The Corcoran Group will move back to Chelsea in late April. The brokerage giant closed its Chelsea office at 21st Street and Broadway in 1998, citing the need for more room, and moved its sales operation for the neighborhood several blocks south to Soho.
Now, Corcoran returns to Chelsea on April 21 with a 9,000-square-foot sales and rentals office on the second floor of 59 West 19th Street. It will host 66 agents, said Scott Durkin, a former Corcoran COO who will manage the new office.
The airy office — a former gymnastics studio — includes large corner windows facing Sixth Avenue and 19th Street, which gives the brokerage street-level visibility. “We have amazing exposure here,” Durkin said, “in the middle of probably the most exciting new development craze in the city.”
Partly from new condo development, most of it higher-end, Chelsea has become since the 1990s one of the most popular — and competitive — sales markets in New York City. In 2005, 398 sales closed there, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel, ahead of larger neighborhoods like Harlem and Hell’s Kitchen, and only slightly behind Greenwich Village.
Durkin said the agents for the Chelsea office will be drawn from the firm’s existing locations as well as from new hires and from other brokerages.