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Ranking Brooklyn and Queens’ top residential brokers
Name-brand agents rule in Brooklyn, but local firms dominate Queens
Douglas Elliman’s Lindsay Barton Barrett, Modern Spaces’ Helen Lee (Skyline Tower, Douglas Elliman, Modern Spaces, Getty)
Manhattan remains the center of gravity for New York City’s housing market, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the city’s residential sales volume across all on-market deals recorded last year. But Brooklyn and Queens are home to a growing share of the city’s high-end listings.
From stately townhomes of Brooklyn Heights to towering new developments rising in Long Island City, the city’s two largest boroughs are increasingly significant parts of its residential market, and the leading performers in Brooklyn and Queens were well represented on TRD’s citywide ranking of the top residential brokers in 2022.
To find out which agents and teams closed the most sales across the East River, TRD drilled into that dataset of 58,000 deals, but this time broke down the data by borough, combining both resales and new development sales.
In Brooklyn, the top sellers were Douglas Elliman’s Lindsay Barton Barrett Team, which closed 84 deals in the borough totaling $215 million in volume. Elliman’s Doug Bowen/Zia O’Hara Team took the No. 2 slot with nearly $213 million in volume across 66 deals. The Corcoran Group’s dynamic duo of Jim Cornell and Leslie Marshall rounded out the top three with 74 transactions in Brooklyn totaling nearly $212 million.
Nearly all of Brooklyn’s top 10 producers managed to beat the borough’s average home price of just over $1.2 million, with the top three averaging $2.6 million, $3.2 million and $2.9 million, respectively. But it was Sotheby’s International Realty’s tenth-ranked Heyman Team that secured the highest average price among the top 10, averaging nearly $3.6 million across 31 deals.
Brooklyn is well-established as a new hotspot of New York real estate. Queens remains more of a wild frontier for the city’s top brokerages. Eight of the top 10 Brooklyn agents work for one of the city’s three largest firms. In Queens, nearly all of the top producers work at firms that are relatively unknown in Manhattan.
Helen Lee, leading a team at Modern Spaces that’s marketing Skyline Tower, Queens’ tallest building, took the top spot with $187 million in volume last year across 158 deals — nearly all of them sponsor sales at the Hunters Point development, which began sales in 2018.
The first broker in the Queens ranking dealing mostly in resales is second-ranked Maureen Ramsbottom, who has led the Maureen Folan Real Estate Group in 2017. She led the borough in resales last year, closing 119 deals for a total volume of more than $116 million.
There’s a huge gap between the borough’s top two producers and the rest of the pack.
Po Wei Tair at RE/MAX 1st Choice took the No. 3 spot with $63.3 million in volume across 55 transactions, followed closely by Li Li of B Square Realty with $63.2 million in 78 deals, and Keystone Realty’s Gabriel Kashi with $58 million in volume across 67 deals, rounding out the top five.
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