Photo: Patrick McMullan

Braden Keil, the Post's longtime real-estate columnist, passed away last night after a battle with skin cancer, which he wrote movingly about for the paper. He was 53 years old and leaves behind a wife, Jennifer Gould Keil, who helped him write his last column, and three children. "He was able to write about real estate in a way that made it exciting for everybody, whether you could afford the real estate he was writing about or not," writer Steven Gaines, the author of The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan, told the Real Deal. "There was nobody in the business like him. He's irreplaceable."