Gail Sankarsingh, a longtime New York City luxury agent, died Friday at the age of 57.
Born in Trinidad, Sankarsingh moved to New York City in 1986 as a teenager and joined Douglas Elliman in 2007.
Sankarsingh built her business with prominent Manhattan new development projects, including the historic Apthorp on the Upper West Side, the Baccarat Residences in Midtown and The Centrale in Midtown East, before pivoting in recent years to focus on resales. She consistently placed among the top-producing agents at her firm, earning fifth in gross commission income among individual Elliman agents in the city in 2017.
Elliman CEO Michael Liebowitz, along with Elliman’s New York City CEO Richard Ferrari and and Douglas Elliman Development Marketing CEO Susan de França, announced Sankarsingh’s death in an internal memo.
“She understood that New York is the epicenter of the world, and she embodied that cosmopolitan spirit in everything she did,” the memo read.
Sankarsingh died following years of battling cancer on and off.
Brokers from Elliman remembered Sankarsingh as unfailingly positive, even in the face of a difficult diagnosis.
“You would never think she was going through something so difficult,” said Elliman’s Alexander Boriskin, who knew Sankarsingh for close to a decade. “She was super positive, always in a good mood, always smiling.”
“She was a broker that nobody ever had a bad thing to say about,” added Elliman’s Michael Lorber.
Kim Shepard, another Elliman agent, said the two hit it off when they met nearly two decades ago, bonding over being single mothers and sharing an unbridled love of the city. The two hunkered down during the pandemic together, going for walks in Central Park four or five days a week before shopping on Madison Avenue, another one of Sankarsingh’s favorite pastimes.
“She liked the nice things in life,” said Shepard, pointing to backyard happy hours where Sankarsingh got a case of champagne delivered. “She said, ‘This is for when I visit.’”
“She was so full of life,” said Elliman’s MariaElena Scotto, who said after heading to the brokerage’s annual Endeavor event in Las Vegas at the end of October, Sankarsingh made time to see the Hoover Dam and catch an Eagles concert at the Sphere arena.
Online, agents expressed shock at the news after having just seen Sankarsingh in high spirits so recently. “She wouldn’t tell anybody,” Scotto said. “Because she said, ‘I can’t have any negativity.’”
Sankarsingh is survived by her son, Christian Foley Sankarsingh, and her niece, Schuyler Sankarsingh-Ali, who are also both agents at Elliman, as well as her mother, Mavis Nandoo, sister Debra, and brothers Neil, Lincoln and Darrel.
