via nytimes.com
“I have never made a deal in the rain,” said Fredrik Eklund, standing in bright sunlight in a $2.8 million apartment on the Bowery that offered 360-degree views of seemingly every landmark in New York City. “People need to see a place in good weather to appreciate it.”
Fredrik Eklund, the Swedish real estate mogul in talks with Bravo for a reality show, has been in the spotlight before: above, in Café magazine.
Mr. Eklund knows about good lighting. On paper, he could be just another charismatic, hyper-aggressive broker in the city’s cutthroat real estate market. As a managing director of Core Group Marketing, a boutique real estate firm in Chelsea, he has a portfolio worth more than $58 million, putting him at No. 37 in The Real Deal’s listing of top brokers in New York City.
His success in the United States has made Mr. Eklund, a member of a prominent Swedish family, with ties to prime ministers, the royal family, even the legendary director Ingmar Bergman, somewhat of a minor celebrity back in his native Stockholm, and the subject of glowing profiles in the Swedish press. But it’s more than just his ability to close million-dollar deals that has brought him that fame.
There’s also that other career of his: that of a one-time actor who starred in a half-dozen adult films under the nom de porn Tag Eriksson.
Despite the whiff of scandal or maybe because of it, Mr. Eklund moved to the United States eight years ago — with zero clients and no real estate training — and built an enviable practice that now includes marquee clients like Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake and the Olsen twins.
“The unglamorous answer is that you work harder than anyone else,” Mr. Eklund said as he moved lithely around the apartment, fussing with details as a photographer took shots for its listing.
Soon there may be more than just a lone photographer following Mr. Eklund around Manhattan as he readies apartments for viewing. On Thursday afternoon, word leaked out that he is in talks with Bravo to star in a reality show about New York real estate brokers. The news, however, may not go over well with his bosses. Because Core has an existing show on HGTV, it might put his future with the firm in doubt. But Mr. Eklund says he isn’t concerned. “Life is a big tasty smorgasbord,” he said. “And there are a lot of really good-looking sandwiches to try.”
Real estate agents are renowned for having the best apartments, and Mr. Eklund’s bachelor pad on Astor Place is no exception. A roomy one-bedroom with arched windows that face downtown, it has a décor that looks as if it came from one of the better catalogs.
A dozen family photographs in silver frames are hung together over the credenza. The Eklunds are so attractive that they seem to conform to a cultural stereotype of Swedishness.
One picture shows Mr. Eklund and his brother, Sigge, both in tuxedos, flanking their father, Klas, on his 50th birthday. The elder Mr. Eklund, in a white tux, is a senior economist of one of Sweden’s largest corporate banks, SEB, and was closely allied with Carl Bildt and Olof Palme, two of the country’s former prime ministers. He is a celebrated public intellectual in Sweden, though he was somewhat remote as a father.
In the center of the grouping is the largest picture, a black-and-white portrait of Mr. Eklund himself, shirtless and beaming, cropped above the waist with hemispheric pecs. He lives across the street from a David Barton gym, where he works out almost every morning, usually by 5 a.m. when it opens.
It was that body that caught the eye of an online casting agent in 2001. Wash West, a tongue-in-cheek porn director who had worked with Bruce LaBruce and others, was intrigued by Mr. Eklund’s story.
“His grandfather was a famous actor in Sweden, so he came with this pedigree of Swedish theater and film,” Mr. West said, referring to Bengt Eklund, who worked with Bergman.
As Tag Eriksson, Mr. Eklund appeared in approximately six films shot in California in 2001 and 2002, including “The Hole,” a parody of the popular horror film “The Ring.” (In “The Ring” watching a cursed videotape causes the characters to die; in “The Hole” it makes them gay.) The film won him a 2004 GayVN award, sometimes called the gay porn Oscars, for a Best Solo Scene.
For Mr. Eklund, the racy films offered an escape from the strictures of Old World Sweden. How others might judge him was not a concern. “Did I ever think it would affect my career negatively?” he said. “No. Did I think that I might fall in love with somebody one day who might have a problem with it? Yes.”
Even before his foray into pornographic films, Mr. Eklund was a risk taker. During his first year at the Stockholm School of Economics, he started a tech company called Humany that made customer-relations software. Later he started a small music label and management company, Cave Entertainment, that had modest success in Latin America and Japan.
He was already known as a young entrepreneur and his profile in Sweden exploded in 2005, when he published an autobiographical novel about his adult film career titled “Bananflugornas herre” or “Lord of the Fruit Flies,” a pun on his homosexuality.
“It started as a diary,” he said. “It was never about the movies themselves, it was about the journey a young Swedish man goes through.”
Still, the book created a stir that propelled him into the Swedish tabloids, as the gay porn star son of a public figure.
“The newspapers there follow his every move, so he’s very well known,” said his brother, Sigge, who recently moved to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter.
“The things I hear Swedes admire most about him are his optimism and self-confidence. He’s the anti-Bergman — Bergman was a very dark and angst-ridden man, whereas Fredrik is social and cheery — and that sells well in today’s Sweden.”
Notably, the book was also how Mr. Eklund came out to his father as both gay and a porn actor. He e-mailed his father a draft.
“So this was his way of telling me — a rather drastic way,” said the elder Eklund, who was shaken by the revelation. “I became worried, not because of the movies themselves, but I feared drugs and AIDS, probably like any caring parent would do.”
Father and son have since grown closer. “Now he’s out of all that, without any scars, and I’m truly happy about that,” the father added.
With considerable life experience already behind him, Mr. Eklund arrived in New York to start a new chapter. He acquired his real estate license at New York University “because people said I would be good at it and because I have an analytic mind and social skills,” he said.
In 2005, a year into his first job at JC DeNiro, an agency owned by Robert DeNiro’s uncle, Jack, Mr. Eklund did an estimated $50 million in business and was nominated for Rookie of the Year by the Real Estate Board of New York.
He worked 85-hour weeks, and was an early adopter of Web tools. “I think I was the first one with a BlackBerry, when it still had the wheel,” he said. “When I started, seven and a half years ago, listings were still coming in by fax.”
Within two years, he left JC DeNiro to join Core, an ambitious start-up founded by Shaun Osher, who had been a top broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman. Mr. Osher said Mr. Eklund had a particular talent for branding developments that other brokers failed to sell. As a recent example, Mr. Osher cited the Cammeyer, an elegant prewar building in the Flatiron district that was previously marketed as 650 Sixth Avenue, until Mr. Eklund found a fancier, historic-sounding moniker.
Mr. Eklund also keeps his numbers high by working with developers to represent every unit in a building, and has a strong reputation as a closer.
Then there are his clients. Perhaps because of his upbringing in Sweden’s ruling class, he moves easily among other public figures. He runs with a glamorous set of Swedes, like Princess Madeleine, who moved to the city in April, and Caroline Winberg, a Victoria’s Secret model.
Although Mr. Eklund remains discreet about his clients, several real estate blogs reported in May that he sold Daniel Craig, the James Bond actor, a $1.9 million TriBeCa apartment. Others he has worked with include John Legend, Jessica Alba, Paul Rudd, Rachel McAdams, Ben Stiller and Brooke Shields, according to another broker who spoke anonymously so as not to jeopardize relationships with current or potential clients.
“I try to always make them not think of me as a broker,” Mr. Eklund said of his ease with celebrities.
And now, with his potential Bravo deal in the works, he may well become one of them.
Watch movies with Tag Eriksson now!
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