Michael Shvo’s black Mercedes 500 limo is stuck in traffic, and he is not happy. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he urges the driver. “Shit, we are really late.” In this case, time really is money: Shvo, a 32-year-old nascent real-estate mogul who is habitually behind schedule, is meeting with a developer who has threatened to fine him a thousand dollars for every lost minute. Not that Shvo would have a problem paying. In 2003, he was the top-grossing broker at one of the city’s largest real-estate agencies, Douglas Elliman, netting over $300 million in sales.
Late last year, he founded the Shvo Group, which develops high-end residential properties like Bryant Park Tower on Sixth Avenue and 39th Street and the Lumiere on West 53rd Street near Ninth Avenue, and brokers apartment sales in gold-plated buildings like the Time Warner Center and Trump World Tower. Since starting his firm, Shvo and his staff have sold some 350 apartments, and the value of the new developments they have lined up, he says, exceeds a billion dollars.
The traffic is crawling, but Shvo remains as slick and polished as the marble finishes on one of his buildings: his dark hair impeccably swept back, his Brioni suit crisp, a mist of cologne enveloping him. On the seat next to him are two cell phones, which buzz and click like menacing bugs, an earpiece phone, and his omnipresent BlackBerry. “I keep it in bed at night,” he says, scanning his e-mail, which he claims can reach 1,200 a day. “I’m always available, I’m super-full-time. I’ve signed leases at one in the morning. Most real-estate brokers don’t work like I do; they’re all in the Hamptons.”
Shvo picks up the two cell phones and dials different numbers simultaneously with his thumbs. “It’s Michael,” he says into the first phone. “Let’s do it. We just have to make sure we can flip the property.”
He switches to the second phone. “Get me Charlie, please,” he says in a low voice.
Back to the first. “I hear you, I hear you,” he says. His leg jiggles. “Let’s do it. How much money do you need?”
Another switch. “Charlie, hang on.”
He finishes the conversations and calls Brooke, his secretary, for messages. “Yes, yes, I took care of that,” he says. “Next. Barry? I’ll call back. Who else? She’s a retard. Next.”
He cracks open a can of Diet Coke. Until a few years ago, he says, he guzzled 30 to 40 cans a day. Now he’s down to ten. After a quick meeting with the developer (light fixtures were decided upon, no fines were levied), the limo is racing to the site of Bryant Park Tower so that Shvo can check on its construction. Although it is 10 degrees out, Shvo doesn’t wear a coat over his suit. “Too many clothes,” he says. “I don’t feel comfortable.” Instead, he jabs up the heat in the back seat to 85 degrees.
The limo pulls up to the site, and Shvo jumps out and dons a hard hat. Bryant Park Tower’s first 35 floors will be a hotel, he explains. He’s already five steps ahead of me. The top ten floors will be “spectacular, spectacular” condos. He insists we see the view from the top.
On the 45th floor, an icy wind blasts through—the walls have yet to be built. “Look,” he says, facing the Statue of Liberty and spreading his arms wide. “This is my apartment. One penthouse will go to me.” Two large construction workers on a cigarette break are watching him.
“Hey, man, you’re not cold?” one calls to Shvo.
His burly friend smirks. “All that money,” he says, “makes his pockets hot.”
There are rules in New York real estate, and Michael Shvo is breaking all of them. To the outsider, the New York apartment-selling game might seem like a nasty, brutish blood sport, but in fact, the real-estate business is an industry of surprising comity. Partly, that’s a function of tradition; mostly, it’s a function of necessity. Unlike most every other city in the country, Manhattan doesn’t have a Multiple Listing Service through which brokers share their properties. Thus, in order to ensure equal opportunity, the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade association, requires brokers to share all listings within 72 hours of getting them, but that rule and others are fairly easy to sidestep. A broker can simply neglect to tell sellers that a buyer from another firm is interested, or let a week slide by before returning a competing broker’s request to show a property—at which point it’s gone. It’s only the decency of the people involved and their good-faith adherence to the rules that keep the system of mutually assured success from slipping into chaos. Michael Shvo’s crime, his critics say, is that he violates the brokers’ code: He’s not only brash, loud, and unapologetically ambitious, but, they claim, he cheats.
For years, the standard profile of a real-estate agent was an SUV-driving suburban matron, or, like Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe in Independence Day, a burnt-out divorcé looking for a fresh start selling split-levels in New Jersey. It was often a place where one ended up, rather than began. In New York, at least, that’s changing. Fueled by record-high housing values, a wave of speculative development, and a radically constricted supply of residential units, real estate has become not only the city’s most lucrative investment, but its ever-grander obsession.
This is a city, after all, where an Elliman agent recently parked her car in front of an open lot in Chelsea and sold five $1 million condos from the backseat by showing buyers the site through a hole in the fence. Whether the popularity of The Apprentice has anything to do with its setting in the real-estate industry, the networks aren’t taking any chances: Both ABC and NBC have real-estate series in the pipeline—the imaginatively titled Hot Properties and Hot Property, respectively. (Shvo says he was approached by one of the big-four networks to star in his own reality show, but passed to devote his time to his company.)
Brokers, meanwhile, are morphing into this decade’s Masters of the Universe. “The prices are larger than life, so why shouldn’t the brokers be larger than life?” says Lockhart Steele, the founder of the popular real-estate blog Curbed, itself a beneficiary of the overheated real-estate market. “This whole idea that brokers are the new celebrities—Shvo’s right on the forefront of that,” Steele says.
It’s undeniable that any 32-year-old multimillionaire who showed up in New York less than ten years ago with just a few thousand dollars to his name and not an ounce of professional experience, then promptly went on to eat the lunch of pretty much everyone in his field, would engender a certain amount of professional enmity. That he’s good at what he does probably doesn’t help: He’s forward-thinking (he pairs developers of his high-end buildings with well-known architects, like art-world favorite Richard Gluckman, to generate buzz), he’s almost pathologically hardworking (he’s regularly at his office past midnight—his secretaries and receptionists have day and evening shifts), he goes to extreme lengths to please clients (from getting near-impossible restaurant reservations to placing calls to help their kids get into the right school), he is a gifted salesman and born charmer (he coaxed me up to the 45th floor of Bryant Park Tower despite the fact that I have a fear of heights so debilitating I often throw up), and he’s a relentless deal-closer (one Friday, a buyer, who was in Mexico City, was wavering about signing a contract. “I said, ‘I need it signed today,’ and she was jerking us around, and I got a little pissy with that,” says Shvo. Rejecting her offer to FedEx it by Monday, he went straight to the airport, flew to Mexico City, got her signature, and headed back that evening).
Professional envy aside, Shvo seems to possess a special gift for incurring people’s wrath. “If you talk to 100 people,” says Andrew Gerringer, managing director of Douglas Elliman’s Development Marketing Group, “you’d probably hear 99 people who have nothing nice to say about him, and the other one probably just doesn’t know him.” Adds Pamela Liebman, president and CEO of the Corcoran Group, “In my twenty years in this business, I have never seen one man inspire such across-the-board loathing.”
What makes him so reviled? Even by the spiffed-up standards of the modern broker, Shvo, with his hair and his suits and his $800 Louis Vuitton shoes, is over-the-top. His appearance alone might not inspire cries of rampant egoism, but then there are comments like this: “This comes from my whole life philosophy that anything you do, you should do the best way, and that includes the way I dress,” he says, picking an invisible piece of lint off his suit. “When it came to my office, I’ve had them install my wood panels four times because the grain didn’t look right to me,” he says. “Now it’s perfect.”
Shvo owns apartments in many buildings—three in the Oxford on the Upper East Side, four in the Downtown by Philippe Starck on Broad Street, and his main residence in the Grand Millennium, on the Upper West Side, for instance—but he claims he has no idea how many apartments he owns altogether. That kind of showboating drives competitors mad. “He told the New York Times that he bought around 35 apartments,” says Liebman, “but he can’t really remember. Does anybody really believe that?”
Shvo isn’t shy about his own professional importance, either. The real-estate business, according to Shvo, badly needs his youthful perspective. “Nobody has a young dynamic,” he says. “Your average apartment buyer today isn’t in their sixties, they’re in their thirties.” Developers, he says, “want somebody who understands technology, not somebody who is just trying to understand how their e-mail works.”
But here’s what really makes competing brokers fume: Most agents play nice with others because the real-estate game is such an interdependent industry, but Shvo seizes business in the balls-out manner of a bounty hunter, boldly grabbing clients or properties that he believes are, shall we say, underrepresented. Shvo proudly tells the story of a woman who came to him for a rental until her broker could find her an apartment to buy. Shvo, of course, swooped in. “Since then, I’ve sold her and her family $35 million worth of apartments,” he says. “I know all the board rules,” he insists. “I know what you’re allowed to do, what you’re not allowed to do, and where the thin line is between them.”
Rival brokers say Shvo crosses that line. In April 2004, Corcoran filed a complaint against him to REBNY, and he left Elliman later that year under a cloud of suspicion (more on that below). Shvo dismisses the criticism as simple jealousy. “I’m young, I’m very successful, and I don’t know one successful person who isn’t controversial,” he says. “Look at Donald Trump. Or Clinton. Or Bush.”
Michael Shvo joined Douglas Elliman in 1998. “I started by doing rentals, showing 40 apartments a day,” he says. “I used to come to the office before anybody else and take all the calls from clients, because nobody else was there.” Within a year, Shvo was speaking at training seminars for new Elliman recruits as a shining example of what was possible from a person who had come to real estate with no experience and zero contacts (he had moved to New York from Israel in 1996 with one suitcase, $3,000, and no idea what he wanted to do; he managed a fleet of taxis, leasing medallions from the owners “like a kind of sublet,” until his own search for an apartment gave him the idea that real estate could be extremely lucrative). Pacing the floor and downing Diet Cokes, he would ask, “Who is doing this as a part-time job?” “Whoever raised their hand,” Shvo says, “I asked—very nicely, without being an ass—for them to leave the room, because they were wasting their time and my time.”
“He drove me crazy,” says Paul Purcell, the former president of Douglas Elliman who now runs his own consulting firm, Braddock and Purcell. “If you gave an inch, he wanted a yard. There’s a psychology behind this, almost a psychosis.” He laughs. “He was constantly in my office. You know, ‘I want more and more and more. I want to be vice-president, senior vice-president, executive vice-president. I want this split, I want that split.’ I really prided myself in never losing my temper, but he took me from zero to 90 in two seconds.”
Shvo was soon earning so much for Elliman that he created his own group within the company, managing a staff of 27. He also formed a tight bond with Dolly Lenz, Elliman’s top-selling superagent who, in more than two decades, has sold a total of more than $3 billion in real estate to boldface names including Nicole Kidman and Calvin Klein. As Shvo and Lenz partnered up (“They ran around Elliman like Bonnie and Clyde,” says one broker), amused co-workers put an expiration date on their friendship. Sure enough, it eventually imploded.
Shvo is not only brash, loud, and unapologetically ambitious, his critics say, but, they claim, he cheats.
The details of what precipitated their falling-out are murky, but “when someone gets a little bigger than Dolly, I don’t think she can handle it,” says an insider. The pair promptly put multiple locks on the doors to their adjacent offices, presumably so that neither would be privy to the other’s business. “Dolly has never been able to keep a partner in her life, and I say that on the record,” says Purcell, who had left the company by then. “I’ve known Dolly for over twenty years, and systematically, whatever friendship she has, it dissolves. People told me it was the Berlin Wall over there. They said, ‘It’s hysterical, now they’re not speaking, and if one gets one thing, the other one wants it.’ Like brother and sister. Or Cain and Abel or something.”
“It’s a sad subject for me,” says Shvo, during dinner at Daniel. In a first-strike charm offensive, he had arranged for us to meet here after I told his PR person that I come from a family of chefs. We’re sitting in Boulud’s glassed-in private dining room, the Skybox, which has a view of the bustling kitchen and costs a thousand bucks and up to reserve. Before the night is over, I will be plied with a five-course meal with corresponding wines, a personally inscribed cookbook that Shvo asked Boulud to leave for me, a tour of the underground kitchen and bakery, and an apologetic phone call from Boulud, who is in Boston (“I am so sorry that I can’t be there to cook for you and Michael,” he says).
“I’ll tell you about Dolly,” Shvo says. “Dolly was really family. We spent holidays together. And Dolly just literally lost it when I made more money than her, and we parted ways.” He is referring to his award from Elliman in 2003 for having the No. 1 group and being the top producer, with sales above $300 million. Lenz, meanwhile, was deemed the No. 1 agent, but Shvo says that he out-earned her. “I broke Elliman’s all-time record for gross commissions in one year. Obviously, if I broke the record, then that means I made more money, right?” he asks. (Lenz declined several offers to comment.)
Many industry insiders take issue with the way Shvo broke Elliman’s record, alleging that he would routinely poach clients and do customer mailings to buildings that were represented by another broker. Further, he and his staff were said to be uncooperative when it came to co-brokering, the practice of sharing listings with competing brokers (which typically results in a 50-50 split of a 6 percent commission). “It was very difficult for people to get into his properties,” says Susan Renfrew, former executive director of career development at Elliman, now managing director at Corcoran. “First of all, he didn’t return phone calls. Some agents in his group would return phone calls, but then they were never available to show. It’s against our fiduciary responsibility to our clients to not show property—the whole point is to give property broad exposure. So he wouldn’t make it very easy for brokers to get in, which basically angered the entire real-estate community and ruined his reputation.”
Shvo fervently denies that. “On projects that we represent, we co-broker everything,” he says. “I always tell developers that it’s important that we involve the brokerage community.” Still, the perception stuck, and brokers began whispering that Shvo wasn’t playing by the rules.
The rumor mill began churning faster when a complaint was filed against Shvo last spring with REBNY, saying that Shvo met with Charles Yassky, developer of a nearly completed condo at 44 Laight Street, even though a Corcoran agent, Barrie Mandel, was the luxury building’s exclusive broker. This violated the basic real-estate principle that a competing broker shouldn’t have discussions with the developer of a building that has an exclusive broker unless said broker is there. Mandel reported him to REBNY, and he was ordered to take a 90-minute ethics course.
“Charlie Yassky is a good friend,” says Shvo. “We have lunch together.” He holds up his wrist to display an A. Lange & Söhne watch. “He actually gave me this watch as a birthday present. It’s a $30,000 watch.” Shvo summons Marcus, Daniel’s genial maître d’. “Sit down, Marcus,” he says. “Marcus introduced me to Charlie a year and a half ago, here at Daniel.” “That’s right,” says Marcus. “We started chatting, and he said he had a building downtown, and would I mind taking a look at it,” says Shvo. “I did, I gave him my opinion on it, and Corcoran had a nervous breakdown. It’s not like I tried to take their business.” Shvo shrugs. “I took their ethics course. That was the whole story.” (When Shvo gave a similarly breezy explanation to the papers at the time, Lockhart Steele wrote on Curbed, “How fucking great is this guy?”) The whispers about Shvo grew louder in October, when he announced that he was leaving Douglas Elliman to open the Shvo Group. “It was time to go,” says Shvo. “There had to be a change.”
Many well-placed sources contend that Shvo didn’t leave, he was fired. Not true, says Shvo. “I’ll be happy to show you the resignation letter I wrote to Dottie [Herman, president and chief executive of Elliman],” he says, his voice rising. “Dottie was very, very upset. She cried for three days when I left.” Herman also declined several offers to comment, but Howard Lorber, principal owner and chairman of Elliman, says, “When Michael Shvo left, there was not a wet eye in the company. There were 2,500 happy people when he was gone.” Many insiders, in fact, say that Shvo begged his bosses to let him stay on, which upset one of the company’s higher-ups so much that that person went to Herman and said, “Either he goes or I do.”
Shvo claims that he was simply stymied by Elliman’s small division of new development. “I wanted to do concepts and marketing,” he says. “And Elliman’s new division is just an add-on to the residential brokerage business. It’s not really substantial.”
“That’s absurd,” counters Lorber. “We’re one of the largest new-development marketing companies in New York. Right now, we have between $2 [billion] and $3 billion of new-development projects.”
“When I beat Dolly, when I was the No. 1 broker in New York in 2003, I was like, ‘Okay, so I’ve done this, now what?’ ” says Shvo. “The REBNY thing was in April or May. I left in October. People tried to tie it in, which I understand, because there are a lot of people that don’t like me.”
Corcoran’s Liebman has her own take on the situation: “Do you really think he wanted to start his own company and give up the power of the Douglas Elliman brand?” she asks. “It was a foregone conclusion that none of the big firms would hire him. I turned him down several years ago, and my favorite takeaway from that meeting was that after I told him we simply didn’t have enough space for him and his team, he told me not to worry, as long as I gave his people phones, he could work out of a closet. This man lives in his own reality.”
Still, when Shvo left Elliman, more than a dozen of his group followed him. “It didn’t even cross my mind to think about why I shouldn’t go,” says Tali Geva, now director of business development at Shvo. “I would do anything for Michael. I’d put him in front of me—it’s a little sad. Michael is going to be the most successful person. Here, it’s being a part of something huge. It’s young, it’s energetic.” She laughs. “Michael said to me that I make too much money. I told him I’d work for free.”
What is so compelling about this guy that inspires people to leave cushy jobs and follow him? “He has a very innocent look about him,” says Shari Markoff, Shvo’s managing director. “You look at him and just want to trust him, and you think that everything’s going to be okay. When he smiles at you and says, ‘Come on, let’s go to the top of Bryant Park Tower,’ he makes you believe that it’s all going to work out. And, miraculously, it does. I mean, you went there, and you’re down, and you’re alive. Right?”
As Shvo finishes his dessert at Daniel, one of his cell phones rings. It’s midnight. “Hey, how are you?” he asks. “So some doctor wants to rent your apartment—it’s a $30,000 offer. Some rich doctor. Maybe he does liposuction, what can I tell you.” He and the client are going back and forth about the apartment, which is in the Time Warner Center, when Shvo impulsively makes an offer to purchase it himself. “I’ll buy it for you back at the price you paid for it. I’m dead serious. I’ll get you out of there. Okay, what did you pay, five and a half million? And what did you have in there, six and a half million? Okay, let’s do the deal.” He snaps his phone shut in triumph.
The whole transaction took five minutes. I accuse him of setting up that particular scene. It’s all a little too perfect: the late-night call, the near-immediate offer, the conspicuous use of the word million. “Absolutely not,” he protests, his eyes wide. “It’s a great deal.” The place is now in contract for just over $6 million.
Shvo spends his considerable fortune on three things: clothing, restaurants, and, primarily, his aforementioned properties. “They’re not something I get emotionally attached to,” he says, “they’re something that gets traded.” When he has had a trying day, he will play the grand piano in his living room at the Millennium. He goes to his apartment mostly to sleep—his housekeeper keeps it clean, and he keeps his fridge stocked via FreshDirect. Although his youth and hard-charging demeanor would suggest that he has the same hobbies of your typical high-earning young buck (golf, cigars, strip clubs, Knicks games), he’s not interested. Instead of going to Bungalow 8 or Marquee, he has season tickets to the Met and Carnegie Hall, and is a classically trained pianist. He calls his parents in Tel Aviv several times a week. “He is so good to us,” says his mother, Hannah. “Last year he visited four or five times. He just comes for the weekend and then he says, ‘Okay, one more day.’ ” Though his parents aren’t religious, he regularly goes to synagogue and doesn’t work on Saturday in observance of the Sabbath.
At the moment, Shvo is dating a twentysomething fashion designer. Those around him say that he is a serial monogamist. “I’m a very loyal person,” he says. “It’s not like I date seventeen girls at the same time. If I like somebody, I’ll go out with them the next day. If we don’t like each other, then we don’t see each other again. It’s just not logical.” One ex describes him as “different in person from the guy that you see—he’s very caring, very sweet and sensitive.” This seems like a line, but it’s not. When he isn’t doing business, Shvo can be surprisingly shy, endearingly awkward even. He has met most of his girlfriends, unsurprisingly, through work. Interested parties, however, should be warned: You cannot replace the BlackBerry. You can only join the BlackBerry. “It’s very hard to be with somebody with the lifestyle I have,” Shvo concedes. With one former girlfriend, he impulsively jumped on a plane to Vegas for the weekend, but that was a rarity. “Things change, and I don’t have much time,” he says. “If a developer needs me to see a project at ten at night, they know I’ll be there.”
One night, Shvo’s limo drops him off in the Millennium lobby at 12:45 A.M., but he isn’t in for the evening, just stopping by to check on some things before returning to the office. As I watch him gather his things, I ask him if he wouldn’t rather be at a bar somewhere, doing shots with other moguls-in-training. Isn’t he a little lonesome? He waves his hand dismissively. “It’s not like I have a group of friends that I hang out with,” he says. “I have very few people that I consider friends. Very few. If I have friends, they’re work-related, because I have very little time.” But, I press, what if you made time? He looks aghast. “I don’t know what I would do with myself if I went home at seven o’clock,” he says. “People say ‘Get a life.’ I have a life.” He walks into the lobby, tapping on his BlackBerry.
The next morning, Shvo is at his usual breakfast haunt, the Peninsula Hotel. Already it has been a good day. He has just finalized the new print ad for the Shvo Group: Against a black background, white capital letters spell out S-H-V-O. Underneath, in small caps: LET’S SHVO. “Nobody else would have the balls to do that,” he says, dumping his fourth Equal into his third cup of tea and simultaneously paying the check with his American Express Centurion card. On the street in front of his limo, a middle-aged brunette approaches. They speak briefly, and she tells him to call her.
“That was an agent from the Sunshine Group,” he crows after she leaves. “Louise Sunshine can’t believe how much business we took away from her.” (Sunshine declined to comment.) He pauses. “There’s nothing I’ve done in my life that I’m ashamed of. I have definitely not screwed anybody. There are people who will say ‘He stepped on toes’ because they lost an exclusive or a property. All the people that are jealous should just go and do it themselves. I’m not doing anything that anybody else couldn’t do. I have an average IQ and a very strong will to work, and it’s like you’re a giant among midgets.”
Most agents play nice. Shvo seizes business like a bounty hunter, boldly grabbing clients or properties.
Still, his detractors plan to keep a close watch on him. Frederick Peters, president of Warburg Realty and co-chairman of REBNY, says, “The slap on the wrist that Michael received [for the Corcoran complaint], he received because it was a first offense. But once anyone has received that slap, we will certainly be keeping our eye out to make sure that it doesn’t turn into a pattern of behavior.”
And so the debate about Shvo continues. “As much as we may dislike working with him, we have to,” says one well-known broker. “In this business, we desperately need each other. But I hate to see all this attention paid to him because he’ll only reap the benefits. It’s like paying attention to Jack the Ripper.”
“He’s a rock star,” says Yuval Greenblatt, vice-president of Douglas Elliman. “Everybody wants to get to know him.”
“I have already heard several brokers say they won’t show the listings in the buildings he represents,” says Liebman. “And ultimately, if he doesn’t change his ways, this will be what hurts him the most. In order to have long-term success in this business, you have to be able to fully service the needs of your customers. And to do that, you need the total support and trust of your fellow brokers. He’s got an uphill battle.”
“I’ve said this to his face,” says Purcell. “He walks a very fine line. It’s not a bad thing: It’s part of his talent.” He pauses. “I’m anxious to see how he can grow a business.”
“Michael needs to change his image,” says Susan Renfrew. “And he needs to work with the brokerage community, and that means sharing his properties with them, inviting them to do business with him in an encouraging and pleasant manner.”
“He’s accomplished a hell of a lot,” says Laurance Kaiser, president of Key Ventures, an old-line Upper East Side brokerage. “Tell me about somebody else who has been in business three and a half years and is doing buildings and conversions and God knows what. And hey, publicity is the best thing in town. I think people might almost be tantalized by wanting to use Michael because of the controversy.”
But what of Shvo’s supposedly unethical behavior? Won’t it turn off prospective clients? Kaiser laughs. “They couldn’t care less,” he says. “Those days are long gone.”
Shvo’s Merch
Three of the broker’s luxury buildings.
Bryant Park Tower
100 West 39th Street
Forty-five floors, the upper ten residential, wrapped in neoclassical masonry and glass, with the usual luxe perks (concierge, gym). Though Bryant Park isn’t exactly a residential mecca right now, a lot of redevelopment is lined up here, as garment factories yield to new buildings and conversions. Sales begin this summer: A one-bedroom is likely to run about $800,000, the penthouses $2.5 million.
The Lumiere
350 West 53rd Street
A Hell’s Kitchen low-rise: just seven stories, with a long street frontage studded with terraces. Everyone has access to amenities like a gym and concierge service. Penthouse buyers get their own private decks, with hot tubs. Since the building opened six weeks ago, 90 percent of the 66 units have been sold. Studios start at $500,000, and penthouses go up to $2 million.
Fultonhaus
119 Fulton Street
Seven new floors were added to the seven originals in this fourteen-story glass conversion. The older floors retain some of their prior character, with beamed ceilings and the like, whereas the new ones are strictly Bauhaus (which may explain the Teutonic name). The nineteen units, a mix of full and half floors, went on the market two weeks ago. Eleven have sold so far, for prices ranging from $600,000 to $2 million.