Bethenny Frankel and Fredrik Eklund Have a Bond Forged in Their Passion for Real Estate
The #RHONY mom opens up about working with the #MDLNY agent — and letting her past go with his help.
Bethenny Frankel is the kind of woman you can't keep in one place for too long. As we saw in the Season 9 premiere of The Real Housewives of New York City, the Skinnygirl mogul sold her Tribeca pad with the help of Fredrik Eklund. Then, this past February, she reconnected with the Million Dollar Listing New York agent again to put her Soho apartment on the market. And there's a reason why she keeps calling on Fredrik to assist her in buying and selling her Big Apple apartments.
"Fredrik and I started business and became friends as a result of that process. Now it's a hybrid friend-working relationship. We're not best friends and we're not tight business partners," she recently told The Daily Dish. "And we worked together on a couple things now and we have a good dynamic."
Which brings us to their latest collaboration, that aforementioned Soho apartment, which you can now buy if you've ever wanted to know what it's like to live like Bethenny.
"The apartment that I currently live in, which is in Soho, I love and I renovated it. I bought it not as a transitional apartment, but I kind of just needed a place to move into. The divorce was going on way longer than I expected, way more expensive than I expected, and way more nauseatingly excruciating that I expected. So I had to adjust and I made a decision I have to kind of find a place for us to live," she explained. "But I wanted it to be nice, and because Fredrik and I have started this relationship and dabbled in real estate, I thought I should renovate it with the intention of possibly selling it."
So Bethenny has done just that and listed it back in February. She said at the time she purchased it she wasn't sure "if this will be our home forever" and so there was always a chance she'd eventually want to sell. She added, "I'm very proud of it. I love it and I felt it really good to just nest with my daughter. She's at an older age where her belongings are important and stability's important and she's in school doing homework. So she needs a consistent environment for that. But now I'm selling that apartment with Fredrik. So now there might be something else in the works. I'm kind of feeling a little more like Fredrik in that I'm incorporating my personal life and real estate. They're sort of intertwining now."
For now, Bethenny and Bryn are living in that apartment, and Bethenny is more than happy to be rid of her former Tribeca home. "The Tribeca apartment, we call it Hudson, represented a very negative time in my life. And as the period of time increased, I think that the apartment tension increased as well. And it just represented something extremely negative for me and I really couldn't wait to get rid of it. It felt like a cleansing — just one more thing one step towards happiness, of just getting this monkey off my back. It felt really good knowing that it was sold. I mean there are just people around me that I work with saying, 'OK, you bought another apartment, when are we going to be able to get rid of that apartment?' It's a big asset to hold and it's nice to let things go. So it was very symbolic."
With Bethenny buying and selling real estate more frequently these days, she admits it has a lot to do with this innate love she has for it. "The truth is I just love real estate. I really like it and so I'm always looking and window shopping and dabbling," she said. "And it's a passion and usually if you love something, you can be good at it and you can make money at it. So I'm sort of dipping my toe into that pond with Fredrik together."
Peep Bethenny's taste in real estate, below.