those words i knew that i'd rather die than let him see me not succeed and do you know who ray simone is that was the gasoline that got her going someone insults me i'm coming at you it's just a matter of time she used to say feel sorry for yourself for 24 hours because nobody really cares about looking at a sad sack and when i collected my agents in the corner and told them we were going to be moving to a new office on monday they were excited and they said where are we going and i said it's a surprise she just does everything by her gut because it was a surprise but i worked it out that friday rented and signed a lease a few floors above ray which i kind of like that from the same landlord and i got desa over the weekend monday we were open for business and that was the corcoran group the minute i walked into corcoran i thought this is where i want to be she was omnipresent in our office she did not sit behind closed doors it was like a ball of energy like a whirlwind a life force would she make a good employee no would she make a good employer yes i got along well with barbara i was very fond of her and i thought we could work well together partly because we were very different esther kaplan was key to building my business she put my card in her purse and inside the purse she had it set up like a miniature file cabinet i think i was never quite as buttoned up as barbara likes to think i am and i knew i had met my partner i knew i had meant my opposite in life she has this foresight that's that's fantastic to watch you can actually see it in action when you're working with her the new york apartment market totally changed in the 80s what happened was the whole world discovered manhattan foreigners are lending us enough to make up for the budget deficit and buying up our real estate and companies anyone who is rich want to have a pied of tear here she has a brilliant common sense that she uses all the time and so my trick was i went to bloomingdale's every saturday morning when they opened and i walked the high price aisles with the gucci bags and all that and i listened to the languages and then asked the sales clerk what language were they speaking everything she did had a touch a barber touch and then i would run ads in those nationalities small papers because there's millions of them in the city and i would recruit a salesperson who spoke that language so i was always ahead of the curve and she envisioned herself as the queen of manhattan real estate and she made it happen and she started this from nothing into something that became an important aspect of new york real estate activity barbara corcoran's a visionary to me she empowered women at a time that it was not the thing to do there was no brokerage of any size that was headed by a woman it was a real male-dominated profession she was under my belief but she won the moment and they grew to respect her and to realize that this is a very smart woman she encouraged baldiness or maybe a different term for women assertiveness to come on please i love being the only woman in a male totally dominated industry because i would walk into any kind of a real estate meeting and it was a sea of navy blue and gray suits and i had my bright red suit on my short skirt and high heels i was noticed when i met bill higgins he was larger than life he was like wild bill higgins and we moved in together i guess in 86 and i figured i'd make an honest woman out of her and uh we got married in 88. and the very first meeting i commented that my largest competitor had gotten all the quotes in the sunday real estate section and it was bill higgins who said you know what he probably has a pr agent you could probably publish a report so it was his idea that i used the following week to publish the corcoran report and it was a revolutionary thing in the real estate industry and that really really got her going it's really her hers she's the expert in pr all it was was my 11 sales for the year divided by 11 to come out to an average sale price who has the nerve to do it on 11 sales and i positioned it as the average new york city apartment price and it caught out like that like wildfire the corker report became famous and we sent it everywhere and it brought us a lot of business and i learned that that was a very important thing for me to build a business it was my secret sauce she never worried about the risk that she was going to take to a new idea she just did it well i know one of the things she did which again was very different from the real estate firms in the in the market at the time is that she connected herself with our advertising her face was the face of the company at the time you see all her faces everywhere even in broadway right i remember seeing that in manhattan and being like blown away that you know she's on bus stops you know she did an ad where she took a picture of every agent in the company and at the time it was small enough to do this and her picture in the middle and it was just these tiny little pictures it kept corcoran in people's minds her creativity is what's created her success one of the great things i learned from my father is he was a king of fun and he had a weird sense of fun [Music] so i simply copied my dad's shenanigans and started planning a lot of fun for my agents she was always doing different and unusual things she had circus elephants at one point massage therapists shoe shine people people who did your nails at the desk hot air balloons and we were riding on the camera and horses we had dress-up parties where you had to come in costume and i dictated the costume and they ran from come in your pajamas dresses nuns crossdress dressed in 1940s whatever i would decide my party that year was going to be she's a people person very creative she would wear ridiculous costumes like coming in a girdle and a bra barbara is definitely over the top what did all the parties and fun times get for me barbara made us feel like we were a special family tremendous company loyalty barbara's big move that she made in the real estate industry was to co-broke with other firms which is where all of the brokerage firms share or share listings with one another brokers hoarded their own listings they didn't want to share and that was a problem because everyone made less money i remember when i first started we had to go to exclusives exclusive pitches and hide so that nobody would know we were getting a listing barbara came along and she said this is rubbish which is indeed was so i decided to change the industry that was a tough struggle because she met a lot of opposition with that i took all our listings against my salespeople's wishes and i shared them with a whole community of brokers they thought i was nuts my agents thought i was nuts but i thought they would yield to pressure if we're going to be kind and share everything surely they would come around the bend and share back they never did it changed our lives but it changed the lives of people who were trying to buy something and so that went on for about a year and a half and she brought that to the real estate board of new york she really was a pioneer in that and then finally the real estate board of new york mandated that people share listings and i subsequent to that experience lots of women came to join the real estate board in leadership roles she was the first and it made a huge difference she opened the door for for women to come into this business in a very major way why are banks in trouble now real estate that's really the the problem that's been uh befuddling all of the major banks famously she was running the company on her credit cards for a while in the early 90s it was 1991 and nothing was selling so we had no sales high overhead and we were going to go down no doubt at all i think people don't realize as an entrepreneur you know what barbara went through in just a battle you know just having to grind every single day barbara had an accepted agreement with a group of people who owned probably 16 buildings and barb came up with the idea of a sort of a one price sale all two bedroom apartments were priced the same whether they were on the second floor the tenth floor with views without views or one bedroom apartments the same thing i only announced it to my sales people really because i didn't have any money to advertise and i told them to bring only one customer each that wasn't enough to go around 88 apartments first come first serve it was that morning of april 17th and there was a line around the block i thought it was bedlam and we sold all of those apartments within an hour flat and i made over a million dollars in commissions she survived when many didn't survive got us through the recession i paid back all of my debt and i opened a new office another new office right in the midst of the recession which blew my competitors away they were intimidated but that's what saved my butt once we started making a profit for me it was license to kill i could think of a new idea and afford to pay for it i decided to take all of our apartments and put them on videotape so that customers no longer had to go out and look at apartments and none of my sales people ever handed out the tape it was a 77 000 mistake of thousands upon thousands of tapes that nobody wanted but all the good things happen on the heels of bad failure and as luck would have it i was approaching my next sales reading and my husband bill was playing war games for the united states navy because he was a navy captain and he talked about this new government thing called the internet i really recommend you do something about that and get involved with it i asked a few questions and i saw my safe face and i immediately went to the office and registered courtroomgroup.com and no one ever heard of dot coms then and i threw all of those old videotapes on corkergroup.com we were one of the first websites in the business in the first week bang bang i got two sales out of london sight on scene and i knew i had stepped in goals she was a leader i mean people followed what she was doing and what an advantage it was it took me probably from 18th position in the market up to four it's changed the business all over the world [Music] in my family uh the women had babies like rabbits you just assumed you could have a baby whenever you wanted and i assumed when i was ready to have children i'd have children it wasn't until i married bill higgins and was 40 that i really wanted children apparently it was important she she went through a lot to have tommy yeah it was tough it took a while so i tried the in vitro method seven tries but before the last one nothing was working and so i chose my youngest most darling sister florence and she gave me her eggs and out of those baby eggs my son tommy was finally born my mother told me that the day i was born was the happiest day of her life i thought i'd have another 10 in the next 10 years but it wasn't in the cards and then i of course adopted my daughter kate 10 years after that she felt she had a lot to give to a child that was being born into the world with either no parents or was being given away i was a late bloomer in the parenting department but the best thing i ever did if i had missed that i think i'd cry from here to my grave but that also started the unwinding of the business for me in a way because i never loved my company as much as i loved my kid ever again i think it hurt my mom as much as it hurt me when she wasn't around once i decided to sell my business i had a buyer within a week and they made me an offer of 22 million dollars and so i said i appreciate the offer and i'd take 66 million dollars i was like why 66. she says it's my lucky number not that the amount of money isn't significant today but it was hugely significant back in 0-1 i had no idea how hard it would be after i left the corcoran group it was a crazy transition and i i was very young but i do remember like wait mom's home you know like what's going on it was a hard adjustment for me i remember being in my closet in the morning not knowing what clothes to wear when i wasn't going to the office but what was great about that is i immediately knew that i had to do something else or i wasn't going to be a happy woman i'd work so hard and was always with somebody for so long i had to be a somebody again barbara was in the mix early on but it wasn't a sure thing i told all my friends i'm going to hollywood i was shocked that they had changed their mind [Music] hi you've reached me barbara thanks for calling into my podcast hotline you got a question you want answered just ask me here without the power of the corcoran group behind me i was a voice when i had the corporate behind me i was the voice vastly different let's take a short break to talk about a company i'm very fond i sat down and tried to figure out not how to reinvent myself but how to repackage myself and so i made a list of the few businesses that i thought i'd be good at one was advertising one was public relations and the other is talking on tv so she says i'm opening this business so that i'm known outside of new york but i had to go a roundabout way of getting there because no one would hire me until fox news i knew nothing about them first of all it's fox hello what what is anyone thinking um they hired me as a political consultant second of all barbara is great and smart and clever in a lot of things worldly and news news current she isn't as a rule i studied the senate the congress all the stuff i never learned in school i finally learned because i had to look half smart and i was scared to death but on the back of fox news i took myself to the today show and got hired as a real estate consultant we got today real estate expert barbara corcoran here good morning good to see you again good time for tenants right now it was like oh my gosh you know she did it like she really she really pulled this off and then of course shark tank came along the characteristics that we were looking for in a shark of course you know you have to be super charismatic and to be able to assess an entrepreneur very quickly you know and give their experience in their assessment honestly and brutally sometimes next thing i knew that i had a thick contract which i signed without reading i told all my friends i'm going to hollywood and i think she was very happy and pretty excited about it barbara was in the mix early on but it wasn't a sure thing i was shocked when the call came in that they had changed their mind you just don't say that to barbara you don't offer something and say you're in a sense imply you're not good enough but then i did what i do very very well i got back up and stood up for myself and i wrote a terrific sharp email to mark burnett who headed the studio and that tells you a lot about how barbara works when she sees something she wants she goes and gets it did she push herself yes was she pushy yes but would it have happened without that i don't think so and by the next afternoon i was invited to compete for the seat and she did amazing from the first pitch on it was just like go i need to be clear on this before i write you off as a nut job which i'm trying not to do i think it was a risk uh because she wasn't a venture capitalist you know she wasn't someone who on a daily basis invested in other companies the first five seasons of shark tank i faked it i've made you a good offer i really believe genuine offer what are you gonna do about it i always ask yourself what am i doing here i didn't know what i was doing i know real estate i know real estate sales people and so i kind of got lucky because i started picking people i just liked to me that's the riskiest approach to investing that there is and that takes a lot of guts who wants some fresh maine lobster when jim and saban stood on the set of shark tank boy could they sell we get our lobsters from shore to door in less than 24 hours she fell in love with us as people more so um than the financials i thought to myself this is a money maker this should be a franchise and so we asked her like what do you mean by franchise she goes this is a very scalable business it's worked so well in los angeles we're getting these requests to go to other cities throughout the country she goes franchise as a key barbara welcome to the family thank you and they to date are one of my most successful businesses oh it's a family show guys best thing i get out of shark tank is i get to relive the early days of building a business through many different eyes many different partners and get all that excitement all over again she wants to give back to entrepreneurs just like she receives support i think she wants to educate people that are watching the show that you don't have to be a mathematical or financial genius to be a great entrepreneur because yeah barbara admits she's not there's no question and it's not a debate she has survived a tremendous amount of adversity you've got to let a kid create the world of their own you can't make them jam into something so narrow as how well you read or write and she's done it successfully and with great grace she's really like a a good spirit whoa this looks like a toy it doesn't even look real she's got the most generous heart i'm not talking about financial generosity it's giving of herself i don't think money was ever her god it was all about helping people and she built this phenomenal business wait no no no get this leg this woman just doesn't stop she doesn't stop she's got more ideas in that pinky than most of us have in our whole bodies among 10 000 people everyone has their own challenges but she's so impressive in the way in which she decides to not let that stop her from acting if i could do it if i could make a success of my life anybody could if i was written off as a dumb kid what a mistake that was there's so many kids written off what a mistake it is anybody can make it you just have to really work your buns off and have a dream i guess right you

Channel: CNBC International TV

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Keywords: CNBC international, CNBC Life, Barbara Corcoran, The Brave Ones, The Brave Ones Barbara Corcoran, CNBC, Shark Tank, barbara corcoran interview, barbara corcoran story, barbara corcoran shark tank, barbara corcoran how to ask for a raise, shark tank barbara, shark tank barbara corcoran story, shark tank barbara corcoran, barbara corcoran shark tank deals, how i built this barbara, the brave ones full episodes, cnbc full episodes, brave ones full episodes, cnbc tv, cnbc live tv

Id: 86efUTYd_GQ

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019