Curious about upstate New York? So is Compass, which just poached the Upstate Curious Team from Keller Williams as part of an expansion into the Catskills.
The 15-broker team, founded by Megan Brenn-White in 2019, says it has closed nearly $260 million in sales in the Catskills and Hudson Valley, where competition for talent has been heating up among New York City’s top brokerages.
Brenn-White said she reached out to Compass after CEO Robert Reffkin suggested in February that the brokerage may switch to a franchise model for geographic expansions as it tries to reduce its expenses.
“As late as this fall I was putting feelers out to see if there would be an opportunity to join and at the time there didn’t seem to be,” said Brenn-White.
A franchise deal never happened, but a slowdown in expansion at the brokerage, in place since last summer, now appears to be over. Compass ended a moratorium on mergers and acquisitions last week when it picked up a 300-agent independent brokerage in Arizona in a deferred, all-equity deal.
“They’re not ready to franchise yet, but they were open to going into a new market,” Brenn-White said of Compass’ Upstate Curious deal.
The team, which is active from Westchester County as far north as Albany, and from the state borders with Massachusetts and Connecticut in the east to Schoharie and Sullivan counties in the west, developed a community app that has roughly 6,500 users.
“We thought the app could fill in a gap for questions we can’t answer as real estate agents for very valid fair housing reasons,” said Brenn-White. “People would say, ‘Hey we’re a biracial queer couple, what town should we move to?’ … If they can throw it out to the community and get answers, that’s extremely helpful.”
Brenn-White said seasonality is returning to the Catskills market after a flood of city dwellers during the pandemic transformed the area into what analyst Jonathan Miller calls a co-primary market, meaning residents split their time somewhat evenly between the area and the city.
Like in the Hamptons, the post-lockdown bonanza decimated inventory in Hudson Valley and the Catskills and drove up prices. Home prices in Ulster County, which includes Kingston and Woodstock, jumped 20 percent in 2021.
“December, January were way slower than they have been the past two years … and then in the spring it has picked up so much,” Brenn-White said. “It feels like right now there are five houses across those 11 counties that every person is looking at. It’s very rough.”
Nabbing the Upstate Curious team isn’t Compass’ only recent move north of New York City: Last fall, the firm recruited the Hudson Valley-based Banx Team, an 11-agent group, from Berkshire Hathaway.
Read more
Brenn-White says she first caught the real estate bug after buying a Park Slope studio for $79,000 two decades ago and flipping it for twice that a few years later.
The Harvard graduate eventually got into real estate in earnest after burning out from her day job, first with Habitat Real Estate. She eventually founded Upstate Curious after moving to the area from New York City, an experience which helped her come up with the name.
“Everyone in the city is a little upstate curious,” she said.