The Dealmaker; Iris Kalt Says She Won't Be Happy Until She's Sold Every House in Scarsdale

By COREY KILGANNON

THE fire engine-red Mercedes convertible zipped up Chase Road into Scarsdale village and parked cross-grain over two diagonal parking spaces. Out hopped Iris Kalt with her pet boxer, Diesel, in tow. She breezed into the Prudential-Centennial real estate office hot on the trail of her latest listing.

Competition can be cutthroat among real estate agents, many of whom tally their sales totals the way a cleanup hitter counts home runs. In May, agents across the county eagerly wait for the annual awards given by the County Board of Realtors to those with the highest sales volume in the past year. Think of it as Oscars week for brokers.

For several years, Mrs. Kalt, 51, has made the ''Diamond'' category of top-producing agents. She arranged 35 property sales last year totaling more than $20 million, making her one of the most productive agents in Westchester. The sales ranged from a $40,000 condominium to a $4 million house in Larchmont bought by Marcus Camby of the New York Knicks. Mrs. Kalt is consistently the top producer in her office, though she shows up so rarely she has no desk.

Instead she can usually be found in her red Mercedes, racing from one property to the next, meeting clients and builders. Armed with a cell phone and a healthy reserve of chutzpah and often accompanied by Diesel, a gift from Mr. Camby Mrs. Kalt spends hours a day searching for plots with potential.

''I love land,'' she said. ''It just jumps out at me. When I see land, my eyes light up. It turns me on.''

Mrs. Kalt storms through muddy construction sites in high heels and drives from listing to listing with similar abandon. She treats stop signs as suggestions, plows through potholes and overtakes slower drivers while conducting her conversations. Her cell phone is tucked under the seat, her beeper is clipped to the waist of her tan designer suit. Her fuzz-buster is on. Iris Kalt is open for business.

''There are 300 agents in Scarsdale,'' she said, honking her horn and overtaking a slower car. ''If I'm not selling it, someone else is.''

The red Mercedes is really her 18-year-old son's car, but last year she ruined the engine in her black Mercedes sedan, she explained, by letting it run out of oil. She ignored the warning from the dashboard oil light, she said, and another from Chili Davis, the former New York Yankee (and a client), who urged her to investigate the funny rumbling noise just before the car died.

Oh, well. In Mrs. Kalt's world, these things are distractions to be minimized. Riding in her little red Mercedes is a bit like spending limo time with Gordon Gekko, the ruthless stockbroker mogul in the film ''Wall Street.'' Mrs. Kalt's Gekko-esque mantras include: ''I never watch TV; I love the phone; I want to sell every house in Scarsdale; you do what everybody else does, you get what they're getting.''

In this red-hot real estate market, listings sell quickly. With few homes available, real estate agents need innovative ways to find available properties.

Mrs. Kalt's specialty is finding plots that have long been considered impossible to develop or improvising strategies to make average listings sell for above-average prices.

Higher prices, of course, mean higher commissions, and Mrs. Kalt said she makes almost $300,000 a year, but money is only part of it. In the most exclusive enclaves of Scarsdale, a real estate agent's pride hangs on each realty sign she sticks into a front lawn. And Mrs. Kalt prides herself on finding properties that other agents overlook.

With particularly selective clients who will consider only specific neighborhoods, she often goes door to door asking owners if they would consider selling.

Once Mrs. Kalt forgot the key to a vacant house. She crawled in the basement window, showed the house and got an offer on it that night.

''I've been known to knock on doors in the middle of the night, or throw my card through the door,'' she said. ''They say, 'It's a little late, but we're glad you came.' I believe in striking while the iron's hot.''

And in residential real estate, the iron is hot right now.

P. Gilbert Mercurio, executive vice president of the Westchester County Board of Realtors, reported that the median sale price of homes in the first three months this year was $372,000, compared with $313,000 in the same time period last year.

But there are roughly 5,000 active real estate agents in the county, all competing for fewer listings. There were 1,798 closings on residential properties last year, down 10 percent from the year before.

Vacant land is scarce in and around Scarsdale, where Mrs. Kalt works. So rather than sell your basic listing and make your basic commission, Mrs. Kalt will often put eager home buyers on hold and instead find a builder to buy the property and expand or replace the house. The builder then sells it to the home buyer, often for several times the original price.

This way Mrs. Kalt makes a commission from the builder when he buys it, another when he sells it and often another from the home buyer if it is her client. All told, it can sometimes total as much as 10 percent of the property price.

''I love to sell to builders,'' she likes to say, because it means multiple commissions. Her boss, Mark Nadler, who owns the Prudential-Centennial branch in Scarsdale, said Mrs. Kalt has found a successful formula finding ''tear downs,'' older houses on prime property that can be replaced with larger homes with larger price tags.

''I've been in this business a long time, and I've never seen anyone find a property's highest and best use like her,'' he said.

Mrs. Kalt finds ways to push deals through when they stall. Recently, a couple from Jersey City wanted to buy a house in the Green Acres section of Scarsdale, but its owner demanded a $40,000 down payment within 24 hours. The couple could not raise the cash that quickly, so Mrs. Kalt suggested taking their credit cards to the bank and drawing out the maximum cash to manage the down payment.

''Any broker can do the smooth deals, but Iris's specialty is fitting the square peg in the round hole,'' Mr. Nadler said. ''You say, 'You can't get it done,' Iris doesn't know from 'can't' and she doesn't know from 'no.' I've often told her, 'No, that's not the way,' but then she surprises me.

''I'll watch 10 brokers work with a client and get nowhere. You put Iris with them, and she can push the deal through, plus sit down with them and have a drink afterward.''

But, he added, Mrs. Kalt is not for every client.

''If they're the type who want to spend months looking, a lot of hand-holding and 'I'll speak to you three times a day,' then I'll match them with a more traditional agent, not Iris,'' he said. ''She doesn't work like that. If it's 10:30 at night and she's putting the deal together on your house, that's when you'll hear from her.''

Among her colleagues and competitors, there is no shortage of Iris stories. The time she she sold a two-bedroom in Eastchester while she was on her cell phone, sipping a pina colada on the beach in Puerto Rico. The time she locked her keys in her car in a White Plains parking lot and made a sale by cell phone while waiting to be picked up.

One story that made the rounds at the office was about the fender bender she had while rushing Mr. Camby to see a house. The house hunt seemed stymied by a crumpled quarter panel, at least until Mrs. Kalt ordered Mr. Camby out of the car to bend the fender away from the wheel and the car limped on to the walk-through.

''You can't make this stuff up,'' Mr. Nadler said.

Then there are the deals that result from the art of shmoozing. Mr. Nadler recalled the time Mrs. Kalt took him to a Knicks game last year and got them to the area outside the locker room where the players' family and friends gather. Mrs. Kalt began casually chatting up the girlfriend of a certain Knick guard.

''In 20 minutes, Iris finds out they're looking for a house in Atlanta or California, and she had the woman's cell phone and all her information,'' he recalled. ''Iris referred them to one of our brokers down there, and three months later they close on a $1.4 million house, and Iris gets the commission. Not bad for a 20-minute chat.''

Cary Sleeper, a broker at Burbank-Whittemore Real Estate in Larchmont, said he is not always a fan of Mrs. Kalt, whose area overlaps with his, but he respects her.

''She's tough and aggressive and perhaps ruthless at times, and the real estate community is largely a genteel profession, so it can sometimes rub people the wrong way,'' he said. ''In such a fast market like we're seeing right now, sometimes there's no time to be polite, and Iris doesn't pull punches.''

Dan Weaderhorn, a builder in Scarsdale who works with Mrs. Kalt, called much of her success a result of, well, her pushy personality.

''When Iris calls, I come running,'' Mr. Weaderhorn said. ''Land around here is so scarce and expensive. Iris knows the potential of property. She can visualize what others can't, and think of deals that others don't.

''She calls me all hours,'' he added. ''My wife says to her, 'Don't you ever shut off?' But that's why she's a successful broker. She doesn't know 'no.' She knows 'push.' ''

Mrs. Kalt was raised in a working-class neighborhood in Bellerose, Queens. Her father owned several delis in the Five Towns area of Long Island. She earned master's degrees in education and school psychology and ''more credits than God'' in college, and she began working in real estate in 1986, making $25,000 a year.

She lives in a large ranch in Scarsdale which she says would sell tomorrow for $1.3 million with her two college-age sons and her husband of 26 years, Steven W. Kalt, an insurance broker.

''She does wild things, anything to close a deal,'' Mr. Kalt said. ''She's the exact opposite of the rest of these straitlaced brokers out there.''

At home, he and the boys do the cooking. ''Believe me, we don't want her in the kitchen,'' he said. ''She's not a domestic woman, but she's still a great mother.''

Mrs. Kalt agreed: ''I don't cook; I don't even know where the supermarket is.''

Her relationship with the Knicks began when she skipped her son's drama production to show houses to Larry Johnson, the Knicks power forward. She found Mr. Johnson a house and soon got some of his teammates as clients. Now she prepares relocation kits for new Knick players.

She is careful about revealing details about clients who are star athletes. Instead, she coyly slides a stack of snapshots across her kitchen counter, showing her posing, often in front of new houses, with the likes of John Starks, Charles Oakley, Chris Mills, Chris Childs and Charlie Ward.

Her spunky style resonates with them, her boss, Mr. Nadler, said.

''These rich athletes don't trust anybody,'' he said, ''because they figure most people are out for their money: 99 out of 100 people would not be able to talk to them, but Iris can.''

Most brokers split their commissions evenly with their companies, but like many other successful agents, Mrs. Kalt has a sweeter arrangement: She keeps 65 percent.

Mr. Nadler recalled that he once teased her that his No. 2 broker was having a ''real hot streak and getting close to your numbers.''

He added: ''You should have seen her react. She gets this serious face and says: 'Really? What are her numbers?' thinking she might be surpassed. The next two months she went all out.''

Commission checks, usually between $10,000 and $20,000, are the norm, she said, adding, ''but it's not the money it's the victory.''

''Every deal I make, I get high,'' she said holding a glass of Chardonnay and strolling over the stone pool deck of a waterfront home at 56 Lake Shore Drive in Eastchester, a home selling for $2 million. She is the listing agent.

''I get depressed if I don't do real estate every day or I don't have a customer on a weekend,'' she said, watching the water splashing down a stone waterfall into the pool from the hot tub that towers high over the lake.

The 14-hour days do take time away from her family. But she said, she has always been a competitor, something to do with her younger brother, once her partner in a jewelry business but now making millions in finance.

''As long as I know there's another penny to be made out there,'' she said, ''I'm going after it.''

Iris Kalt Ranks in Top Half of One Percent in the Elite Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Global Network

#GoodToKnow

Larchmont, N.Y. (March 29th, 2019) – Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England, New York and Westchester Properties today announced that Iris Kalt, from their Larchmont office has been named to Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices’ esteemed Chairman’s Circle - Diamond Level for 2018. The Chairman’s Circle - Diamond Level is awarded to the top one-half of one percent of the network’s sales professionals based on gross commission income or closed units.

Iris was also recognized for reaching the 20-year milestone of consecutively winning the Legend Award. As a Legend Award recipient, she joins a select group of network agents who have consistently ranked in the top two percent of sales professionals in the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices’ international network. In addition, Iris received accolades for being a top producer within the company, ranking at #5 for gross commission income and #8 in units sold for 2018.

Iris was recognized for her exemplary performance at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices’ New England, New York and Westchester Properties, Awards + Service Event, held in Wallingford, CT on March 28th, 2019 at the Toyota Oakdale Theatre.

“Iris’ continued exceptional success is a direct result of her keen knowledge of the Westchester County real estate market, her professionalism and her dedication to providing unparalleled customer service,” said Candace Adams, CEO and President of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England, New York and Westchester Properties. “She exemplifies our core values and we feel very proud to have her on our team.”

With over 30 years of experience in residential and commercial real estate sales, Iris has consistently outperformed Realtors across Westchester and the United States. Iris’ track record of sales and impressive “list to sell” ratio demonstrates that she delivers the highest possible selling prices to her sellers regardless of market conditions.

Iris Kalt can be reached directly at 914-643-1367, or by email at IrisKalt@bhhswestchester.com.

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England, New York and Westchester Properties is a leading real estate brokerage firm with over 1,800 sales professionals in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. The firm’s sales executives are experts in their local markets and are committed to providing exceptional service to residential and commercial clients. With more than a century of unparalleled financial strength, operational excellence and business ethics, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England, New York and Westchester Properties is the premiere real estate firm in the Northeast.