The widely recognized monthly real estate magazine, The Real Deal, is set to release its 100th Issue this week. What people do not realize is that its founder and publisher Amir Korangy began the paper in the wake of 9/11 when we out of work and looking for an opportunity. He built The Real Deal on the expectation that New York will come back with the mind of a real New York faithful who believed in the people and the real estate industry. This was certainly no easy accomplishment. For a magazine focused on deals in NYC as well as South Florida, the burst of the housing bubble had a particular impact on the then-fledgling publication. This, in addition to the recession’s hard hit on the publishing industry, proved to be rather strenuous circumstances for the ambitious businessman.
A hard worker who admitted in an interview that friends in the industry often had to be sacrificed in the name of honest reporting, Mr. Korangy threw himself fully into his magazine to keep it from going under:
“The last 9 years of my life are not measured by days and months, but ad pages and issues,” says Korangy, “During the first year when I put out the magazine with Stuart and Yoav, I remember several times looking at the calendar and saying to myself, ‘wow, I have been awake for 50 hours. Didn’t realize my body could do that.’ Looking back, I often think about how I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore, but who knows, there is something very satisfying about being awake for 50 hours without the motivation of women, drugs, or rock and roll.”
Korangy weather the storms in parallel to the real estate industry itself, and he has come out on top. Now boasting a circulation of 130,000 and a website that garners more than 3 million monthly page views, The Real Deal (http://therealdeal.com) is distributed to more newsstands than any other business publication in NYC. Mr. Korangy attributes this success to a solid and loyal readership:
“The larger your audience becomes, the more responsible you feel about putting out better and more useful news and information. Going through a global recession, compounded by an industry recession, can put a jolt into any business owner—yet alone a publishing business—but what kept us afloat through the hardest times has been the readership, which is the only testament to a media business. If the readers are there, the business will find a way to survive and thrive.”
