• Emily Beare

  CORE

  
  After more than 21 years as a broker, earning more than $4 billion in sales, Beare feels this is the first time she is working in a balanced market. “Sellers have become more realistic, and buyers realize that if they see something they like, and it is well priced, they need to act quickly,’’ she explains. She just put Mariah Carey’s penthouse on the market and sold Rupert Murdoch’s apartment on Central Park South.  

• Noble Black

  CORCORAN GROUP

  
  After listing Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s penthouse at 1120 Fifth Ave. last year, “We had 52 showings in a week, 11 offers above ask,” says Black. The property emerged from the bidding war to sell $4 million above the $9.95 million listed price. He’s now selling a smaller unit that also was owned by the couple. (It’s in contract.) “It does have this incredible provenance. We had some photos of them having parties there in the early ’80s,” says Black, one of the top sellers in the country, who did $506 million in sales in 2025.
  

• Serena Boardman

  SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY

  Manhattan’s famed co-op whisperer continued to rack up big transactions in some of the Upper East Side’s most exclusive buildings. Her recent streak includes repping either the buyer or seller in three deals of $13 million or more. She also repped the owner of a Gilded Age townhouse, which traded hands for $15.5 million in January. Closing out 2025 with total annual sales of $260 million, Boardman remains an undisputed arbiter of Manhattan real estate.

• Paul Brennan and Martha Gundersen

  DOUGLAS ELLIMAN

  It was a big deal for a “Little” estate. The 7-acre Amagansett property, owned by Judy Little (widow of financier Brian Little) at 370 and 372 Further Lane had been on the market since spring 2024. But when Brennan and Gundersen introduced their buyer to the property, they had a $70 million deal inked in a matter of days, one of the largest of the year. “All the pieces fell into place,” says Brennan. “It was a very special buyer,” adds Gundersen, noting that the deal is under an NDA. While not a formal team, Gundersen and Brennan are frequent collaborators, working together to market the East End’s top estates — like the new-construction eight-bedroom East Hampton spread they sold to Sylvester Stallone for $25 million.

• John Burger

  BROWN HARRIS STEVENS

  Known for his market knowledge and discretion, Burger is one of the titans of New York’s luxury real estate market, with more than $10 billion in career sales. He recently sold a co-op at iconic building The Dakota and has the listing on late architect Robert A.M. Stern’s two-bedroom condo in the Upper East Side’s Chatham, which Stern designed, at $4.5 million.

• Janice Chang

  DOUGLAS ELLIMAN 

  Chang was the most successful broker in NYC in THR’s research, racking up the highest total sales volume of any small team at any brokerage this April-to-April calendar year — $582 million. She also closed the year’s biggest condo sale, repping both sides of the $55 million deal for 52E at 50 West 66th St., Extell’s 70-story Lincoln Square tower, plus two other units in that building for $45.4 million and $44 million. “The secret is not to do small deals,” she says with a laugh. “If you can average $10 or $15 million a deal, you don’t have to do 100.”

• Carrie Chiang

  CORCORAN GROUP

  Chiang is known for closing complex, record-breaking deals with precision and finesse. Many of her properties could serve as locations for HBO Max’s The Gilded Age, such as 973 Fifth Ave., a Stanford White-designed mansion, which she sold last year for $46 million. She says, “At the ultra-luxury level, New York remains one of the most desirable and stable places to invest globally.”

• Steven Cohen

  CORCORAN GROUP

  Cohen recently repped the sellers of a $21 million Upper West Side penthouse bought by former NBA exec Alex Lasry and sold an $11 million Upper East Side townhouse for financier David Rothschild. Despite market uncertainty  like the city’s proposed pied-à-terre tax, “the market is strong,” he says. “It’s New York City, and people want to be here.” 

• Terry Cohen

  COMPASS

  Cohen’s biggest deal last year was an East Hampton gem — known as Dune Cottage and once owned by Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill — which closed for $72 million with Cohen repping the buyer. “You have really good years, and you have years where your assistant gets paid more than you do,” says the 25-year Hamptons real estate vet. “A year and a half ago, we didn’t sell anything on the ocean. Now we’ve sold about 45 properties.”

• Gary Cooper and Preston Kaye

  HEDGEROW 

  Though their company is only 6 years old, the infamously tight-lipped Kaye and Cooper have been cleaning up in Suffolk County, closing the most expensive trade in Amagansett history this year with the sale of fashion designer Reed Krakoff’s home at 55 Dunes Lane for $43.5 million and racking up a total of $683 million. They sold an oceanfront teardown on Surfside in Bridgehampton for $28 million, and the house on that block that was in Wall Street for $32 million.  

• Bianca D’Alessio

  THE MASTERS DIVISION, NEST SEEKERS

  D’Alessio has built a booming business advising developers from site acquisition through construction, design and sales launch, posting $255 million in sales volume last year. She’s also a castmember on HBO Max’s Selling the Hamptons, author of Mastering Intentions and a weekly Money magazine columnist. “I do 20 to 30 buildings a year,” she says. “We had a lot of healthy activity in the $3.5 million to $20 million market in our projects this past year.” 

• Glenn Davis

  SERHANT

  After a successful 14-year run with Douglas Elliman, Davis joined Serhant in October. Looks like he made a good choice: He just sold three homes at 1 Morton, totaling around $30 million, including a townhouse that went to Will Arnett. He also unloaded Harry Macklowe’s 78th-floor apartment on Millionaire’s Row for just under $60 million and will be handling sales for the Mandarin Oriental Residences on Fifth Avenue.

• Tim Davis

  CORCORAN 

  Few names are as synonymous with Hamptons real estate as Davis’. The lifelong Hamptonite has spent 42 years making deals for billionaires like Vornado’s Steven Roth, Chris Burch and Harry Macklowe, negotiating more than $5 billion in East End sales. His market dominance is striking: Of seven sales on Meadow Lane — aka Billionaire’s Lane — Davis was involved in six, including 1320 Meadow Lane, a Moroccan-style oceanfront mega-mansion that sold for $40 million. “When you sell something on the ocean, it’s a different level,” he says. He’s also marketing 635 Daniels Lane in Sagaponack for $85 million.

• Mick DiStasio

  BROWN HARRIS STEVENS

  A former pro basketball player in the U.K., DiStasio has come a long way since his first sale — a fifth-floor walk-up that he had to show 300 times before it finally closed, but unlike other big earners, he still caters to relatively humble buyers. “Below $8 million is our wheelhouse now,’’ he explains.  That target is paying off. After stints at other firms, he joined Brown Harris last year and did $60 million in sales. “This year,” he says, “we are on pace to do $100 million.”

• Fredrik Eklund and John Gomes 

  DOUGLAS ELLIMAN 

  Eklund and Gomes helped make NYC real estate America’s favorite spectator sport with Million Dollar Listing New York, notching $30 billion in career sales in the process. This year, the duo — with a team of 100 agents in five states and an AI real estate specialist named Maya — have sold three West Village properties for around $20 million, and they’re marketing a $75 million spread atop 432 Park. But their biggest coups were in Montauk. “This last year, the Hamptons were gangbusters,” they say.

• Stephen Ferrara and Clayton Orrigo

  HUDSON ADVISORY TEAM, COMPASS

  “Friends are clients and clients become friends. It’s an incredibly intertwined business,” says Orrigo, who adds that there’s “no off switch,” especially since he purchased a three-bedroom condo (for $7 million) last year in a Herzog & De Meuron-designed building that also houses Hudson Advisory’s headquarters. Their team amassed an astounding $1.8 billion in sales from April 2025 to April 2026 (about 20 percent of which were off-market deals), including selling a penthouse at the Zaha Hadid-designed 520 West 28th St. building for Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Wes Edens for $26.5 million.

• Nikki Field

  SOTHEBY’S

  Not only did Field do more than a half a billion in deals in 2025, she turned the struggling super-tall Steinway Tower at 111 West 57th St. into one of the hottest properties in New York. “It was not being branded well for the type of luxury buyer it needed,’’ she notes. That all changed when she brought in developer Christian Candy for $47 million and Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec, who is about to close on a home there for $22 million. “There are now 34 billionaires in the building,” Field says. 

• Cathy Franklin

  CORCORAN GROUP

  Franklin, who totaled $376 million in 2025 sales, says one sign of how hot the market is right now is that potential buyers were willing to venture out in the bitter cold this winter. When Franklin and Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group launched sales at 1122 Madison, a Studio Sofield-designed new development, in January, “We had a blizzard and people walked in the snow to get to the sales office, which is very, very telling,” says the agent, who promptly sold the building’s penthouse for $89.5 million, the highest sale this year in NYC.

• Carl Gambino

  COMPASS

  Gambino’s first sale — Joe Jonas’ house more than 10 years ago — set him on course to be a go-to agent for high-profile clients. He went on to sell the homes of Ana de Armas in SoHo, Jessica Chastain in midtown and Louis C.K. on Shelter Island. He currently has the home of Lily Allen and David Harbour in contract for $8 million and is selling Yolanda Hadid’s farm in Bucks County. “I get to work with the most interesting, talented and intelligent people in the world,” he says.

• Steve Gold

  CORCORAN GROUP

  High-net-worth buyers, according to Gold, no longer are waiting for interest rates to fall. “It’s not really a topic of discussion anymore. Buyers have adjusted psychologically, and they’re starting to realize they might be missing good opportunities,” says Gold, who’s drawn 388,000 Instagram followers amid starring on such TV shows as Million Dollar Listing and Selling the City. Gold, who scored $422 million in sales in 2025, leased supermodel Linda Evangelista’s Chelsea loft to Keanu Reeves for a reported $45,000 a month while he was on Broadway doing Waiting for Godot.

• Sami Hassoumi

  BROWN HARRIS STEVENS

  The sale of Ronald Perelman’s townhouse at 36 East 63rd St. for $46.75 million and Oleg Cassini’s beaux arts mansion at 15 East 53rd St. for $34.4 million were two big coups for Hassoud this year. But large city homes have been her niche since she sold the Harkness house for $53 million back in 2006. “They were predicting negativity in the market,” she says, “but there is more of a demand for bigger houses in the past six months.’’

• Frances Katzen

  DOUGLAS ELLIMAN’S THE KATZEN TEAM

  Katzen’s reputation for discretion is one reason she has raked in $3.5 billion in career sales — with a celebrity clientele that reportedly includes Naomi Watts, Michael Strahan and Annie Leibovitz. So it came as a shock when the press found out that the buyer of the duplex penthouse she sold at 108 Leonard St. was none other than Sabrina Carpenter. “I sent a note to my team, saying, ‘How did this happen?’ ” says Katzen, who had signed an NDA. In the end, she was vindicated: It was the attorney’s fault. “It was a hard year,” says Katzen, who nonetheless secured a $46 million deal at 53 W. 53rd; a $17.5 million at 150 E. 78th St.; and a $15 million deal for the penthouse at Jardim in Chelsea. 

• Deborah Kern

  CORCORAN GROUP

  Kern still holds the record for the biggest residential sale in New York history, in which billionaire Ken Griffin purchased a $238 million property at 220 Central Park West from her client. Her streak continued last year, when she repped Byron Allen in the sale of a full-floor condo in the same building; it sold for $82.5 million. “The New York City market today reflects what it always has: resilience, momentum and enduring appeal,” says Kern.

• Lisa Lippman

  BROWN HARRIS STEVENS

  Lippman has a distinct advantage over many colleagues: She’s an attorney. “I’ve got a lot of discretion,’’ she explains. Her legal background also comes in handy when it’s time to negotiate. When there was a bidding war over a $29 million West Village penthouse and she was told the other buyers were going to purchase it with crypto, she didn’t fold: “I did my due diligence.”   

• Alberto Luzzi

  SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY

  The multitalented Luzzi keeps busy as an agent with Sotheby’s (with recent deals in the Financial District), as a jewelry designer (with an eponymous store in SoHo) and as a philanthropist. He’s the founder of the We Raise Hope foundation, which has built a school and hospital in a small village in Nepal that was devastated by an earthquake. 

• Frank Newbold

  SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY

  The veteran Hamptons agent and one-time business partner of Ina Garten repped the seller in the second-biggest sale on the South Fork in 2025, a 7-acre oceanfront estate on Further Lane that traded for $70 million. His listings include an 1894 carriage house (priced at $19.5 million) in East Hampton Village that’s been enlarged and redesigned by Chris Mitchell and Pilar Guzmán, authors of Patina Modern.

• Brenda Powers and Elizabeth Sample

  SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY

  “My wish list for the year is simple: smart policy, fiscal discipline and leadership that keeps New York competitive. Incentives matter. Stability matters,” says Sample. In January, she and Powers handled both sides of the $50.7 million sale of billionaire developer Stephen Ross’ penthouse at Deutsche Bank Center. 

• Abraham Sarway

  DOUGLAS ELLIMAN

  At just 28, Sarway has made a big impact. Last year, he represented three different buyers on the purchase of units at the Giorgio Armani Residences, totaling about $75 million. On the seller side, he’s representing another $25.5 million property at that Madison Avenue location. He also set a rental record with a $150,000-a-month deal at 1010 Park Ave. “Getting people to pay more over the market is no easy feat,” he says, “but when you’re able to explain the value for them, it goes a long way. People listen.

• Ryan Serhant 

  SERHANT

  From his start on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York to the launch of his TikTok-fueled brokerage in 2020 and the premiere of his own show, Selling Manhattan, on Netflix, Serhant may be the most visible man in real estate. Now, he’s leaning in to his acting chops and producing original scripted shortform programming, including his new comedy series The Broker.Age. “We have a full production company here,” says Serhant of his agency-cum-studio. It operates in every time zone around the world, 24 hours a day, pumping organic real estate-centered edutainment across multitudes of channels. Though he plans to expand to 11 states this year alone, he maintains that “bigger isn’t better — better is better.” 

• Jordan Silver

  BROWN HARRIS STEVENS

  Silver’s early career as an actor and his mastery of social media dovetailed to contribute to his rapid rise in real estate. He began making videos of apartments, and then decided to appear in them. “I used my writing skills and voice training to do the narration, and as things were picking up, I thought I should have myself in there for branding,’’ he explains. The much-followed 32-year-old, who closed more than $20 million in deals last year, just sold a penthouse at 8 Union Square South for $5 million and is creating a mockumentary reality show for Instagram titled Selling Skylines. 

• Jim St. André

  COMPASS

  Going into his 23rd year as a broker, St. André, a former professional soccer player, has parlayed his sportsman’s energy into real estate success. He is selling a historic garage being converted into condos at 125 Perry St., has a $35 million townhouse and a $57 million penthouse in contract in the same project and was involved in a $60 million apartment sale at 150 Charles St., the most expensive to close downtown. And he still finds the time to coach his local high school soccer team.

• Dana Trotter

  THE AGENCY

  A former equestrienne, the aptly named Trotter was born into the real estate business, growing up in the Hamptons with a father who was a builder and developer and a mother who worked in sales at Sotheby’s. At 22, she got a license to help her mom out and wound up loving it. This year, her office sold two of the top 10 deals in their market — oceanfront parcels on iconic Lily Pond Lane for $67 million and a home off Hook Pond for $37 million. “There isn’t a lot of inventory, but if something is priced right, it gets multiple bids,” she notes.

• Cody Vichinsky

  BESPOKE REAL ESTATE

  In 2014, brothers Cody and Zachary Vichinsky launched Bespoke Real Estate in the already crowded Hamptons. They instantly stood out with a data-driven approach and a business model catering exclusively to the richer-than-rich. They say: “We structured our business more like an investment bank. We didn’t focus on accumulating massive amounts of agents. We wanted massive amounts of resources that we could pass on to our clients.” It’s been a winning model, with Bespoke closing more than $12 billion in deals over the past 12 years, with an average sale price of more than $27 million. Bespoke has expanded to South Florida, California and the Caribbean, but the Hamptons remains the heart of their operation, and last year was another standout, including a $59 million deal for 115 Beach Lane.  

• Greg Vladi

  SERHANT

  Four years ago, Vladi was showing rentals to NYU students. Now, the 35-year old former tennis player has sold a 22-unit condo project in Greenpoint and closed a $16 million townhouse on East 66th Street — in addition to selling a Tribeca loft off-market for $2 million in one day. “It was loaded with memorabilia like an original gun from Terminator 2 and the scissors from Edward Scissorhands,” he recalls.  Sadly, the props didn’t come with the apartment.  

• James Weiss

  CORCORAN GROUP

  At just 30 years old, Weiss totaled more than $100 million in deals in 2025 and is approaching the half-billion mark in career sales. “I think New York is going through a renaissance period  with all these membership clubs and restaurants opening,” says Weiss, who works with several clients in the crypto and venture capital space. “We actually have a lot of people from L.A. who want to try out New York for a year to see if they want to make the jump.” 

• Greg Williamson

  DOUGLAS ELLIMAN

  Williamson has two full-time jobs: selling multimillion-dollar NYC homes — last year he found a buyer for Ellie Kemper’s $7.49 million four-bedroom on Central Park West — and giving back. Williamson is producer and founding partner of Love Rocks NYC and the Soho Sessions, both raising funds for God’s Love We Deliver. Co-produced with designer John Varvatos and Nicole Rechter, benefit concert Love Rocks has raised nearly $65 million over 10 years, funding 6.5 million meals for New Yorkers with life-altering illnesses. Past performers include Cher, Alicia Keys, Paul Simon and Keith Richards. Total fundraising has reached $100 million. 

  This story appeared in the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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