New York City’s residential power players aren’t just closing deals — they’re also shaping the future of the industry and the city.
Earlier this year, The Real Deal highlighted the 100 most influential players in New York real estate, with a notable contingent from the residential sector. The group includes upstart disruptors, social media darlings, political advocates and industry lifers.
The leaders
One of the most talked-about operators on the list is Robert Reffkin, a Goldman Sachs alum who founded the brokerage Compass in New York in 2012 and has since grown it into the nation’s largest residential real estate conglomerate.
Reffkin took on a new title in January, chairman and CEO of Compass International Holdings, after he closed a $1.6 billion deal to merge with Anywhere Real Estate, which includes brands such as Sotheby’s International Real Estate and the Corcoran Group, led by CEO and president Pam Liebman, another name on TRD’s list.
Unlike Reffkin, Liebman has spent her entire career both in real estate and with Corcoran. She joined the brokerage as an agent when she was just 23 years old and climbed the corporate ladder until the firm’s legendary founder, Barbara Corcoran, tapped her to lead the company after her departure.
Both Liebman and Reffkin got their start in New York City, though their spheres of influence have spread far beyond it.
Though the Compass competitor, Brown Harris Stevens, operates in other markets, the 150-year-old brand’s deepest ties are to New York, and its leader, CEO Bess Freedman, has held tightly to the city’s old-school residential market principles.
The talent
In recent years, Freedman has spoken out against Reffkin’s efforts to push private listings and the rising influence of reality TV within the industry and its effect on consumers’ perception of real estate. She’s publicly clashed with celebrity broker Ryan Serhant, who turned stardom on the little screen and a substantial social media following into a roster of high-end clients and eight-figure deals.
Serhant launched his own brokerage in New York in 2020 and has since expanded it to 13 states. He and other agents with his company star in Netflix’s “Owning Manhattan,” giving them a real estate celebrity onramp akin to how he originally grew his profile on Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing New York.”
Serhant’s fame was born alongside Fredrik Eklund’s, a Swedish-born agent who co-leads one of the largest and most prestigious teams in the luxury sector with his business partner, John Gomes. The two met while working at Core Real Estate and later founded the Eklund-Gomes Team at Douglas Elliman.
Also featured on the Bravo series was Corcoran’s Steve Gold, who more recently appeared alongside Eleonora Srugo in Netflix’s “Selling the City.” Gold and his team were counted among the city’s top new development agents last year, in part, for selling condos at One High Line, where he led sales with Corcoran’s Deborah Kern. Kern also led sales at Vornado Realty Trust’s 220 Central Park South, once dubbed “the world’s most profitable condo.”
While Noble Black isn’t among the agents who launched their careers on reality TV, it wasn’t for lack of trying. After a failed audition for the third season of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice,” Black was hired as a consultant on the show before becoming an agent. He started selling homes with Corcoran and later joined Elliman, where he grew his team into one of the largest and most prolific at the firm.
Last year, Black and some members of his team returned to Corcoran, leaving behind other Elliman loyalists, including Frances Katzen.
The disruptors
Also known for his fidelity to his firm is Leonard Steinberg, Compass’ chief evangelist and one of its top agents in New York. Steinberg has been outspoken in his defense of Reffkin’s efforts to disrupt the industry’s status quo, including his fight to expand the use of private listings within the brokerage.
At a brokerage like Compass, with polemical leaders like Reffkin and Steinberg, Jason Haber fits right in. The Compass agent is known less for his dealmaking, though he does his fair share, than for his politicking, both within the industry and in the broader political landscape. After tumult at the National Association of Realtors, Haber and The Agency’s Mauricio Umansky launched their own national trade group, the American Real Estate Association.
At the top of the city’s resale game is Compass’ Hudson Advisory Team, founded by Clayton Orrigo and Stephen Ferrara in 2017. For the last two years, the cohort has dominated TRD’s ranking of the leading resale brokers in New York.
The elite ambassadors
As firms like Compass get bigger and bigger, Adam Modlin’s shop, the Modlin Group, remains as boutique and luxury as brokerages come. The top agent runs a lean operation, with just eight agents in New York and a smaller cohort in the Hamptons.
He’s known for working on some of the largest deals in the city, including the $46 million sale of an Upper East Side townhouse last year, which he worked on with Corcoran’s Carrie Chiang.
Among the new development queens in New York is Alexa Lambert, who joined Compass after the brokerage acquired the longtime local brokerage, Stribling. Lambert, who also runs a resale book of business, is known for heading developer Miki Naftali’s Manhattan projects, including buildings in progress on the Upper East and Upper West sides and Gramercy.
On Billionaires’ Row, Nikki Field has emerged as a titan after taking over sales at 111 West 57th Street, which now has only one unit remaining. Field, whose client roster includes billionaire Jeff Bezos, rose to top broker status during the condo boom in the 2010s and now runs a megateam at Sotheby’s International.
Also at Sotheby’s is Serena Boardman, an Upper East Side native who has developed a reputation as the broker to know for prospective buyers of the city’s most elite co-ops. She, along with Brown Harris Stevens’ Lisa Lippman, has ranked among the top co-op dealers in the city.
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