With the zeal of a young and hungry broker, the 30-year veteran canvassed the streets of New York, visiting longtime clients and potential new tenants on a daily basis. Meanwhile, she took to the sky, flying into Europe and Asia to scour new leasing possibilities. By the third quarter, the work paid off.
“I think we’ve really had to reinvent ourselves,” said Ms. Consolo. “I know that at the beginning of this year, I took the rule book and I threw it out.”
MS. CONSOLO WAS BORN in Ohio’s historic Shaker Heights district. After her father died when she was 2, Ms. Consolo moved to the East Coast with her mother, splitting her time between homes in Westport, Conn., and Greenwich Village. She became an orphan at the age of 12, when her mother died.
“Let’s not start crying now,” said Ms. Consolo, reassuringly. “I’m O.K.”
As a student at Parsons and New York University, Ms. Consolo embarked on a career in fashion, first by founding a national modeling company called Super Girls, which she sold to Max Factor. With a degree in art history, she later created an interior design company on the West Coast that she cashed in on by selling her book of clients to an architecture firm.
A divorce lured her back to New York, where she met her first real estate boss at a party, who convinced her to try her hand at his now-defunct firm, Garrick-Aug Associates, where she eventually inked deals with Godiva, the famed Belgian chocolatier. It was the first of what would become a long career of ritzy retail transactions.
(Before either question is broached, Ms. Consolo warned, “You’re not asking two things: You’re not asking how many times I’ve been married, and you’re not asking my age.”)
The Upper East Side resident fell in with Douglas Elliman in 2005 after meeting the firm’s CEO, Dottie Herman, at an anniversary party for Rubenstein Associates, the public-relations firm. It was then and there she decided to leave behind Garrick-Aug Associates.
“When Garrick was sold, I knew that the new owner was taking it in a different direction,” recalled Ms. Consolo. “I was being wooed by several companies, but then I met Dottie, and I thought it was a wonderful match made in heaven.”
So what’s next for the retail queen? For starters, she’s hoping for a new flurry of transaction activity to start off the New Year. But beyond that, she said calmly, it’s anybody’s guess.
“Every year I keep saying to myself it’s a new year, but it’s been a good run,” Ms. Consolo said. “You can tell your readers that I’m not going anywhere.”
After a ponderous pause and characteristic self-awareness, Ms. Consolo reconsidered her answer—then added an extra layer of moxie.
“Are your readers going to like to hear that? That I’m not going anywhere?” asked Ms. Consolo, before finally answering her own question. “Who knows? I don’t. But who really cares?”
jsederstrom@observer.com
