Top-performing Douglas Elliman agent pulls team to Sotheby’s International

A top-performing Douglas Elliman agent and her team has made the leap to Sotheby’s International Realty on a hunt to do more business at home and abroad.

Daniela Sassoun, along with her colleagues Mark Mistovich and Daryl Eisenberg, have joined Sotheby’s East Side Manhattan Brokerage.

Sassoun’s sales volume ranked her nationally as Douglas Elliman’s No. 25 agent in 2021 and No. 16 in 2020. In 2022, she was ranked among RealTrends and Tom Ferry America’s Best Real Estate Professionals as No. 400, closing $29.795 million in sales volume.

She has closed nearly $1 billion in sales across her 17-year career, including over 17 deals and over $75 million in transactions at 110 Central Park South.

In addition to closing deals in New York, the brokers have closed deals internationally, in luxury hotspots like France and Brazil. Sassoun said she hopes the team’s move to Sotheby’s will grow their business in other countries.

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“As any broker who moves just like us, you expect to grow your business,” Sassoun said.

All three members of the team came from a financial background.

Before real estate, Mistovich worked in the international banking industry, with a focus on hedge funds and currencies. Eisenberg worked in banking prior to entering the real estate world in 2001. The three met at Corcoran before joining Douglas Elliman.

Sassoun said the team will not be expanding as it moves to Sotheby’s.

“We’d like it tight,” Sassoun said. “The client has to have interface with me or Mark or Daryl or one of us.”

The agents are jumping to a smaller firm in terms of headcount, but a well-established New York City footprint.

A ranking by The Real Deal of Manhattan’s top brokerages put Elliman second in the city with $6.02 billion in closed sales across 2,680 deals last year. The brokerage came in as the second largest in the borough, with 1,652 active salespeople.

Smaller-in-size Sotheby’s ranked 10th with 358 active salespeople in NYC, but ranked fifth for closed sales with $1.62 billion across 572 deals.

The city’s residential players were poised to welcome international buyers back when the United States lifted a slew of travel restrictions last fall, but a sales executive told TRD earlier this year their global clientele was a staple of the city’s business.

“The international buyer has been a fixture in New York,” said Marissa Ghesquiere, who leads Sotheby’s East Side brokerage.