Peter Zaitzeff of Serhant: 5 Questions

In addition to being a dynamic personality on Season 2 of the popular Netflix series “Owning Manhattan,” Peter Zaitzeff, sales director for new development at SERHANT, is one of the most renowned and top-selling residential real estate brokers in New York City. 

His listings include iconic luxury buildings such as 70 Vestry Street, the Zaha Hadid building at 520 West 28th Street, and 10 Madison Square West. Zaitzeff has made a name for himself as a go-to expert for architecturally significant properties, while also building up a celebrity-filled client list that includes Martha Stewart, Jon Bon Jovi and Ben Stiller. 

Zaitzeff didn’t expect to become a wildly successful celebrity real estate broker when he took his first post-college job in finance at Merrill Lynch — or even when he pivoted into his family’s restaurant business — but thanks to a connection with a neighbor, he found his calling. 

Commercial Observer caught up with Zaitzeff in February to discuss his career, his passion for luxury residential properties, and some of the biggest challenges facing residential brokers in New York City. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: How did you end up as a residential real estate broker?

Zaitzeff: I graduated college in 2006-2007 and I always wanted to be in finance, so I got a job at Merrill Lynch, and my family was running a chain of restaurants. My brother said, “No, you can’t go into finance, you need to come and work with us.” Long story short, I ended up working in the restaurant business with my family for six years, and then I got married, and the restaurant business is notoriously hard. The margins are so small. I was also working with my family, so it was very, very tough. 

My [now ex-] wife was working in law and could support me as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do career-wise. I was about 28 years old, and we were living on Bond Street in a very not-fancy building on a very fancy block. There was this guy who lived at 40 Bond Street named Dennis Mangone, who at the time was in real estate at Douglas Elliman, and I got to know him. He was a rainmaker in new development.

I said, “Dennis, I want to get into real estate, I’d love to work for you, I’ll work for free, anything to get my foot in the door.” He said, “Alright, I’ll give you an internship.” I worked for him for three months. During that time I was working closely with Susan de Franca, who was the head of new development at Douglas Elliman, and at the end of the three months, she was like, “This guy has potential,” and she hired me. 

What was the first real estate project you worked on?

My first project was 150 Charles Street, and during that three-month internship I had learned the building through the offering plan, which is a 1,200-page document that is basically the bible of the building. It’s all of the guaranteed promises that the developer makes to the buyer, it’s all the specifics of the building. I had memorized it front to back. 

And not only did I memorize that, but I memorized all of the floor plans and new exposures, because there was no building, it was demolished at the time. It was a storage facility before it was 150 Charles. We sold out in three months at $3,300 a square foot, which was record-breaking prices for [2013].

I worked with Leonard Steinberg, Raphael De Niro, Madeline Hult Elghanayan and Darren Sukenik, all of whom are the best brokers of their generation. I basically earned a master’s degree in real estate in three months of working with them. 

Is there a deal you’ve done that you are most proud of?

Last year, I closed 150 Charles unit 9A. I’m very proud of this deal. I sold this apartment to my client when I was on the development side of things, and he bought it for $30 million in 2012-2013. Then I sold it for him for $60 million, some 15 years later, which was the largest transaction for a condo ever downtown. 

Also at the end of last year, I did a rental deal at the Benson for $288 a square foot, which was the highest ever paid for a rental property in terms of a price per square foot. I did another downtown rental for $150,000 a month.

I sold Martha Stewart’s old apartment at 165 Charles, which is the Richard Meyer building in the West Village. That was a big career sale for me. The buyer had been looking for 10 years. 

You mentioned having one client for 15 years and then another for 10. How do you develop these long-term relationships?

I pride myself on the fact that these relationships and these huge deals don’t just happen. I’m selling to New Yorkers. I’m selling to people that want to live and work in New York City, and it takes a long time to build their trust. I’m not selling to clients that are looking at New York City as a safe deposit box, who just come in and plant $50 million on 57th Street. That’s not my buyer. 

My buyer is a born and bred New Yorker and/or long term living in New York. They’re looking for family homes that they’re going to live in forever. The relationships start very organically. I would much rather be somebody’s friend than be somebody’s real estate broker. So I look at every relationship as a friendship first. I think that people take that to heart, because I’m not trying to jam business down their throat. … That enables long-term relationships. 

Let’s look at the residential market in a more broad sense. What are some of the biggest challenges facing real estate brokers in New York City?

So I think the biggest challenge, and this will continue to get even worse, is the inventory shortage that we’re up against right now. It’s going to get even worse between now and the end of 2027. 

There are 3,900 units in inventory and available currently on the market, and the pipeline for new inventory is only 1,900 units. So that puts it at about 6,000 total units. The market absorbs around 600 to 625 units per quarter. So if you do the math, by the end of 2027 there’ll basically be no inventory. And that’s because construction loans dried up right after COVID. 

There were not a lot of new builds that were in planning. And then there’s not any more land or developable buildings in New York City. So you have developers looking at office-to-residential conversions, which oftentimes don’t translate to good residential properties, because the space is so big. The floor plates on a commercial building are triple the size of any residential building.

The other thing is, you have buyers that locked in right after COVID at 2 percent rates, so they’re not going to be buying. They’re not going to be selling their property, because they’re going to have to pay a 5 percent interest rate on, most likely, a smaller home. So why would they do that?

The solution is to build more, but there is nothing in the pipeline. 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.