Alt sitting in her newest listing at 118 West 12th Street.
Photo: Dina Litovsky

The parlor of 118 West 12th Street has three ornate, golden floor-to-ceiling mirrors, each 12 feet high. The dark mahogany floors are immaculate, and the white couch and bone-colored carpet are sophisticated without being stuffy. It’s minimal and elegant, and you can imagine a real, almost certainly hot, and very fancy person living here — putting flowers in the handmade ceramic pitcher on the marble side table or paging through the Chanel coffee-table book but never spilling the coffee. It is Age of Innocence meets Architectural Digest, a turnkey fantasy curated by Eva Alt, who, now into her third year in the business, is managing the impossible: making it cool to be a New York real-estate agent.

“There are a lot of preconceived notions about what real-estate agents and what brokers look like,” Alt says as we wait for a client at the five-bedroom, five-bath rowhouse just off Sixth Avenue, her newest listing. “They’re cheesy, tacky, gimmicky … It’s older society ladies uptown, or it’s the guys on the TV shows, the flashy ones.” Alt is an agent with Compass’s Hudson Advisory team, which specializes in referral-only listings across the chicest belt of downtown Manhattan: Greenwich Village, the West Village, Soho, Noho, Nolita, Tribeca. If Alt lights a candle at a showing, it will be Diptyque’s Tuberose or Frederic Malle’s Jurassic Flower. No cookies will be baked.

In a city of 30,000 agents, Alt’s edge is her taste. None of her listings are new builds, with their soulless kitchens and AI staging. “A developer comes in and says, ‘We want to do this for the lowest price per square foot possible.’ It’s everywhere,” she says. The world of Prewar Eva, the Instagram account she uses to tease new listings, is artists’ lofts, merchants’ mansions, carriage houses, duplexes and triplexes with unique little nooks and details like a stained-glass window or original beams. They are obscenely expensive but also so special that the prices feel somehow inoffensive — almost.

What makes a Prewar Eva listing? Beaux-Arts is her favorite time period, but she’d take the house we’re currently touring, which is Neoclassical and recently owned by Roy Lichtenstein’s son and, before him, Jackson Pollock’s nephew. (The property is still technically pre-market, but last sold for $18 million.) Once the client, who works in private equity and asked to remain anonymous, arrives, Alt calls our attention to every detail: the Venetian plaster, an original 1847 sink in the upstairs bathroom (some of the oldest plumbing in the city), the Zuber wallpaper on the garden level, a skylight on the third floor that casts the house in a certain glow. The staging is by ASH, New York–based designers who mix vintage and flea-market pieces with the highest of the high end. “This is only the third time it’s been on the market in 170 years,” Alt tells the client as we ascend the stairs. “I want you to see what being in a 24-foot house versus a 22-foot house is like. It’s volumetric. If you know boats, it’s like the difference between a 30-foot boat and a 35-foot boat.” (I don’t know boats, but the client nods.)

Alt’s path to real estate may help explain her niche. She was raised in Buffalo, where her mother was a high-school art teacher and her father owned a chain of bead stores. She joined the Boston Ballet’s pre-professional program at 15, but dance didn’t pay the bills, so when she moved to New York a few years later, Alt took an internship at Into the Gloss, which in 2014 launched Glossier, and where she stayed for six years running social media. “Glossier was my college,” she says. Alt has requisite perfect skin, very shiny hair, and a high, clear voice you can hear being the first in the class to answer a teacher’s question. She likes “being a know-it-all,” she says.

In 2020, Alt quit Glossier to consult for other brands. She and her husband, the architect Sharif Khalje, were also looking for a new apartment. She would walk around the city and write down house numbers, then spend hours deep-diving on the architectural history blog Daytonian in Manhattan or on ACRIS, the city-records database. “I know every block in the Village, Tribeca,” she says. Alt found herself and Khalje a floor-through apartment in an 1880s townhouse, also on 12th street, and realized she should make her new hobby into a job. “It was flexible enough that I could keep dancing. And earning potential was important. I won’t hit a ceiling. And I had an innate interest and passion for it.” She started the Prewar Eva account (named by her friend Krissy Jones, the founder of SkyTing Yoga) and messaged Clayton Orrigo, the Hudson Advisory founder, a former tech entrepreneur and friend of her former boss Emily Weiss. “Eva is the only person I have ever taken on who had no experience,” Orrigo told me.

Alt still dances every day before working her real estate business.
Photo: Dina Litovsky

Hudson Advisory is affiliated with listings behemoth Compass but runs almost like an exclusive ultra-luxury club: Nearly all its business comes in through referrals. A third of its $4 billion in sales are private transactions, Orrigo says, meaning they never even make it to a public listing. Later this year, the team will move into the retail space at 160 Leroy, the modernist cement-and-glass building with undulating windows on the Hudson River designed by Ian Schrager and architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron. (Alt would know.)

Alt’s many lives give her fluency across overlapping well-heeled circles below 14th Street. For her semi-Bohemian “downtown community” — other dancers, artists, gallery owners, designers, actors — she sees herself more as a “curator” than an agent. She still dances every day, often at Steps on Broadway, biking from rehearsals to showings with ballet shoes in her bag. Last year she performed in her own solo show at New York Live Arts and danced at the Met. But her rolodex also includes the recently IPO-ed, hedge funders, influencers like Weiss and Jones, and media figures like Architectural Digest editor Amy Astley. “I like to work with people that I know,” she says — it just so happens she knows the kind of people buying a two-bedroom penthouse with clerestory windows overlooking Gramercy Park ($2.75 million); an Upper West Side duplex in an 1891 brownstone with terracotta floors and three fireplaces ($1.5 million); and a Noho loft in the historic Robbins & Appleton building ($1.975 million). “She’s not just trying to jam some house down my throat that in a year I’m going to be upset about,” the client says when we get to the top floor of the townhouse. Plus, Alt “knows everything about the Village — who might get pregnant in a year and want to move, who is looking to expand.”

Her real passion, a building’s provenance, is what she looks for; it makes a listing not just expensive, but “blue chip,” significant, like a piece of art itself. “Who lived here before? What were they like? What were they doing?” Alt asks. “That’s just so special to New York.” She was once aghast that a fellow broker who was showing her a loft didn’t know it had belonged to the choreographer Trisha Brown. “He said, ‘Who’s that?’” She just closed on a corner loft for a buyer in Greenwich Village that used to belong to the artists Paul Jenkins and Willem de Kooning ($3.15 million).

Alt is aware that the version of New York she’s preserving is by now inescapably rarefied. “Every time a house comes up, or a really special anything, that I know is at a price point only a very, very wealthy person can buy,” she says, “it does break my heart a little bit.” Most of the homes that used to belong to artists are going to financiers and tech guys. “Look at Soho,” she says. “No artists live there.” The townhouse on 12th Street was first occupied by stonecutters; the last two owners were LLCs. (There is a sense that Alt’s taste is especially coveted by people who might not have their own.) Alt sees herself as a “dreamer, but a realist.” If the townhouse sells, she stands to make a six-figure commission. “You can’t make money as a dancer,” she tells me. “This is the harsh reality of that art form. I don’t have rich parents.” Accordingly, she would never turn down a listing for not being special — but she might not post it.

Prewar Eva is the opposite of harsh reality, perfect squares of dream New York lives like snapshots from movie sets. Alt has her favorite icons: the Dakota, Hotel Des Artistes. “It’s like finding the side of New York that’s never changed,” she says while locking up after the showing. “These buildings have been built for hundreds of years, and they’re still standing.” Her client told her he would think about it.