The powerhouse was one of New York City’s most successful real estate agents for more than three decades, building on nearly two decades as a female pioneer in business leadership before transitioning to brokering luxury deals.
Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman announced Baum’s death in an internal memo to the brokerage where Baum started her career in 1991, praising her as a character of style and substance. Baum spent more than 30 years at the company before joining Douglas Elliman last year.
“Sharon was a pioneer in every sense of the word: sharp, stylish and always a few steps ahead,” Liebman wrote.
To accompany her deals for prime properties, she wore a diamond pin on her lapel and a forest green Rolls-Royce with the license plate ‘SOLD 1’, which she temporarily retired for something more subdued after the Great Financial Crisis.
“She’s so focused on knowledge and intelligence instead of grit,” Leonard Steinberg said the Daily News in 2015. “She has substance.”
Jonathan Conlon, Baum’s longtime collaborator at Corcoran with whom she left last year for Douglas Elliman along with John Gasdaska, said part of Baum’s legacy is reinventing the profession that has long been treated as a pastime.
“She was one of the first true professionals to enter the world of New York City real estate, formalize it and treat it like a business,” he said. “She really helped make the New York City real estate market and business community see itself that way and not as this kind of social pastime.”
Born in 1940 in Jefferson City, Missouri, Baum attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and became one of eight women in the first coed graduating class from Harvard Business School in 1965.
She later joined Chemical Bank, where she worked for seventeen years and became the company’s first female vice president. She was the subject of a 1975 Wall Street Journal article about the rise of ‘dual career couples’, while she and her husband Stephen had full-time jobs. “Every minute is taken up,” she told the Wall Street Journal in 1975. “I never have time to watch TV or read a book.”
Baum made the leap into real estate in 1991, when she joined Corcoran. She quickly became the company’s top-selling agent, which she attributed to the vast network she built in the business community over nearly two decades.
“What I did was put out a big mailing with really nice engraved cards that I sent to my master list, saying I was no longer with Chemical Bank and that I was going into a whole new field – and the word got around,” Baum previously said. The real deal.
“She single-handedly led the high-end market to my company,” Corcoran co-founder Barbara Corcoran, who recruited Baum to her company before selling it in 2001, told the Daily News. “She was so powerful. She is one of the best-connected, well-wired real estate agents in Manhattan. I adore her.”
By 1996, she was already making more than $50 million a year in sales, focusing on antebellum co-ops and townhouses. She scored one of her biggest deals in 2006, when she sold the Duke-Semans mansion on Fifth Avenue for $40 million. Baum was the only agent to receive the Real Estate Board of New York’s Deal of the Year award twice and also received REBNY’s Henry Forster Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. As of 2024, she claimed over $2 billion in sales over the course of her career.
Known as the Queen of Park and Fifth Avenue, Baum evolved her business with the times as money began to flow into the city, growing her relationship with Gasdaska and Conlon into a strategic partnership in 2016.
Gasdaska recalled driving through the West Village with Baum for a pitch when she asked, “Is this Tribeca?”
“I was like, ‘You don’t come here that often,’” Gasdaska. “She started laughing and said, ‘I don’t like going under 59th Street.’”
“But she knew what she knew, and she knew what she didn’t know,” he added.
That didn’t stop Baum from finding downtown apartments for Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence, helping the former secure a $20 million penthouse in Tribeca once owned by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
When Conlon and Gasdaska left for Elliman in 2024, Baum joined as the pair began helping manage her business portfolio in her later years.
“Having her as a business partner for the past nine years has been a true honor in our careers,” said Gasdaska.
Elliman said in an internal memo, despite Baum’s short time at the company, “many of us have been blessed to have known and worked with her over the course of her long, groundbreaking career.”
“To call Sharon a legend would be an understatement,” said Elliman CEO of Brokerage for New York Richard Ferrari.
According to Elliman, Baum is survived by her husband, Stephen, their two sons, Ben and Sam, and her brother, David, and his husband, Ronald.
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