Susan de França’s blueprint begins with the buyer

Before the marble samples, before the sales gallery, before anyone points to a skyline rendering and says they could see themselves living there, someone has to ask who the apartment is for. Susan de França has made a career of getting into that conversation early. A building may take years to arrive. Its future resident already has opinions.

De França runs Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, the division that helps developers plan, position and sell new residential properties. Her portfolio of assignments has included 150 Charles, 111 Murray, 432 Park Avenue and Faena House. The addresses make a handsome business card. The more interesting work happens before there is an address worth putting on one: decisions about layouts, design, service and the daily habits of the people expected to buy.

There is a small domestic detail that helps explain her eye. In her Manhattan home office, she described covering an entire fabric wall with images of fashion and real estate, turning it into a large mood board. For someone whose work involves imagining rooms that do not yet exist, it is an appropriate piece of furniture: a wall that refuses to be finished.

The neighborhood came first

De França was born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Buildings were part of her early curiosity. She studied business management in college, then entered real estate, drawn to the structures around her and to the business of presenting them. Watching her city change gave her a long view of a trade that often prefers the next launch.

By 2013, she could describe an industry that had moved from newspaper advertising toward websites, films and conversations with architects and designers. The apartment was acquiring a supporting cast. Marketing increasingly asked buyers to picture a life, complete with the things they might do after coming home.

Her early employers included M. J. Raynes Development Corporation, where her real estate career began, followed by senior roles at The Sunshine Group and Davis & Partners. At Related, she became president of sales, working on a portfolio that included One Central Park, The Residences at Mandarin Oriental and Superior Ink. These jobs put her close to the developer’s side of the table, where a beautiful idea must eventually become something someone will purchase.

That experience matters to the way she describes her present work. The sales conversation arrives with a history: choices already made about the building, its audience and its economics. Getting involved while those choices are still open gives a marketing executive considerably more to do than select adjectives for a brochure.

A different table at Elliman

In 2011, de França joined Douglas Elliman as president and chief executive of development marketing. Dottie Herman had approached her about the opportunity after getting to know her outside work. The attraction was the chance to build something within an established company, with access to its brokerage business and its agents.

She was also returning to familiar company. Some agents she encountered at Elliman were people she had worked with more than two decades earlier at M. J. Raynes. In an industry fond of discussing the next frontier, her new beginning included a few old acquaintances. Relationships had acquired professional mileage.

Her task was competitive. In 2013, she was recruiting, expanding rental assignments and putting approval procedures around marketing materials and on-site sales offices. Elliman’s model paired development specialists with resale brokers who already knew their neighborhoods and buyers. The challenge was to give those independent businesses a coherent way of working on a developer’s project.

There is a practical tension here. Brokers bring their own reputations and client relationships; a development needs consistency across every sales conversation. De França’s job sits between those needs. Freedom to bring in business is useful. So is having everyone describe the same building.

The broker knows something the drawing doesn’t

By 2018, she was describing a multidisciplinary operation: research, planning and design, marketing and sales working together. The combination makes sense when the product is expensive, slow to produce and difficult to revise once construction has advanced. A sales team can change a sentence overnight. Moving a wall is a more elaborate editorial decision.

The value of the brokerage connection becomes clearer at neighborhood scale. An agent showing apartments hears what buyers keep requesting and what they keep rejecting. Those conversations can expose a gap between the housing being planned and the housing people actually want. Market knowledge has a short shelf life if it remains in the wrong room.

Her emphasis on listening also gives some perspective to the visual glamour of her assignments. An architect’s name and a carefully dressed model apartment can attract attention. The more stubborn question is whether the rooms suit the intended resident. That question persists long after the launch party has been cleared away.

National expansion began in 2012. By October 2025, the division had roughly 80 employees and $30 billion in projects in sales or approaching market. De França explained the expansion as following the firm’s clients, a group she defined broadly enough to include developers, buyers, sellers, brokers and consultants. The common thread was the relationship rather than a single city.

Art, apartments and a standing lunch

The overlap between art and property is personal for de França. At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, she talked about the appeal of discovering artists and about an Andy Woll painting she had acquired. She also had a recurring appointment: an annual lunch at Casa Tua with colleagues Pablo Alfaro and Dennis Mangone, who had helped establish Elliman’s partnership with the fair.

Art fairs offer real estate people an audience already accustomed to thinking about space, taste and ownership. De França described new developments as places where buyers could bring artworks and collectible furniture into a fresh setting. There is an obvious commercial fit. There is also the pleasure of seeing something unfamiliar and wanting to take it home.

Her own description of luxury is disarmingly brief: “Money can’t buy time.” She has connected it to travel, galleries and sensory details, including the impression made by a hotel’s flowers. The mood board belongs to that same habit of attention. A home can look composed in a photograph and still need to accommodate a person with errands, guests and a desire for somewhere quiet to sit.

“Money can’t buy time.”

Susan de França

She has joked that her team knows how easily she falls for the properties they market. The buyer’s predicament, it seems, occasionally visits the person in charge of selling. Professional familiarity does not entirely remove the temptation of a good apartment.

The people who kept the lesson

Some of de França’s influence is easier to see through other people’s careers. Former Elliman marketing director Sarah Robertson has credited de França and Leslie Wilson with encouraging her to pursue an MBA. Robertson saw their leadership as an example of what she wanted for her own professional life.

That is a revealing form of support. Encouraging someone to return to school means treating their future as larger than their current job. The benefit may appear later, in another company or another kind of work. It is difficult to reduce that transaction to a sales statistic.

Tracy Tutor has also identified de França and Dottie Herman as mentors. Tutor described the significance of arriving at a company where women occupied prominent leadership positions, after years in workplaces where she felt male colleagues received priority. The presence of women making decisions changed the professional environment she experienced.

Together, those accounts add something that a list of towers cannot convey. They describe a workplace through the opportunities people felt able to consider. An executive’s influence can travel with an employee who leaves for business school just as readily as it stays with a broker building a career inside the firm.

The neighborhood, revisited

In May 2025, de França was talking again about the Upper East Side, this time through the developments her team represented. She singled out THE 74, with interiors by Rafael de Cárdenas, and the smaller collection of residences at The Surrey. The neighborhood of her childhood was offering new variations on a familiar address.

Her examples suggest how much the category can contain: full-floor apartments, a hotel residence, a building shaped by a fashion designer’s sensibility. She also discussed the Giorgio Armani Residences at 760 Madison and the way its architecture related to its surroundings. Even within one neighborhood, the story could change from building to building.

In May 2026, Elliman’s development marketing division was appointed exclusive sales and marketing firm for The Residences at The Boca Raton, a planned collection of 75 condominium homes. Senada Adžem was named executive director of sales. The assignment brought de França’s work back to the meeting point of hospitality, design and private ownership, with Hart Howerton designing the project and Pembrooke & Ives envisioning the interiors.

For all the changes in location and scale, her career keeps returning to a fairly intimate problem: imagining how someone will live. A skyline makes the public picture. Inside it are rooms that have to work on an ordinary day. De França’s job begins while those rooms can still be changed.