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Schneider is History.
I’ve read the press releases and the newspaper reports, and listened to people in the real estate community weigh in with opinions about the Corcoran acquisition of Allan M. Schneider Associates. But what would Allan Schneider himself think of this monumental sale? Schneider, who died in 1991, was a man of many contradictions, and his reactions would no doubt have reflected that.
Schneider had an enormous ego. Not only was he in the process of building an important real estate brokerage in the Hamptons when he died, he was wrapped up with inventing himself as the personality he wanted to be, as a kind of mahatma of the Hamptons. After a day of celebratory drinking following his purchase of an Amagansett office, he choked to death on a piece of steak.
Some of us who knew him could see Schneider’s underlying insecurities, the denial of his conventional Jewish New York background, and the appropriation of a newer, more mainstream but ill-fitting upper class mantle. While it was fairly transparent, it didn’t really matter that much. The things we liked about Schneider were his drive in aggressively expanding his business and his generous, blustery, if sometimes boozy, manner.
Given his ego and his ambitions, he’d clearly be furious that as part of the current sale the Schneider name got tossed into the dustbin of history, and all the offices immediately switched to the Corcoran name. He’s not in bad company. When I sold my business to Sotheby’s, my name wound up in that very dustbin the day after the closing. The dustbin was already crowded with names like Parke-Bernet, once the most important American auction house, and an early Sotheby’s acquisition. I was thrilled to be off the hook, but Schneider and I had different personalities.
I think he would also have been enraged about missing out on the big payoff. Schneider had a grand lifestyle, a major house, a Manhattan pied-a-terre, some good art and antiques, and a bon vivant approach to entertaining. But he never had the financial underpinnings. His assets consisted of his personal real estate and possessions, and the value of the business, but he had mortgage debt and no savings. He died without a will, and his parents, an elderly couple from Florida who did not figure strongly in his life, became his legal heirs.
Schneider lived from day to day, and never had the comfort of a large net worth, the ultimate beacon of success. He had the toys and the expensive accessories, but the appearances of his life belied the fundamentals.
The brokers who bought the business in 1991 from Schneider’s estate and who until earlier this month owned and controlled it, continued to expand, and they certainly deserve to cash out with big gains from the sale to NRT, Corcoran’s parent company.
Schneider himself probably never would have sold, but he would no doubt be proud that the business he created from virtually nothing has come this far. He would also be irate that he never had the chance to walk away with a bundle. The contradictions that defined Schneider in life continued after his death—and they are still evident at the very moment that his name has made news for the last time.