Montauk squawk box
Hamptons real estate brat eyes a comeback
The self-titled “f--king Prince of Montauk” is back.
Or at least that’s the story Dylan Eckardt is pitching — eight months after the badboy real estate agent from out East seemed to throw it all away being arrested by local cops for driving while stoned.
“The hardest thing is to claw your way up,” Eckardt, 38, told The Post in an interview this week.
Last June, faster than you can say “Xanax,” the former professional surfer-turnedreal estate agent to the rich and semi-famous was out of a job.
His reputation had reached its height last June, thanks to a lengthy Vanity Fair feature that heralded his princely moniker. Less than two weeks later, his sordid arrest left his rep as scruffy and tattered as his surfer-boy appearance. That was then. Now, Eckardt isn’t just selling renovated bungalows out in Ditch Plains or familysized three bedrooms with ocean views, he’s also selling a story of a comeback.
The Montauk local has scored an exclusive to sell Zum Schneider, one of the fishing town’s largest restaurants. If he’s successful — and stays out of trouble — it would mark a striking turn- around for the shabby-chic restaurant as well as for Eckardt.
“There’s not a classy restaurant in Montauk,” Eckardt told The Post, seated in the chic Tribeca workspace of the designers he hired to help with the sale. He added later that the fisherman’s town needs a venue where “city streets meets sandy feet.”
Eckardt doesn’t look like your typical real estate broker, let alone one selling multimillion-dollar properties.
Despite unseasonable February temperatures in the 60s and an upbeat feeling of spring, Eckardt was clad in all black: jeans, T-shirt, hoodie and a baseball cap that sometimes sat atop his long, shaggy, dirty-blond hair.
A black-heart tattoo wrapped his ring finger, and more ink on his arm peeked out from under the sleeves of his hoodie as he talked and gestured wildly, his brightblue eyes darting around the room.
This appeared to be a slightly less in-your-face version of the surf punk who told Vanity Fair last June: “All the cops know who I am … No one is going to say s--t to me.”
Maybe that’s because shortly thereafter he was being perp-walked.
The Post reported that he told cops after he blew through a stop sign, “I take Xanax and Lithium every day. This is one time I’m not really f--ked up and driving around and you harass me.”
The arrest cost him his job at the Nest Seekers brokerage — despite the fact that he sold $10 million of property in his first four months.
But he appears to have worked his way back into the agency’s good graces, referring to his time away from it as a “hiatus.”
With the Zum Schneider project, “I want to be able to say this place sucked before we got in,” Eckardt said, adding later: “It’s an opportunity to change the f--king game.”
Eckardt is hoping to sell a concept more than a restaurant. He’s partnered with interior designers to transform the drab German eatery into a chic restaurant and lounge for the 35-plus crowd that outgrew what is frequently described as the cokehead culture at nearby Surf Lodge.
People “work their asses off to afford a house in Montauk and they deserve to have what they need,” Eckardt said.