New York's real-estate queen

Dolly Lenz is a broker at the high end of the New York real estate market.Here's how her customer base changed:

Another big change in the market, says Ms Lenz, has been the arrival of the “hedge-fund guys”. Fifteen years ago she was selling to doctors and lawyers as well as bankers, most of them wanting an eight-room apartment for life somewhere on the Upper East Side. Now, along with international investors and a few celebrities, her biggest customers are hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street lions who expect to change properties after two or three years like other people change cars. She tells of one hedge-fund manager, 33 years old, who bought a $24m apartment in an hour, explaining that he had “just bought a $19m painting at Christie's, and he was not going to put it up on a $2m wall”. The potential buyers for the Park Avenue penthouse include another “hedge-fund guy” she says, and a “royal-family-type person”.