Corcoran tops Elliman, Compass for luxury single-family home sales in NYC

Brokerage’s strength in Brooklyn was enough to push it to the top of the citywide ranking

Corcoran’s Pam Liebman, Douglas Elliman’s Scott Durkin, Compass’ Robert Reffkin and Leslie J. Garfield & Co.’s Leslie Garfield (Corcoran Group, Douglas Elliman, Compass, Leslie Garfield, Getty)

Bill Egbert

Research by

Apr 13, 2023, 5:45 PM

New York is a vertical city. The forest of apartment buildings that define its skyline represents the real estate industry’s eternal quest to squeeze the maximum value out of the land by stacking luxury homes as high as air rights will allow.

But even its priciest neighborhoods are still dotted with the rarest of city residences: the high-end single-family home. The buyers of these high-brow low-rises are more rarefied still, and finding those willing to pay the price can be a challenge for any brokerage.

To measure firms’ success in this market segment, The Real Deal drilled down into the dataset of 58,000 deals from our recent ranking of the top brokerages across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens in 2022, but this time looked specifically at single-family residences — including both townhouses and stand-alone homes — that sold last year for $5 million or more.

Manhattan had the most with 145, but Brooklyn boasted 92 such sales — a factor that actually tipped the citywide ranking. Only one house sold in Queens for $5 million or more last year, in an off-market deal.

The Corcoran Group beat runner-up Douglas Elliman in citywide volume, though Elliman sold one more single-family home than Corcoran did. Corcoran closed $325 million across 26 deals for single-family homes that went for $5 million or above. Elliman closed 27 such deals, but they totaled just $297 million in volume.

When isolating Manhattan, however, Elliman was the clear winner. The brokerage sold 19 luxury single-family homes in the borough last year for a total volume of more than $232 million, beating out Corcoran’s 13 deals that totaled a little over $204 million in volume.

It was Corcoran’s domination of Brooklyn’s high-end single-family market that secured its top spot in the citywide ranking. Pam Liebman’s agents sold 13 homes in the borough last year for $5 million or more, versus Elliman’s eight. Corcoran also achieved nearly double the volume, nearly $121 million versus Elliman’s tally of about $64 million.

Compass came in third in the citywide ranking, closing 22 deals for a total volume of nearly $210 million, and it also placed third in Manhattan with 17 closings totalling over $176 million.

But in Brooklyn, Robert Reffkin’s firm was fourth behind luxury townhouse specialist Leslie J. Garfield, which closed seven deals totaling nearly $63 million in volume. Compass posted barely more than half that volume in Brooklyn, sealing five deals worth a total of $33 million.

Leslie J. Garfield’s performance in Brooklyn was enough to secure the fourth spot in the citywide ranking, with 22 deals worth nearly $200 million, besting fifth-ranked Brown Harris Stevens’ tally of 12 deals totalling nearly $154 million. BHS did, however, snag the No. 4 spot in Manhattan.

Corcoran closed the deal for the city’s most expensive single-family home last year: a 13,000-square-foot townhouse at 12 East 63rd Street in Lenox Hill that went for $56 million in February.

Ryan Serhant’s brokerage sold three single-family homes for $5 million or more in 2022, but one of them was the second most expensive deal of the year. The 22-foot-wide townhouse at 36 East 68th Street itself sold for nearly $53 million, but the buyer also purchased all the furniture inside, hiking the deal's total price tag to almost $57 million.

Elliman sold the third most expensive single-family home last year, a 20,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts property on Fifth Avenue once called Manhattan’s “last intact Gilded Age Mansion,” which went sold for $50 million in an all-cash deal.

The Modlin Group sold the fourth priciest single-family home, a townhouse at 8 East 62nd Street that Somerset Partners’ Keith Rubenstein had been trying to sell off and on since 2016. It finally found a buyer last year for $48 million.

Brown Harris Stevens helped Chipotle founder Steve Ells flip a West Village townhouse in the fifth most expensive sale last year. Ells sold the property at 27 East 11th Street for $35 million last June — a nearly 19 percent premium over the $29.5 million he paid for it just eight months earlier.