Penmark Property Advisors, LLC

NEW YORK TIMES

In the male-dominated real estate universe, the hard hat can be a hard hat to wear.

It was 1975, and Leslie Winkler was working on her doctorate in American history. She and her husband, a dentist, were out one night with another dentist and the dentist’s wife, who ran her family’s real estate business and who announced during dinner that she needed a managing agent. Ms. Winkler, disenchanted with academia, was intrigued. A managing agent — what’s a managing agent? A managing agent, she was told, was someone who visited people’s beautiful apartments. That sounded good to Ms. Winkler; she said she could start on Monday. She quickly learned that being a managing agent was not only about visiting beautiful apartments. It was about leaks, broken boilers, tenants who were hot and tenants who were cold, and tenants whose stoves and refrigerators were on the blink. “But it was such a problem-solving job and such a learning experience,” said Ms. Winkler, now 71 and the president of Halstead Management, with 200 residential properties under her supervision. “You’d go up on the roofs of these buildings and see the landscape of New York City and think, ‘This is really good.’” If Ms. Winkler was one of the few women in the property management business back then, it was fine with her. “I wasn’t intimidated at all,” she said. “I wanted to learn and put myself right out there.” It’s true that when she went to a meeting with a male colleague, most of the questions were directed to that colleague. “Even if you did have the answers, there was no presumption that you knew anything or were good at your job, but that was how it was. That was the business,” said Ms. Winkler, who is very much of the “if you don’t want ants in your food, don’t go on picnics” school of thought. “Either you accepted it and proved you were better than your male colleagues, or you got upset.” At least in part because of her own experiences, she has made a point of bringing women into the business and mentoring them, she said: “I hope I’m a role model to show them you can reach the top of your profession.”