Robin Kaplan “was a writer, an editor, a poet, and she was a real estate tycoon,” her wife, Ellen Silverberg, said this week. Ms. Kaplan died of pneumonia in Oakland Park, Fla., on Feb. 9. She was 74 and had been in declining health.
She studied set and lighting design at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and owned bookstores in New York and Key West early in her career.
Her mother, Gloria Fertig Kaplan, was “a big interior designer in New York,” Ms. Silverberg said, and she told Ms. Kaplan that “if she could sell books, she could sell real estate, and that’s what Robin did. She came back to New York and started selling townhouses.”
She began her real estate career in the city, then worked with Tina Fredericks when she first came to the South Fork in the late 1980s. She went on to be a vice president at Allan M. Schneider Associates and a senior vice president at Douglas Elliman.
Ms. Kaplan not only sold properties, she also invested in them. Real estate was “her main love, besides me, and she made a lot of friends that way,” her wife said. A “lover of words,” she was always writing, whether it was poetry or the copy to market the properties she represented. “She was a very creative person,” Ms. Silverberg said.
She enjoyed reading and playing competitive backgammon.
Ms. Kaplan was born on Nov. 29, 1951, in New York City to Herbert Kaplan, a builder, and the former Gloria Fertig, and grew up in Westchester County. She moved to East Hampton full time around 1990.
She and Ms. Silverberg were together for 34 years. They married in 2013 and in 2015 moved to Florida. Ms. Silverberg was an animal portrait painter, and Ms. Kaplan “loved that.” Ms. Kaplan always had a dog — her last, Max, “still misses her very much” — and Ms. Silverberg came to the relationship with two cats. “We drove down from New York with two cats and a dog when we moved,” she said.
Ms. Silverberg has suggested donations in Ms. Kaplan’s memory to an animal charity or an organization that feeds the hungry.
In addition to her wife, Ms. Kaplan is survived by a brother, Richard Kaplan of New York City, his wife, Mary, and two nephews, Eli and Isaac.
