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Who

A leading broker at Corcoran, Baum is one of the brokerage's top co-op saleswomen.

Backstory

Baum grew up raising Angus cattle in Missouri and attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College before earning an MBA in 1965 from Harvard Business School, where she was one of seven women to graduate in the school's first co-ed class. Following stints in the airline industry—she worked at Pan Am and Eastern Airlines—Baum joined Chemical Bank and spent 17 years there, rising to become one of the first female vice presidents at the company. She switched to real estate in the late '80s, joining Corcoran in 1991. Today she's in charge of the brokerage's exclusive properties division where she deals mainly in old-school, high-end co-ops on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park West. She's sold more than a billion dollars' worth of hoity-toity residences over the course of her career.

Of note

Baum has long list of big deals to her credit. In 2001, with her Corcoran colleague Carrie Chiang, she sold the five townhouses that comprised the Lycée Francais de New York for $50 million. In 2003, Baum sold banking widow Lily Safra's 18-room penthouse at 820 Fifth Avenue for just north of $20 million, and then sold her full-floor condo at 838 Fifth Avenue for $13.6 million the following year. In 2006, she and Brown Harris Stevens' Paula Del Nunzio represented the Duke family in the $40 million sale of the Duke-Semans mansion on Fifth Avenue to Tamir Sapir. Other clients over the years have included Harrison Ford, Nathan Lane, socialite Elizabeth Graham Lindemann (ex-wife of Adam Lindemann), and a Qatari emir. These days Baum is working with fellow Corcoran super-agent Deborah Grubman to market Gary Barnett's 995 Fifth, a conversion of the old Stanhope Hotel. It's a tough job: Sales of the apartments—which start at $10 million—have been weak so far.

In person

Baum shuttles from listing to listing in a chauffeured hunter green Rolls Royce Silver Spur, often conducting meetings and eating lunch in the backseat. The luxury auto's not-so-modest vanity plate reads "SOLD1." To match her plate, she sometimes wears a rhinestone pin bearing the word "SOLD."

Personal

Baum is married to Stephen H. Baum, an ex-Wall Streeter who now chairs Vistage International, a CEO-coaching company. She has two adult sons, Benjamin and Samuel, the latter of whom is a women's clothing buyer for Target. Baum and her husband divide their time between an apartment at 850 Park Avenue—precisely the sort of patrician co-op building she specializes in—and a home in Greenwich.

True story

Shortly after she graduated from Harvard Business School, Baum dated a young fellow alum, an up-and-comer named Michael R. Bloomberg. Several years later, Bloomberg sent her a dozen roses on her wedding day.