There was little talk of real estate at the dinner table when Danielle Naftali was growing up in Bergen County, New Jersey.
“At home we did not spend that much time talking about real estate,” Naftali said. “My dad really took the time when he was home to focus on family. I would go and see the sites and get to see what he was doing, but I wasn’t fully immersed in it growing up.”
Naftali was studying to be a therapist at Syracuse University when a summer internship changed the course of her career. She was working for the leasing team at a different developer’s rental building on West 57th Street and West End Avenue — a job she found with the help of her dad, Miki — and started sprucing up the apartments to boost sales.
“The apartments looked crappy,” she said. “They weren’t staged, and I started to make recommendations. I was like ‘why don’t we paint the walls, why don’t we stage the units.’ All of a sudden we started to get more money.”
She started enjoying the work.
When she approached her dad the next summer about working at Naftali Group, he offered her an entry-level job as a receptionist.
“He said ‘You’re not going to come in here as a manager. You’re going to work your way towards every single position at the company. It made me understand every job at the company, and that every job is hard and you have to work for every single position. I think it was the best thing he did for me.”
DANIELLE NAFTALI ON NAFTALI GROUP’S MIKI NAFTALI, HER FATHER
“He said, ‘You’re not going to come in here as a manager. You’re going to work your way towards every single position at the company,’” Naftali said. “It made me understand every job at the company, and that every job is hard and you have to work for every single position. I think it was the best thing he did for me.”
Her first full-time job was as an on-site administrator at Stribling. After that, Naftali returned to her dad’s company 10 years ago as a marketing assistant. She later took night classes at NYU to earn her business degree. Three years ago, she was promoted to executive vice president, overseeing a team of 12 people as the head of Naftali’s marketing, sales and design.
“I’ve really worked through being the assistant of marketing, then I became the manager and director and now the executive,” Naftali said. “It’s taken me time and now I have a great team under me, and we have a lot more work.”