Nina Hatvany isn’t afraid of a down market.
San Francisco sales tipped toward the historically bad in the fourth quarter of 2022, dropping to their lowest point in more than a decade in October — a long way from the mania that helped land the Compass broker and her three children the top spot in TRD’s ranking of the city’s residential teams.
Chatting from her son’s backyard, the London-raised broker said she and her three children, Natalie, Paul and Vanessa Hatvany Kitchen, marked their best year on record in 2021, with over $450 million in sales and 113 transactions. She forecast their volume would drop 10 percent in 2022 to make it a close second.
Hatvany’s team has led the city in terms of volume since 2017, according to RealTrends. Unlike other agents in the area, Hatvany doesn’t limit her work to a price point or neighborhood, although she tends to concentrate on the $10 million-plus homes in the prestigious enclaves on the city’s northern end, while her children take the lead on lower-priced homes and condos in the city’s southern end. Their recent listings vary from a $20 million custom-built mansion in Russian Hill to a 1,000-square-foot townhouse condo asking less than $900,000 in Cathedral Hill. Last year, the Hatvanys brokered both sides of a $14 million deal for a Pacific Heights Tudor-style manor and they helped another client buy a one-bedroom in Noe Valley for $870,000.
Hatvany, who is in her late 60s, said that the current downturn is “exactly like” those in 1989, 2001 and 2008 — with one big exception.
“Unlike in 2008, people aren’t overleveraged, and many have fabulously low mortgage rates, which means that they don’t need to sell at this time,” she said. “This will keep the inventory down and keep prices from falling too far.”
Growing up Hatvany
Hatvany, who hasn’t lost a bit of her English accent, came to Stanford University to do graduate work in psychology at age 21.
After a stint with an Upper West Side condo developer while she was teaching at Columbia University’s business school, Hatvany arrived in the Bay Area in the early 1980s. She got her start with a 12-unit townhouse development in Palo Alto, a project she calls a “disaster” in part because conditions were very similar to today’s complicating factors: high mortgage rates, buyers waiting on the sidelines and a looming recession. At one point, the bank offered her $1 to take the townhomes off her hands.
Hatvany passed. Instead, she rented the properties out to make it through the “very, very hairy” times. She emerged with an important lesson about having enough equity to ride out a down cycle. The market, she stressed, is just that, a cycle, with highs and lows to be expected.
“Looking back, it was just a blip — a two-year period,” she said. “But at the time, it was devastating and forever.”
That initial foray into townhouse development was enough to permanently put Hatvany off ground-up multifamily construction, though she does own more than 10 small rental properties. She shifted her focus in the late 1980s to renovating existing single-family homes in San Francisco, where she found her niche. At that point, she was married and starting a family.
Once she got “more into the groove” of house flipping, she started living in the homes while she was renovating them, largely in San Francisco’s northern neighborhoods: Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights and Sea Cliff. Vanessa said she can recall living in 18 homes before she went to college, a number her older siblings dispute, putting it closer to 13.
There were other houses, all three agree, that the family meant to move into after renovations but never did because their mother, whom they typically refer to as “Nina,” found another project house instead. They can also recall their parents, on several occasions, accepting unsolicited offers on their just-finished home from friends who came over for dinner or a party, thus necessitating another move.
Paul recalled his childhood as “as calm and connected as you could imagine while moving that much,” noting that they always kept the same phone number and school. Natalie said that their parents had a “really fun rule” where the kids got to pick a new bedroom paint color and bedding for each move. But Vanessa said she “hated every single move.”
The youngest child went the farthest afield from her family as an adult. Unlike her siblings, who both got law degrees like their father, became real estate agents like their mother and largely stuck around in San Francisco, Vanessa spent more than a decade in New York, working in media and public relations before spending seven years as a Douglas Elliman agent.
But even she couldn’t resist the siren call of Team Hatvany, returning in 2016.
“They have your back,” she said of her reasons for coming home to join the family business. “Not just today, or next year. To the end.”
Unite and conquer
Ever since the team came together, they’ve been on top.
Michael Bellings of the Bellings Brothers Team, which ranked second in the city in terms of volume with just over $300 million in transactions, said he often works with the younger Hatvanys at his agency’s average price point of $2 million. His father, David, has a long history of doing deals on the market’s higher end with the matriarch.
“When Nina and I have hit road bumps in our deal,” said the elder Bellings, “we literally can resolve it standing in the living room.”
Team Hatvany (from left): Natalie Hatvany Kitchen, Nina Hatvany, Paul Hatvany Kitchen and Vanessa Hatvany Kitchen
Compass regional president Patrick Barber said family teams are common in the city, but a mother working with all of her children is unique to the Hatvanys.
“There are brothers,” Barber said. “There are mothers and sons. But that’s kind of where it ends.”
Barber has been watching Hatvany’s career since she made the transition from buyer to agent in the early 1990s. When he co-founded Pacific Union, which Compass bought in 2018, he spent years convincing her to move from TRI Coldwell, where she was the top-producing individual agent for more than 20 years.
Hatvany said that the family-only team makes accountability a lot easier, recalling how she used to get anxious if she couldn’t reach a former assistant.
“I would have bad thoughts,” she said. “What’s she doing? Did she clock out early? Whereas with them, I’m like, I know she’s at the orthodontist with my grandson. I’m so happy his teeth are getting straight.”
The team had discussions about growing the business by bringing in non-family members, but decided against it.
“That implicit trust can’t be duplicated,” said Paul. “Someone will always be an outsider.”
Hatvany said she can imagine retiring in 10 years, but she’s concerned she’d be bored. Natalie reminded her that she’d been forecasting another decade in the business for at least a few years already, and Vanessa recalled an agent in New York who worked into her 90s, a path she could imagine her mother following. Paul thought retirement would be “oppressive” for both of his parents.
Given the volume of deals the Hatvanys are doing, even in a down market, Barber said they could certainly grow their business — if they wanted to expand outside of the family.
“Are they leaving deals behind that they could be doing? Of course,” he said. “But they want to do it their way.”