Four former top Corcoran brokers have found a home at Brown Harris Stevens at 2 Fifth Avenue for their new partnership, BHS Marketing Group.
The group is comprised of Wendy Maitland, Erin Boisson Aries, Wilbur Gonzalez and Reid Price, four former senior vice presidents who brought over a team of 14 former Corcoran brokers to Brown Harris Stevens. They will focus on marketing and selling new residential developments.
According to Gonzalez, the group has almost $500 million worth of new developments that will begin sales within the next 30 days, including 33 Vestry Street, known as V33, and One York.
BHS Marketing Partners will take high-end, design-driven new developments from conception to completion, said Maitland, one of the four managing directors.
“Brown Harris Stevens is obviously one of the major players in New York City, and it’s had the slowest entry into the new development segment of the business,” Gonzalez said.
According to the brokers, Brown Harris Stevens was receptive to the concept, which will have a collaborative group effort during development stages, followed by assigning one or two managing directors as sales directors when a project starts selling units. “We [will] each take the lead on a different project depending on the needs and best fit,” Gonzalez said.
According to Gonzalez, who worked on Andre Balazs’ chic 40 Mercer condo building in Soho from the preplanning stages through sales, the model allows for brokers familiar with buyers’ demands through their on-site sales experience to participate in the earlier, conceptual stages of the marketing effort.
“Marketing teams tend to work in a vacuum,” Gonzalez said. “This model allows them to have a direct feed on the current market situation.”
“We were sought out as brokers individually and collectively,” said Maitland. “We have a unified vision to do something unique and fill a niche that we felt excited about in a different way from the Corcoran Sunshine market formula.”