BUILDING FROM THE GROUND UP

REAL ESTATE ROYALTY Shlomi Reuveni remembers paying $950 per month for his first Manhattan apartment. Needless to say, the units with which he currently works as the senior managing director and executive president of Brown Harris Stevens would have been just a tad out of his price range at that time. Reuveni now deals with the high-end real estate market, where properties are geared toward a wealthy clientele, like at 15 Union Square West, where units will go for around $4 million each. Reuveni was born in Israel. In 1982, as a 15-year-old, he moved with his sister, brother and parents to New York City. The family lived in Queens, and Reuveni attended Forest Hills High School. He went on to attend Hunter College for only a year, "and then real estate pulled me in," he said. "I just didn't have the patience [for college]." The 18-year-old Reuveni felt that he needed to be in a more active setting than school, and two of his friends led him to a smaller real estate company responsible for the sales of co-ops and rentals in the city. Reuveni focused on on-site rentals the first two years of his real estate career and then moved up to working with companies that specialized in high-end real estate. His career led him to the Corcoran Group in 1995 to work as a sales agent, and it was there that he found his true interest in new development projects. He spent 12 years with Corcoran, cultivating relationships with developers in the city and guiding new projects from the ground up. In 2007, Reuveni and his team left for Brown Harris Stevens, a Manhattan-based company that traces its roots back to 1873, when Charles S. Brown opened his real estate appraisal business in Lower Manhattan. Reuveni now runs Brown Harris Stevens, a year-old division that handles the new development marketing division of Brown Harris Stevens Residential Sales. Reuveni and his team cover all aspects of new development sites for residential condos, including analysis, research, marketing and sales. "We want our homeowners to be happy, not just with price and location, but with the feeling of a home," he said. Reuveni has found his own feeling of a home on the Upper West Side, where he has lived for the past 18 years. "I've seen the neighborhood change," he said. When he first moved to the Upper West Side, Reuveni lived in the low 100s and Riverside Drive. "It was considered to be really far uptown," he remembered. Today, he lives with his wife, Liora, and their 7-year-old daughter, Maya. Despite the breadth of properties and areas he has seen during his career, he still considers the Upper West Side something special. "To me," Reuveni said, "it's one of the prettiest neighborhoods in the city."