The Real Deal’s 2024 Residential Broker and Brokerage Rankings

Sitting in Sant Ambroeus in the West Village, Zeve Salman looked out longingly onto the row of eight-figure homes lining Perry Street. 

“If you gave me five new houses on this street right here, I could sell them,” he said. “But find me those five houses.”

Salman, a co-founder of the Elevated Team with Eric Brown at Compass, echoed a refrain common in 2024, chalking up the market’s troubles to a lack of quality inventory. 

But Salman and Brown, who this year appear in The Real Deal’s agent rankings for the first time, found ways to get deals done in a market stifled by high interest rates and political and economic uncertainty. 

“Last year was a challenging year, and it was just a year of sort of confusion and uncertainty,” said Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman. 

As Corcoran’s Kane Manera sees it, that has all shaken out in the form of a pretty efficient market, if not one that is setting price or transaction records. 

“Things from where I stand are efficient,” he said, pointing to the stalemate between buyers and sellers. “It’s a fairly priced market where buyers and sellers are meeting.”

Add to the mix antitrust settlements that shook the industry for much of the past year and changed how agents get paid, and many in the city are already eager to turn the corner to see what 2025 might hold. 

“It’s unpredictable, and there is volatility,” said Kevelyn Guzman, regional vice president of Coldwell Banker Warburg. But she added that since the start of 2025, “we’ve seen a shift in a good way. We’ve seen [the market] pick up.”

Highs and lows

The city’s residential market was a rollercoaster last year, alternating high highs with low lows. Transactions lagged in the first half of the year, as high mortgage rates locked sellers into their homes and kept price-conscious buyers on the sidelines. 

By the summer, all signs pointed to the Federal Reserve finally lowering interest rates. Mortgage rates fell in anticipation, kickstarting deals across the city. 

Though mortgage rates only dropped temporarily, the movement was enough to fuel a string of activity through the fall, a season many in the industry expected to be tempered leading up to the presidential election. 

“It was kind of like a tale of two markets,” said Douglas Elliman’s Noble Black, whose team ranked in the top 20 in both resale and new development categories. 

Black described the first half of the year as “lackluster,” but by July, “a huge amount of energy” had returned to the market. 

Along with the sales boom came the return of nine-figure deals in Manhattan, which hadn’t logged a deal of that size in two years. 

First, a duplex penthouse at Extell Development’s Central Park Tower closed for $117 million, followed by the crown jewel penthouse at OKO Group’s Aman New York, which sold for $135 million to the building’s developer, Vlad Doronin. 

“The mood changed,” said Pam Liebman, the CEO of Corcoran Group, which again topped TRD’s ranking of residential brokerages in Manhattan. 

Liebman added that while the market entered 2024 on uneven footing, it ended the year with a renewed sense of confidence, with the results of a presidential election in the books and strong stock and crypto markets padding the pockets of wealthy buyers. 

“People started to realize that there wasn’t going to be an influx of inventory anytime soon,” said Liebman. “They had to get their lives moving, and it seemed like a pretty good time to buy.”

But the year of the market’s return also marked a period of change for residential brokerage. 

Following the National Association of Realtors’ settlement in 2023, brokerages across the country announced their own deals to satisfy the onslaught of litigation, with firms and trade associations rolling out new rules regulating how brokers do business.

The Residential Board of New York kicked off the year by removing buyer agent commission offers from the residential listing service. The organization, which has yet to settle lawsuits filed against it over similar commission-related claims, also started pushing for agents to use buyer agreements — a move that has been met with a mix of praise, apathy and confusion. (REBNY has since updated its rules to require, not just suggest, the use of buyer agreements.) 

Access the comprehensive data set supporting this ranking here. TRD Data puts the power of real data in your hands.

The new dev ebb

New development accounts for less than a quarter of the city’s sales, but the industry often looks to the latest crop of building launches as a market bellwether. 

The only problem? Sponsor launches were few and far between. 

The buildings that did launch — projects like the Reuben Brothers’ hotel-condo boutique the Surrey or Mickey Rabina’s 100-unit supertall at 520 Fifth Avenue — sold fast in the inventory-constrained environment. 

Serhant’s Kayla Lee, who led sales at The Huron, raised prices 13 times at one of Greenpoint’s only new luxury buildings. The building also set the neighborhood price record with a $5.7 million penthouse sale and the neighborhood price per square foot record at unit 7C, which sold for over $2,700 a foot.

One of the year’s top-performing buildings, Steve Witkoff’s rebranded One High Line, topped $1 billion in sales and was an example of a languishing property having its moment in the sun with a resurgence of buyers.

Corcoran’s Deborah Kern and Steve Gold, who topped the new development rankings, have been leading sales there, along with Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. 

“Inventory has been slowly getting absorbed,” said Elliman’s Jade Chan, who is leading sales at the Mandarin Oriental. “Over the past 10 years of new development, we obviously had such a big boom, and now it’s starting to dwindle down.”

Nearly every agent notching new development sales in 2024 talked about developers getting realistic with pricing. 

“The ones that sell are the ones that get more reasonable and serious about pricing,” said Shlomi Reuveni, who took over sales at 77 Greenwich in 2024 and 25 Broad Street in 2023.

Reuveni and Lee both pointed to not even entertaining projects with aspirational pricing — something that might have worked 10 years ago, but not in 2024. 

“We actually walk away from a lot of deals when the seller is very adamant about getting a price that we just don’t think is realistic,” Lee said. 

Outlook for next year

Looking to the months ahead, brokers and their executives largely projected confidence, though they acknowledged that the wave of new policy from President Donald Trump’s administration is adding a layer of uncertainty. 

“Things have been looking really good,” Liebman said. “There’s obviously nervousness around some of the potential new policies and the little shakiness in the stock market, but according to my agents, the mood is still pretty good out there.”

But others were more hesitant. While Elliman’s Eklund-Gomes team’s pre-development business is surging in the new year as developers start to move forward with the early stages of new projects, the team’s co-founder John Gomes said buyers and sellers are surely disoriented by the year’s constant news cycle. 

“When you get whiplash, it makes you dizzy. When you get dizzy, you’re unstable,” Gomes said. “The market is not stable.”

With instability at the forefront, Gomes said he doesn’t know where 2025 will fall. 

“I have to say, my crystal ball is foggy, and it’s usually not.” 

Access the comprehensive data set supporting this ranking here. TRD Data puts the power of real data in your hands.