Corcoran and Elliman dominate NYC new development sales

New developments made up nearly 30 percent of New York City’s total residential sales volume last year, and two firms scooped up the lion’s share of that market.

To measure the firms’ success in this market segment, The Real Deal drilled into the dataset of 58,000 deals from our recent overall brokerage ranking, but this time looked specifically at new developments. 

More than 45 percent of all new development deals in 2022 were brokered by The Corcoran Group and Douglas Elliman — 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

Corcoran generated $3.6 billion in sales volume through 1,179 sides. This accounted for nearly 40 percent of its total volume last year. Elliman’s $2.9 billion in sales volume was generated through 1,065 sides, which was just over 35 percent of the firm’s total volume.

Besides being perennial big dogs in the city’s overall residential market, Corcoran and Elliman carry the advantage of having long-standing, dedicated divisions focused on wooing developers and marketing their new buildings.

Corcoran merged with the Sunshine Group to form Corcoran Sunshine back in 2005. Elliman Development Marketing partners with Knight Frank Residential.

The No. 3 firm for new development sales, Compass, also has a team dedicated to marketing new buildings, but grabbed only a 10 percent market share last year, amounting to $1.4 billion in sales across just 658 sides. This made up only 16 percent of Compass’ total volume last year.

Brown Harris Stevens, the biggest independently owned brokerage in the city, came in fourth with $986 million in volume — a 6.86 percent market share and 23 percent of its total haul last year.

Thus far, the new development ranking tracks perfectly with TRD’s overall brokerage ranking, with those four firms occupying the same slots as in the broader list. But the No 5 spot went to Nest Seekers, which closed nearly $347 million in new development sales volume, which accounted for more than 58 percent of the firm’s total last year.

Sotheby’s International Realty, which took the No 5 spot in the overall ranking, placed tenth in this subset. This accounted for less than 5 percent of its overall sales volume.

Collectively, the top 10 firms in the ranking handled nearly 71 percent of all new development sales in the city last year.

This is one of the hundreds of data sets available on TRD Pro — the one-stop real estate terminal for all the data and market information you need.

For inquiries about how to obtain the underlying data set referenced in this story, email research@therealdeal.com