Two of the city’s top residential brokerages, @properties and Coldwell Banker, have long jostled for the title of highest-grossing firm. Last year, it was @properties in a landslide.
The local firm did $9.6 billion in sales volume in the Chicago area, compared to Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage’s $7.3 billion, Crain’s reported, citing Real Trends figures. Baird & Warner was third with $5.6 billion. The Chicago-specific statistics were culled from Real Trends’ recent survey of the 500 largest residential firms in the country.
In The Real Deal’s own March 2019 ranking of Chicago residential brokerages, @properties topped the list with $6.54 billion in sales volume. Coldwell was also second on that list, with $4.57 billion in volume and Baird was third with $2.92 billion.
Despite a softening Chicago housing market in 2019, @properties’ overall sales volume was 5.5 percent higher than the previous year’s $9.1 billion, according to Real Trends. The firm, led by Thad Wong and Michael Golden, was the only top-five Chicago brokerage that reported higher sales, Crain’s noted. Coldwell’s volume cratered by $2 billion, and Baird’s dipped 6 percent.
The overall numbers are likely to slide this year, as the coronavirus crisis has already upended the housing market with Illinois under a statewide stay-at-home order through at least the end of the month.
While the Chicago area saw a jump in housing contracts signed in March, most of those were in the beginning of the month, according to a recent report from Midwest Real Estate Data. Contracts plummeted in the last weeks of March, signaling a likely dropoff in April. [Crain’s] — Alexi Friedman