Ranking NYC’s biggest brokerages by headcount

As the city’s luxury market perks up with the promise of lower interest rates this year, brokerages are preparing to do battle to capture the most of the gains. 

To get a handle on how many agents brokerages have in the most populous boroughs of New York City, The Real Deal analyzed data from the New York State Secretary of State’s office on current real estate broker licenses as of Dec. 15, 2023. Only those licensed as an “Associate Broker” or “Real Estate Salesperson” associated with a brokerage office in New York, Kings and Queens counties, resulting in a list of all the 39,126 licensed agents working in those boroughs. 

The vast majority of those agents are based in Manhattan brokerages — nearly 58 percent. Of those 22,529 brokers, nearly 10 percent of them work for one firm.

That firm, Compass, remains Manhattan’s heavyweight champion by agent headcount, though its 2023 total of 2,104 brokers is down a bit from over 2,400 in 2022.

Its two closest rivals also shed agents in recent years. The Corcoran Group took second place with 1,599 brokers and Douglas Elliman fielding 1,506 at the end of 2023.

Brown Harris Stevens came in at No. 4 with 947 brokers, and R New York rounded out the top five with 654 agents.

Altogether, the borough’s top 10 brokerages have 9,133 agents competing to sell slices of the Big Apple — over 40 percent of the borough’s total.

In Brooklyn, Corcoran took the top spot with 533 agents and Compass came in second with 335 active salespeople.

Third place was eXp Realty with 271 agents, followed by RE/MAX with 253 and Douglas Elliman rounded out the top five with 212.

Most of the agents selling Kings County don’t work for the big players, however. Just 32 percent of the borough’s 7,002 active salespeople work for one of the top 10 brokerages there.

Queens topped Brooklyn in terms of number of brokers, with 9,595 agents, and the top five firms fielding nearly twice as many agents as the top five in the borough to the south. 

E Realty International maintained its top spot in Queens with 866 agents in the field, followed by Keller Williams’ subsidiaries combining for 707 brokers. Homegrown brokerage Winzone Realty placed third with 660 agents.

Exit Realty came in a distant fourth with 284 brokers and eXp Realty rounded out the top five with 275 active salespeople.

To access the full dataset underlying the rankings as well as key contact information, check out TRD Data, The Real Deal’s new data subscription platform. 

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