The Ranking of The Firms

Listings and top producers at the city's ten biggest residential brokerages

In a business where listings come and go, some in residential real estate say you’re only as good as your last deal.

The Real Deal set out this past month to take a comprehensive look at the current website listings of the ten biggest residential real estate companies in the city. We wanted to find out what firms’ reputations are borne out by their performance.

We tallied items including total listings at each company, total dollar value of listings, top producers and how the average broker in the industry is faring.

The results of the snapshot survey are telling. In the battle between the big two – Corcoran and Douglas Elliman – Dottie Herman’s company has more agents and total listings, but also a high percentage of brokers with no listings.

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Brown Harris Stevens made a strong performance, finishing third in overall dollar value of listings with only a fraction of the number of agents as the largest firms. Sotheby’s agents had the highest priced listings, on average.

As far as the average agent at the ten biggest firms, he or she currently has around one and a half listings, and each property he or she is representing has a median value of $999,000 – just about the average price for an apartment in Manhattan, according to a recent market report. In this time of tight inventory, 44 percent of agents don’t have any listings at all.

The best brokers – around 10 percent – had at least one listing over $4 million, and only around three percent of all brokers had a listing worth more than $10 million.

In the battle of the sexes, there wasn’t any great difference in performance between men and women – though there are twice as many women as men working at the biggest firms.

A few caveats about the survey. It included only Manhattan agents and their listings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It did not include properties in contract, just listings. It didn’t include firms primarily involved in rentals. In cases where agents were sharing a listing, that property was counted twice, which may have lead to slightly higher numbers, though the effect would be uniform across all firms. Data for the survey was collected in mid-April.

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