By Braden Keil

New York Post
April 7, 2004

Takeover fever is still running rampant in the real estate brokerage industry.
The latest acquisition has residential real estate giant Douglas Elliman buying Goodstein Realty, the brokerage arm of the 77-year-old family-run development company.

Neither side of the transaction would disclose the sales price.

Dottie Herman, the CEO of Elliman and partner of investor Howard Lorber, said the 145-agent Goodstein firm — with $355 million in sales from its offices in Manhattan and on the north and south shores of Long Island — will help to fill in the North Shore gap of her company’s Manhattan-to-Montauk territory.

The Goodstein brokerage operation was officially formed in 1996, after years of listing properties of clients and friends through its marketing department.

The sale is due primarily to the parent company’s upswing in development in Richmond, Va., and South Florida, with other projects pending, said Goodstein President Leonard Bayer.

The two companies should also complement each other in marketing
and development.

“After we sat down with Douglas Elliman about a month ago, we realized this was the right synergy and the right fit,” Bayer said.

“We market developments and they do development. So we think that we can work well together,” Herman said.

The sale comes as Elliman and other top real estate firms — such as Cendant, the owner of Corcoran and Sotheby’s; and Terra Holdings, the parent of Brown Harris Stevens — vie to acquire smaller firms.