Sarah Saltzberg with her REBNY award, and performing on Broadway in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” Lead photo courtesy of REBNY; inset photo by Joan Marcus.
If it is indeed true that “All the world’s a stage,” then the author of that maxim—poet, playwright and real estate investor (true!) William Shakespeare—would have been mightily impressed with Sarah Saltzberg. For while becoming a successful Broadway performer, writer and producer, she used those talents to also establish herself as one of New York City’s preeminent REALTORS®.
While humbly downplaying her achievements during an interview with RISMedia, the lady doth protest too much, methinks—for all that glitters in her life does seem to be gold. To be or not to be an agent, that is the question Saltzberg answered correctly long ago, choosing the affirmative. A co-owner of Bohemia Realty Group, a boutique firm serving NYC and Westchester, the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) recently named her winner of the Eileen Spinola Award for Distinguished Service for her exceptional contributions to the community.
A passionate advocate for fair housing and ethical practice, she has led critical conversations on broker rights, compensation and the implications of legislation like the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) Act, which prohibits landlords from passing broker fees onto tenants.
On the other side, Saltzberg’s stage highlights include being a creator and original cast member of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” along with acting/writing roles for a variety of successful Broadway and off-Broadway productions.
Currently involved with plays from all angles, including as an investor, she recalls youthful years trying to make her mark in the performing arts. Now 48, Saltzberg could have had no idea then that the show business skills she was learning and perfecting early on would soon have a major impact on her career having nothing to do with the theater. A bit of luck didn’t hurt either.
“I was employed as a nanny for playwright Wendy Wasserstein at the same time I was an integral part of a show downtown,” she says. “I was also waitressing. I had a friend, David Neiman, who had gone into real estate and said I should try it to make more money. I was like, ‘I’m absolutely not doing that. I’m an artist. I have to suffer for my art.’”
Saltzberg asked Wasserstein what she thought, and was encouraged to give it a go.
“David was making so much more money than I was as a waitress,” she recalls. “Wendy said I was the kind of person who goes out of their comfort zone to do something to get a project done, and that I should go be a real estate agent for a few months to make money and help get my show going, then move on with my life.”
Living in Harlem then and now, Saltzberg approached the landlord who owned her rental apartment building, as well as many others. This was back when Harlem had not undergone the gentrification it would decades later.
“I just sort of bothered him enough to give me a shot,” she says, laughing. “I think he was so exhausted by me calling him that he was like, ‘Oh, you think you can rent the apartments in your building? You have until Monday.’ When you’re an actor, you’re a hustler, and I am a real hustler. When Monday rolled around, I called him. I think he had forgotten who I was, and I was like, ‘I have applications for you.’
“There were five or six vacant units in my building at the time, and I filled them all with new tenants. Over the next six months he opened up his entire portfolio for me, which was thousands of units. There were few agents in Harlem at that time. Nobody was offering to handle rentals.”
Suddenly out of nowhere Saltzberg found herself crazy busy with a new passion, and the ability to use her performing skills to get things accomplished.
“My background is in improvisation and theater,” she relates. “When you have those tools, they translate very easily, and I was able to talk my way into situations, kind of use my emotional intelligence to get deals done. I would meet with supers and bring them cookies, or bring them beer and make sure the apartments were ready to be rented.
“I was looking at it from a tenant’s perspective, because I was a tenant. So I would say, ‘Look, I can rent this apartment but the elevator’s broken. There’s garbage in the lobby. Fix it, clean it up, and then we’ll be able to rent the apartment.’ I was really boots on the ground.
“Within a very, very short amount of time I brought in other agents, many of whom were also in the arts, living in upper Manhattan. There were more than enough rentals to go around. Two years later, the portfolio had generated enough revenue for the owner to sell it. I stayed on with the new owner. A year or so later he bought another 80 or so buildings. So we had a ton of units.”
A second Wasserstein connection
Now with dual careers, Saltzberg again credits Wendy, this time for insisting she learn the business aspects of the theater world. It didn’t hurt that Wasserstein’s brother, Bruce Wasserstein, was an investment banking wizard with an MBA from Harvard who was close with his sister.
“I flew with them on Bruce’s private plane to Europe,” says Saltzberg. “When you fly internationally on a private plane and you’re 25 years old, it really spoils you. I was like, ‘This is amazing!’ Then of course the next time you’re flying a commercial plane in coach and you’re like, ‘This sucks!’”
The Wasserstein connection would help provide the business expertise Saltzberg needed to keep moving forward in real estate until she ultimately established her own brokerage.
“It all just sort of grew from there,” she says. “It was very serendipitous. I had never had a business class. I could do lots of accents, but didn’t really understand business. And so when I was negotiating my deal for ‘Spelling Bee,’ which was the show I had been working to raise money for, I had Wendy in my ear saying I have to make good business decisions to set myself up for the future.
“And I was very fortunate that I had a mentor because every time ‘Spelling Bee’ gets done, I get a check, and have for other shows that I’ve written. The lesson I learned is that you have to control your own source material.”
Sadly, both Wendy and Bruce Wasserstein would die young, Wendy at 55 and Bruce at 61. Wendy had received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for “The Heidi Chronicles.” She also wrote “The Sisters Rosensweig” and several other plays. Over his career, Bruce Wasserstein worked on 1,000-plus mergers and acquisitions with a total value of approximately $250 billion.
Saltzberg has fond memories of both, all the way back to when she first invited Wendy to see a then workshopped off-Broadway play that would eventually become “Spelling Bee.”
“She came down to see it, then put me in touch with her friend, Bill Finn, who was a Tony Award-winning composer,” says Saltzberg. “He was like, ‘I know what the show is.’ And so he got involved.”
Finn would write the music and lyrics. Just 14 months later the play opened on Broadway in 2005.
“It happened very, very quickly,” says Saltzberg. “I made my Broadway debut, and was in the show for several years. During that time I was also building a real estate team. Even though at that point I had done what I had set out to do, I really loved it.”
Growing her business
And so she would continue, eventually co-owning Bohemia Realty Group.
“We now represent a lot of new developments in burgeoning areas like lower Westchester, Yonkers and New Rochelle,” says Saltzberg. “And that taps into our artistic and creative side because you’re branding a building. You’re thinking about who would want to live there and sort of reverse engineering to attract those people. It’s wildly exciting, and really fun.”
Saltzberg is married, with sons aged nine and seven. She delights in how they enjoy her twin careers in different ways.
“It’s funny because they like both for different reasons,” she says. “They love coming into my office. We often have dogs here, and people bring their kids. My partner has young children and our director of leasing also has two that are my kids’ ages. They’ve grown up together. They’re all very close.
“Also, living in one of the buildings we represent in Yonkers are a couple of New York Yankees players. My older son is really into baseball, so he loves that. I helped write another musical, ‘Gettin’ the Band Back Together,’ that was on Broadway when my older son was about three. He would come to Sunday matinees and be running around backstage singing. Everybody in the theater knew him. That’s an incredible experience for a child.”
Saltzberg acknowledges that the real estate industry is more challenging than ever, with rental frustration especially obvious in New York City.
“When I first got into it, it was wide open,” she says. “It felt very expansive. In New York there has been a lot of legislation and legislative changes that have made it very difficult in a lot of ways to transact. There’s a lot of politics involved, and not a lot of communication and working together. We’re in a housing crisis right now.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people in the city that need housing. And as usual, the people that end up suffering are the ones the law was written to protect. But there’s just so many negative, unintended consequences, and there’s a lot of hubris in the political world. Somebody has to have the guts to say we need to rethink this because so many of our constituents don’t have housing. Unfortunately what they do is put in things that really don’t address the root cause.”
Saltzberg and her team do their best to address the problems, trying to find apartments for as many needy people as possible. It’s part of a giving-back mindset she employs after people like David Neiman and the Wassersteins helped her way back when.
As for her single most prideful accomplishment with two hugely successful but totally divergent careers, Saltzberg knows to thine own self be true.
“There’s nothing better than being on stage if you are a performer,” she says. “Nothing will ever come close to the ‘Spelling Bee’ experience. There will be other experiences that are wonderful in other ways, but to have that success at a young age, and to have learned from it in the way that I did, was life changing.”
