From left: Jennifer Zucher and Lori Zaslow

For broker Jennifer Zucher, finding clients a home isn’t enough — she also wants to find their soul mates.

That’s why Zucher, a principal at the Upper East Side boutique firm Plaza Real Estate Group, started Project Soulmate, a New York City-based matchmaking agency with her best friend, Lori Zaslow, a former fashion recruiter.

“We felt like the most important things in people’s lives were job, home and love life,” Zucher said. After years of matching homes and careers to their clients, the pair turned their efforts toward playing Cupid, launching Project Soulmate here in New York in April 2009.

Zaslow and Zucher, who met at sleep-away camp 17 years ago, have been matchmaking professionally for nearly three years — though they’ve been setting up friends for years. The New York firm, which is comprised of the two matchmakers, recruiters, and an image consultant, carefully vets, recruits and interviews prospective ladies and pairs them with their male, paying clients. (Zucher declined to disclose fees, saying that costs are discussed privately with clients.)

Nearly three years later, the firm’s success hasn’t just impressed happy, matched clients — Zucher said around 85 percent of matches go on a second date — it’s also attracted Bravo, which has set them as the stars of a new show launching next month.

“Love Brokers,” which will premiere March 5 at 10 p.m., will chronicle New York singles as they look for love with the guidance of Zucher and Zaslow.

“Bravo is all about passionate people living aspirational lives,” said Bravo Senior Vice President Shari Levine. “Lori and Jenn turned their passion for helping people find love into a successful business which makes for the perfect Bravo storyline.”

The dates are completely blind and the matchmakers plan the dates, make the reservations and get everything ready to go for the men. “We take the headache out of dating for men,” Zucher explained.

The men who seek out their services are generally “very busy men,” Zucher said, often in finance or law.

But though matchmaking takes up the majority of her day, Zucher said she’s not ready to leave the real estate world. “It’s something I can’t fully give up, even though matching people up with love is a big passion of mine.”

Zucher sells residential properties at Plaza Real Estate Group, a commercial and residential firm run by Zucher’s mother, Janet Sedaghatpour, and her husband, Ron Zucher, and focuses on the Upper East Side.

“Sometimes, after selling an apartment, we sign [the buyer] up to find their [life] partners,” she said. “Really, I can’t complain about life. I get to work with my family and best friend and find people love and of course their homes!”

Trump, who serves as executive vice president of development and acquisition of her father’s firm, said it is “a really exciting time” for the Trump Organization because it is renewing its focus on acquiring existing properties, that require renovations, on the cheap.

“Ground up construction, you’re not seeing a lot of those projects domestically,” she said, “because you can buy things at less than the cost of replacing them.”

Trump said that although the lending environment is tight for many real estate developers, her firm has the advantage of being able to borrow easily thanks to its relationships with lenders.

Finally, Trump, who classified her self has fiscally conservative and socially liberal — but not a libertarian, said that despite her hope for President Obama when he took office, she is “vehemently against most of Obama’s policies.”

Roosevelt Island

1. Founder of SI-based development firm convicted of $14M real estate Ponzi scheme [Post]
2. Because of widespread political support, NYU expansion opponents would be more effective of they pushed for compromise [Villager]
3. Manhattan office leasing falls 26 percent in January [Crain's]
4. Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin begins house hunt after spending weeks on his brother’s LES couch [Post]
5. For a century, Roosevelt Island was a penitentiary with prime views of freedom [NYT]
6. Inside the 150-year-old Jersey City building that will house Snooki and JWoww for their “Jersey Shore” spinoff [NYDN]
7. Port Authority admitted $1B worth of predictable WTC costs were simply not accounted for [Post]
8. Public hearing on Fresh Direct subsidy package for Bronx move draws huge crowd of supporters and opponents [NYDN]
9. NYU declines request to donate money, instead of land on its expanded campus, for a public school [Villager]
10. Bank officials and federal and state negotiators missed Super Bowl to finalize mortgage settlement [Bloomberg]
11. Family bakery business thrives after relocating to 46,000-square-foot Mott Haven factory [NYDN]
12. Brookfield’s profitability falls in the fourth quarter after it spun off residential arm [Bloomberg]

Thad Seely, a stadium development executive with the New York Jets

The New York Jets’ stadium development executive Thad Sheely will leave his position to start a real estate development company based in New York, Bloomberg News reported.

The Jets and the New York Giants built a new stadium,called Metlife Stadium, in East Rutherford, N.J., on Sheely’s watch, and now he’s “ready for [his] next challenge.” The new stadium opened in 2010.

Sheely’s new company will be called Gridworks Development, and will focus on projects in “transitional neighborhoods” and act as an advisor on public-private projects, Bloomberg said. [Bloomberg]

From left: the exterior and interior of the townhouse and the attached commercial unit

An investor who tried to flip an Upper East Side townhouse for double its original purchase price in 2007 is back to her old tricks.

The 7,980-square-foot standalone townhouse at 21 East 84th Street owned by investor Lily Lee Lee Wong has returned to the market after a two-year hiatus, according to data from Streeteasy.com, and it is available for $19.9 million, or $32,000 per month as a rental.

The four-story, 115-year-old townhouse at the corner of Madison Avenue, which currently has a residential tenant in place, will be available as a rental from June, said listing broker Karina Kheifetz-Sagiev of Evans Real Estate, when the tenant moves out.

“It will most likely be sold to an end user,” Kheifetz-Sagiev said, “but I don’t think we’ll find a buyer overnight.”

Wong, who purchased the 15-room townhouse for $12.1 million in June 2007 from philanthropist Maryam Ansary, relisted it for $24.5 million just a month later with Bellmarc. She chopped the price down by $4.6 million at one point and then finally threw in the towel in late 2009.

Her attempt to flip the property for double the purchase price shocked some industry pros.

“I don’t quite get what she’s doing here,” Dolly Lenz, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, told the Observer at the time. “But obviously at $25 million she’s not going to do it — in my opinion.”

Kheifetz-Sagiev said the current asking price of $19.9 million “is fair market, considering the current economic situation.”

Wong chose Evans to market the property, she said, because the Greene Street-based brokerage found her a residential tenant for the property last year. Wong was not immediately available for comment.

“We’re targeting both local and international markets to try to get this property the best price we can,” Kheifetz-Sagiev said.

The four-bedroom, six-bathroom property, which was designed by Grant’s Tomb architect John Duncan in 1889, has original stained lead glass windows, six wood-burning fireplaces and an elevator. The home also includes a separate commercial unit on the ground floor, with a separate entrance and a tenant already in place — Artbag is a leather goods store, specializing in custom made handbags and wallets. It was reported in 2009 that the store brings in $280,000 per year in rent.

Rendering showing bird’s-eye view of proposed Fifth Avenue plaza redesign (credit: OLIN)

The announcement on Tuesday that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has received $60 million from museum trustee and philanthropist David Koch to renovate the four blocks that align Fifth Avenue from 80th to 84th streets into a unique destination was a source of mixed emotions for some of us.

That the Plaza that fronts the museum will be reconceived and probably improved, at the hands of OLIN (which redid Bryant Park), is of course a good thing. And yet one ruefully observes that this strip of Fifth Avenue has been through hell in the past five or so years, in part because of the prolonged and half-hearted labors that were expended at great expense upon the very spaces, or near the very spaces, that now will be entirely reworked. A few years ago the museum’s trustees closed off the grand stairway for a year to improve its utility, if not its appearance. In the past year or so, they have similarly blocked off the pre-existent fountains to the same effect.

With that caveat, and with the provision that the work indeed be finished by the summer of 2014, as the Met’s press release claims, then the new project has much that looks promising. It would fundamentally reconceive the fountains and the tree-lined allées on either side of them to create a greater sense of coherence and ease of use. Over one hundred new trees would be planted and two elegant kiosks would be designed by Rick Mather Architects.

The present stairway, one of the most successful urbanistic achievements on the Upper East Side, or anywhere else in Manhattan, will not be part of the newly announced renovations. In a way, that is a shame. Undertaken over 40 years ago and, as good as it is, its pared-down, vaguely 1970s vocabulary does not work well with the Beaux Arts style of the rest of the Fifth Avenue façade. It too could use a fundamental revision in a classical style that accords with the work of Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead & White, who together are responsible for the present façade.

As for the fountains, they appear in the renderings to be far larger and more imposing than the present fountains, more like destinations, rather than after-thoughts, whose effect will be similar to the fountains at the Louvre. This too would be a good thing. Above all, the great achievement of the proposed renovations would be to create a sustained destination space, a mélange of park and urbanism and culture, which is really without parallel anywhere else in the city.

Renderings of Hollwich Kushner's winning design

1. Speaker Christine Quinn proposes code changes that would make landlords repsonsible for fixing underlying problems, instead of just making repairs [Crains]
2. Hollwich Kushner wins MOMA/P.S. 1‘s annual architecture contest [Curbed]
3. $128M deal to keep Fresh Direct in the five boroughs worth it? [NYDN]
4. Hamptons residents split over how to deal with illegal short-term renting [Curbed]
5. Inventory of foreclosed properties nationally shrinks [NuWire]
6. Less than a month after listing East Hampton home for $12M, former ‘Real Housewife’ Kelly Bensimon relists it at $8M [Curbed]
7. Builders increasingly including outdoor common space in home designs [WSJ]
8. Hotel Chelsea staff has told tenants repeatedly “don’t call the fire department” even when their homes fill with smoke [DNAinfo]
9. Inside Rupert Murdoch’s London home [Business Week]

Prudential Douglas Elliman Chairman Howard Lorber and President and CEO Dottie Herman

The city’s largest residential brokerage firm, Prudential Douglas Elliman, could drop “Prudential” from its name and leave the global network if it can’t hammer out a new franchise agreement to replace one that expires in about a year, Dottie Herman CEO of the residential firm, told The Real Deal.

Top executives at Prudential Douglas Elliman are scheduled to meet this month with a division of the Canadian conglomerate Brookfield Asset Management to discuss the future of its license agreement for the name Prudential, Herman CEO said. 

The residential brokerage, led by Howard Lorber, chairman, and Herman, is the largest franchisee in the Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services network. Prudential Financial sold the real estate and relocation business last December to Brookfield Residential Property Services for $110 million.

In an article about Brookfield Asset Management this month, The Real Deal reported that Prudential Douglas Elliman may reverse its decision to leave the Prudential network, now that Brookfield is the franchisor, but was waiting to hear from them.

Herman, in an interview with The Real Deal last month, said she and Lorber told Brookfield Residential Property Services executives in a brief meeting in her office at 575 Madison Avenue just after Brookfield’s purchase that the brokerage had not planned to renew the expiring franchise, because the firm was constrained geographically. She pointed to her inability to open offices in Boca Raton and Palm Beach, Fla., but sources said the same problem existed in the New York metro area.

“I sat with them for five minutes, and we said, look, we were leaving, but the only real reason was because we felt we couldn’t grow,” Herman said. “We have a strong enough name, and we don’t need the Prudential name. We basically want to see what they have to offer. If they tell us we can’t grow, we are not going to stay with them, either.”

Herman said her firm does not benefit significantly from the Prudential name, in fact, “people come to me to ask to franchise our name,” referring to the name “Douglas Elliman.”

She also said her impression from the December meeting was that Brookfield did not know exactly what it was going to do with the Prudential franchise. She had not been consulted on the acquisition, even though Herman’s brokerage is the largest in the network.

“I don’t think they really knew the direction they were going in,” she said. “I think they are trying to find out from all the people in Prudential [franchisees], what it is that they want.”

Brookfield did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Last month it said in a response to questions about the franchise agreement, “Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate is in good standing as a member of our Prudential Real Estate network. We do not comment on affiliates’ franchise agreements.”

Brookfield Residential Property Services is a division of Brookfield Asset Management, a Toronto-based firm with a wide range of real estate, energy and transportation businesses, including Manhattan-based Brookfield Office Properties, which owns office buildings including the World Financial Center.

Franchisees such as Elliman pay fees annually based on sales volume, with the percentage paid declining as revenue increases, Herman said.

From left, Newark City Council member Darrin Sharif, Council President Donald Payne, Deputy Mayor Adam Zipkin, Mayor Cory Booker, developer Ron Beit, investor Nicolas Berggruen, Gov. Chris Christie, Essex county Executive Joe Divincenzo and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein break ground at Teachers Village in downtown Newark

Manhattan-based RBH Group, and a cast of luminaries that ranged from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, broke ground today on the long-awaited Teachers Village, a $149 million retail, educational and residential development in downtown Newark.

The Richard Meier-designed complex will provide rental housing for more than 200 Newark teachers, will house three local charter schools and a local daycare and include more than 70,000 square feet of retail space for a range of businesses, including destination restaurants, medical offices, local merchants and national chain stores.

“In the end, vital cities are those that don’t close at five or six o’clock on weekdays,” Christie, the Newark-born politician and former Newark-based U.S. Attorney, told the hundreds of attendees.

The groundbreaking comes days after the city topped off the Courtyard by Marriott, Newark’s first new hotel in 40 years, part of a wave of development that will include the relocation of Panasonic’s North American headquarters to Newark, resulting in a deal to build a $190 million office tower in downtown.

“You’re really seeing Newark turn a major corner in terms of development, Newark Mayor Cory Booker told The Real Deal. “Here we are in a down economy and what you’re seeing is Newark surging forward.”

The project was financed through a complex series of public and private investments that helped fill the gap of providing enough equity and debt to get major financial institutions to back the project after more than three years of negotiations.

RBH, led by managing member Ron Beit, is leading the development of the complex, with partners billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, BRT Realty Trust, Frederick Iseman and Steel Partners.

Goldman Sachs, which is one of the backers of PS 90 in Harlem, is backing the financing along with Prudential, TD Bank, New Jersey Community Capital and the Brick City Development Corp. Scott Singer, executive vice president of Singer & Bassuk, which arranged the financing, told The Real Deal that this was one of the most complicated public-private partnerships he has ever been involved in.

Beit said in an interview that he will relocate his offices to downtown Newark in three months, praised his various development partners, noting the difficult nature of putting the deal together.

“There was plenty of opportunity to turn away and no one ever did,” Beit told attendees.

Teacher’s Village, located on a four block site at Halsey Street, just steps away from the Prudential Center arena, will include three local schools: Great Oaks, Discovery Charter School and Team Academy, serving about 800 students from kindergarten through eighth grade and will also include the Chen School, a daycare center for 150 children. At least one retail lease has been signed, for a restaurant called Booker’s Diner, named after 19th century educator and civil rights leader Booker T. Washington.

Residential monthly rents will range from $700 for a studio to $1,400 for a two-bedroom apartment, and are being pre-marketed to Newark teachers.

“This is more than just a homecoming this is a dream come true,” Meier said.