Don’t tell Prudential Douglas Elliman that the boom market is over. Manhattan’s largest residential brokerage grew by another 200 agents in the past year, according to data gathered by The Real Deal as part of its annual survey ranking top residential firms.
The Corcoran Group — the second biggest brokerage in number of agents — had more bang for the buck, though. With now more than 400 fewer agents than Elliman in Manhattan, it nearly matched Elliman in number of exclusives and finished ahead of it in average number of listings per agent.
The toniest of big firms — Brown Harris Stevens, Stribling & Associates, and Sotheby’s International Realty — continued to lead the pack in terms of selling, on average, the highest-priced apartments.
Still, there are fewer agents listing properties at stratospheric prices among those firms — Brown Harris Stevens, for example, had 15 agents with a $10 million listing or higher last year, but now has around half as many brokers selling in that price range. Sotheby’s median listing price last year was an astounding $5.09 million, a figure that dropped to a more reasonable $1.99 million last month, placing it second in that category.
The Real Deal gathered data on the 10 largest firms from firms’ Web sites and the main listing system that brokers use, R.O.L.E.X. Following up on a similar survey last year, we tallied total listings at each company, total dollar value of listings, top listings, and how the average broker in the industry is faring. Data for the survey was collected in mid-April.
The growth of the biggest firms was like Manhattan apartment prices in general — still moderately up compared to last year. Bellmarc Realty and Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy were the only big firms that saw a decrease in agents compared to last year.
Showing that consolidation continues to shape the industry, Elliman and Corcoran accounted for more than 60 percent of listings among the biggest firms, 2,658 out of 4,426 total listings, up from 50 percent last year. (That doesn’t include the Sunshine marketing division of Corcoran, with another 38 agents and 219 additional listings. Sunshine was considered a separate entity for the purposes of this survey since its listings are not integrated with Corcoran’s in the R.O.L.E.X. database.)
Past lists didn’t include firms primarily focused on rentals. That meant that Citi Habitats made the list this year, even though its number of sales exclusives, 150, put it near the bottom of the 10 firms, outranking only the much smaller Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy and Warburg Realty Partnership. The addition of Citi Habitats knocked Fenwick-Keats, which made its debut among the top 10 firms last year, off the list.
A few caveats about the survey. It included Manhattan-based agents and their listings in Manhattan. It included only listings, because of the difficulty in compiling data for closed sales and sales in contract. All listing data was culled from the R.O.L.E.X. system in an attempt to eliminate open listings from the survey results. The only exception was the number of agents at each firm, which was culled from firms’ Web sites.