Douglas Elliman sets sights on wealthy Connecticut suburbs

Six months after opening an office in Beverly Hills, Douglas Elliman has set its sights on an affluent market a little bit closer to home: Greenwich, Conn.

Since April, Elliman has quietly expanded into the southern Fairfield County market, where it now has close to $40 million in active listings, Gabe Pasquale, executive vice president of Elliman’s Westchester office, told The Real Deal. Pasquale is leading the Connecticut expansion.

The new office, he said, recently completed its first transaction in Greenwich, representing the buyer of a $9 million waterfront estate.

Still, the nascent branch doesn’t have an actual office just yet. Instead, agents are working out of Elliman’s office in Chappaqua. “We do have several agents that are either directly dedicated and working the Greenwich market, or they are duly licensed in both New York and Connecticut,” he said.

Despite the newness of the office’s first deal, there have been rumblings of a Greenwich office in recent months. In April, Douglas Elliman’s Chairman Howard Lorber said, during an interview with The New York Times, that an office in Greenwich would open in the “not-too-distant future.”

To be sure, Elliman will be competing with established offices in the area, including Houlihan Lawrence, William Raveis and David Ogilvy & Associates, an affiliate of Christie’s.

But the affluent market could pay dividends. The median sale price in the area in July was $1.86 million and the average sale price was $2.59 million, according to Houlihan Lawrence. Among Greenwich’s priciest listings are Leona Helmsley’s former estate, which is asking $65 million, and producer Bob Weinstein’s estate, which is asking $32 million.

Elliman’s $9 million deal was at 23 Hendrie Extension, a 7,000-square-foot waterfront estate in Old Greenwich with a private dock. Brokers Debra Goldenberg and Victoria Miller, of Elliman’s Miller-Goldberg Team, represented the buyer. That team works out of the Chappaqua office.

This year, Douglas Elliman opened an office in Scarsdale, N.Y., and Beverly Hills – the company’s first West Coast office. “We go where our clients want to be,” Dottie Herman, Elliman’s president and CEO, said in a statement.