I was born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn — a native New Yorker who came up the hard way, without anything handed to me. I've known this city my whole life: every neighborhood, every kind of building, every kind of person who lives in them. That's the part most brokers can't claim. It's the part that makes me good at this.

Finding the right home was never about square footage and a price point. It's about how a person actually wants to live — whether the apartment faces the sun or an air shaft, how the walk from the train feels at night, the block that's quiet versus the one with a bar under the window.

Some clients want the quiet co-op off the Park, where the doorman's been there thirty years and nobody asks your business. Some want the downtown tower with the city still going at three in the morning. I've placed both — the trick is knowing, ten minutes into a conversation, which kind of person is sitting across from me.