Compass No. 1 as four firms dominate NYC co-op sales

Brokering co-op sales can be tricky — agents don’t just need to find the right unit for a buyer, but also the right buyer for the board. 

Last year’s deals show having an established network might give brokerages a boost with the property type. The city’s four biggest firms brokered more than half of all co-op transactions in New York City last year by volume, with Compass alone commanding nearly 18 percent market share.

To measure firms’ success in this market segment, The Real Deal drilled into the dataset of 58,000 deals from our recent overall brokerage ranking, but this time looked specifically at co-ops.

Compass sold 2,490 co-ops in 2022 with a total volume of $2.8 billion, according to an analysis of sold listings across the city from last year. That’s about 30 percent more — in both deal count and volume — than runner-up Douglas Elliman, which closed 1,739 co-op deals for just over $2 billion.

The Corcoran Group sold 1,578 co-op units last year for $1.98 billion, and Brown Harris Stevens moved 1,348 co-ops with a volume of $1.76 billion.

Those four firms sold more than 42 percent of all co-op units sold in the city last year and accounted for over 54 percent of dollar volume.

The No. 5 spot went to Sotheby’s International Realty, which closed just 357 co-op deals in 2022 but reached a total volume of $818 million. Sotheby’s average price of nearly $2.3 million per co-op unit was by far the highest of any of the ranking’s top 10 firms.

BHS won the distinction of brokering the priciest on-market co-op sale of last year — the $25 million trade at 950 Fifth Avenue in Lenox Hill. That was just the third-most expensive co-op deal of 2022. The top two transactions — the $101 million sale of a pair of units at 4 East 66th Street belonging to the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and the $35 million sale of EisnerAmper co-founder Richard Eisner’s co-op at 1107 Fifth Avenue — were both off-market. Off-market sales accounted for nearly 16 percent of co-op deal volume in 2022.

Compass owed its top-ranking dollar volume to its large number of smaller deals. The most expensive co-op the firm sold last year was just $9.8 million, coming in behind Elliman’s top deal at $16.6 million, Corcoran’s $24.8 million top sale and, of course, BHS’s $25 million transaction. Overall, Elliman handled four, eight-figure co-op deals in 2022, BHS six and Corcoran nine.

Coldwell Banker Warburg — formed by the national chain’s 2021 acquisition of one of New York City’s last independent brokerages — relied on co-op sales for more than 71 percent of its total deal volume last year, though its $223 million worth of co-op deals was only enough to earn the firm the No. 7 spot overall. Sotheby’s and No. 8-ranked The Agency both owed nearly half of their deal volume last year to co-op sales.

This is one of the hundreds of data sets available on TRD Pro — the one-stop real estate terminal for all the data and market information you need.

For inquiries about how to obtain the underlying data set referenced in this story, email research@therealdeal.com