NYC-based Corcoran broker dies of coronavirus

Marc J. Goodman, a broker with the Corcoran Group for more than two decades, died at his Upper West Side home on Sunday from Covid-19, according to the brokerage and a close friend.

Pam Liebman, Corcoran’s president and CEO, informed company staffers and agents on Monday.

“An unfailing optimist, Marc is remembered by his colleagues and clients as the most generous of agents, always willing to lend an ear and offer a helping hand,” Liebman wrote in a statement.

Goodman was 67.

Friends and colleagues remembered Goodman as a good-natured man who had a playful sense of humor.

“People were drawn to Marc,” said broker Merope Lolis, who was his business partner for a decade. They began working together after Goodman helped her land a listing while she was out of town.

It was just the kind of man he was, she said.

“He approached his business the way that he approached his life, and that was with great honesty and integrity,” she said.

Robert Hickey, who said he’d been a close friend of Goodman’s for 18 years, described him as having “an easy charm,” and “that sort of Seinfeld humor where you see the humor in almost nothing.”

“He really loved that moment when you realize this is all crazy,” he said.

Goodman, who worked out of the West Side Gallery office, was also a long-time fitness instructor. He was devoted to his meditation practice and mentoring others.

Hickey recalled a conversation with a few of Goodman’s neighbors earlier in the week who were shocked to realize that Goodman, “who still looked great in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans,” was in his late 60s, not his 50s as most of them thought.

“Literally, they gasped,” Hickey recalled with a laugh. “[Marc] would have loved that.”

Goodman loved spending time in his neighborhood. Hickey recalled summer barbecues on Goodman’s terrace — “the most beautiful balcony on West 80th Street” — or going for a walk coffee in-hand through nearby Riverside Park.

Hickey said Goodman started running a temperature about two weeks before his death and immediately self-isolated. He wasn’t able to get tested during the first week of his illness and finally received a diagnosis for Covid-19 last Thursday.

“That was a hard day. But it seemed like he was getting better,” said Hickey. “And then he was gone.”

Since the coronavirus outbreak began, real estate agents have wrestled with balancing the risk of contracting or potentially spreading the virus with continuing to meet clients and show homes throughout the city. The debate was thought to be put to rest when Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared brokerage services a non-essential business in late March. But industry trade groups lobbied to relax part of the stay-at-home rules for real estate agents, and on Wednesday real estate was declared an essential industry. (However, after some confusion, Empire State Development said on Thursday that agents could only show homes virtually.)

Goodman’s death is the first publicly known in the New York City brokerage community.

Hickey expressed shock at losing his friend so suddenly. “Marc was like the most fit, healthy person you could imagine,” he said. “This is a really nasty, mean disease that takes whoever it wants to take.”

As of the evening of April 2, nearly 50,000 New Yorkers had tested positive for Covid-19 and 1,562 people had died from their infections, according to the NYC Health Department.

“People who think this is all kind of hype, I just want them to know that it’s not hype,” said Hickey.

Write to Erin Hudson at ekh@therealdeal.com

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