Douglas Elliman, Knight Frank Residential partner up

With sights set on international, uber-wealthy buyers, two powerhouse names in the residential brokerage world are teaming up to sell the city’s most luxurious real estate.

Douglas Elliman and the international brokerage Knight Frank Residential today announced a new partnership aimed at matching Elliman’s top listings with the U.K.-based firm’s global Rolodex.

“Basically this is a brand within a brand,” Elliman CEO Dottie Herman explained during a breakfast at the Park Hyatt hotel at One57 earlier this morning, “so that the top ten percent of our city markets, whether it be Miami or New York, will be branded,” Douglas Elliman Knight Frank Residential.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two firms will join forces to market the top 10 percent of Elliman’s listings in the New York metro area, South Florida and Los Angeles.

Andrew Hay, the global head of Knight Frank’s residential arm, said the next 12 months will be spent aligning “the two networks and the two client bases” at his company’s 400 offices around the world.

Signs for Douglas Elliman Knight Frank Residential will begin popping up at offices in the city, according to Elliman Chairman Howard Lorber, who said the real value of the deal will be in displaying the partnership online.

“Not too many clients come to offices anymore,” he said.

The event also saw the introduction of a joint supplement to Knight Frank’s annual wealth report. The survey found that the world’s ultra-high net worth individuals believe that by 2024 New York will surpass London as the city that matters most to the world’s wealthy.

One key finding came from the perspective of Miller Samuel President Jonathan Miller, who identified a trend of New York-based investors showing rising interest in certain overseas markets.

“While investors from around the world have been increasingly targeting the New York market, there is an active reverse flow of investment,” he wrote in the supplement. “New Yorkers are still domestically focused, and are competing with international investors in Miami and San Francisco, but at the same time we are seeing locations in Spain and the Caribbean rising in terms of the interest to New York-based investors.”