Three words to describe Triplemint’s new growth strategy: Divide and conquer.
The residential brokerage is moving forward with three new offices in the Tri-state area, including its new, smaller headquarters in Union Square.
The team moved out of its Midtown office at 1500 Broadway and into its new 5,500-square-foot HQ at 7 West 18th Street in May. Triplemint is leasing the office from George Comfort & Sons and plans to open more space as more people return to the office full time, a spokesperson said.
The brokerage also signed a lease for a 2,800-square-foot Westchester office at 151 Mamaroneck Avenue. It is leasing the office from Palladium Management, a boutique real estate investment and development firm.
Triplemint is also finalizing a lease for its Brooklyn office in Fort Greene, which is expected to be finalized later this month.
Both the Westchester and Brooklyn spaces will require roughly two months of buildout before agents can settle in, according to Triplemint co-founder and CEO David Walker.
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The move to the smaller locations are an effort to take a more local approach amid a more favorable office market.
“We want to be part of that positive shift back to commercial real estate and [take] more space,” Walker said.
Spreading out those locations also helps the brokerage appeal to a more “fluid” clientele that have expanded their living options beyond Manhattan, Walker added.
Like many other brokerages, Triplemint faced losses and gains caused by the pandemic. In April 2020, it laid off two employees and made executive salary cuts.
During that time, the brokerage offered free tools to teach agents how to set up virtual tours when making that digital shift. But as more people are vaccinated and New York reopens, the future looks like it’ll be hybrid.
“Ultimately what we realized is that if you’re going to be competitive in the next 10 years as a brokerage, I think you have to be able to do business both virtually and in person,” Walker said.
An in-person perk for the Westchester and Brooklyn locations: community event spaces. Walker envisions people heading to Triplemint’s Westchester office to host and attend events, be it a panel with designers or a birthday party.
Owen Berkowitz, one of the co-founding agents of the Westchester business, chose the office’s Mamaroneck location because of the restaurants and local organizations nearby that they can partner with for such events.
“The pandemic provided rocket fuel for Westchester as people wanted a place where they could have bathrooms and bedrooms — both plural — backyard, barbeque and birdsong,” Berkowitz said. “We got that.”
The Westchester market saw historic home sales numbers last year. Overall, Triplemint saw a 60 percent increase in agent productivity and a 120 percent growth in sales year-over-year, Berkowitz said.
Triplemint expanded to New Jersey in 2019, when it merged with Hoboken-based Court Street Property Group.