Off-market residential deals are no longer just a Manhattan luxury phenomenon.
In 2025, private home sales expanded across New York City, spreading beyond the borough’s traditional ultra-high-end enclaves and deeper into Brooklyn and Queens as brokerages increasingly push sellers toward private listings.
The Real Deal analyzed closed transactions of residential sales in both 2024 and 2025. Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens all saw off-market sales volume jump at least 30 percent from the year prior. But Queens stood out with the largest share of its 2025 total sales dedicated to those deals.
Brooklyn led all three boroughs with the most off-market deal volume at $5.4 billion while Queens logged the most deals at nearly 5,400, representing a 21 percent increase from the year prior.
The surge comes as the industry battles over the future of private listings.
Compass has spent months fighting Zillow’s policy that bans certain privately marketed listings from its platform, while industry leaders like Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman and Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman have publicly criticized Robert Reffkin’s push for a larger private listing network.
The debate has increasingly filtered down into how brokerages pitch homes to sellers across the city.
“People are now being feared into this thought pattern that if you list privately first, it will help the seller achieve a certain outcome,” said Ashley Brennan, a Brown Harris Stevens spokesperson.
The biggest shifts are showing up outside Manhattan’s traditional luxury core.
Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods posted some of the city’s sharpest year-over-year increases in off-market activity, suggesting the strategy is moving beyond trophy properties and into more mainstream segments of the housing market.
Some brokerage executives say part of the increase comes down to economics. In parts of the outer boroughs, listing agents may have stronger incentives to sell homes themselves instead of broadly marketing properties to competing brokers.
“In certain parts of the outer boroughs, the commission structures are different,” said Richard Ferrari, president and CEO of brokerage at Douglas Elliman. “Listing brokers tend to sell directly and/or offer a very small commission on a co-broke.”
Among the top 20 neighborhoods for off-market deal growth, East Williamsburg posted the sharpest increase, with off-market volume surging 170 percent from the year prior. Flushing recorded the highest number of off-market deals overall at 374 transactions, up 72 percent year over year in volume.
Manhattan’s luxury neighborhoods still dominate in sheer dollar volume — a reminder that the city’s wealthiest enclaves remain the natural home for discreet dealmaking. The Upper West Side led the city with roughly $551 million in off-market deals, followed by Lenox Hill at $493 million and Lincoln Square at more than $462 million.