Real estate veteran Patrick Lilly and six of his team members are leaving the Corcoran Group, one of the largest brokerages in Manhattan, for the boutique brokerage CORE, The Real Deal has learned exclusively.
Lilly, who began work at CORE today, ran a nine-person team at Corcoran. Six of his team members will join him at CORE immediately, while two others are still deciding to move, he said. One member decided to stay at Corcoran.
Adie Kriegstein, Martin Eiden, Andres Soto, Latoya Anderson, Eric Purcell and Cassie D’Agata are part of Lilly’s team who are joining him at CORE.
Lilly said he made the decision to hop to CORE because of the way the real estate industry is changing. Being a boutique firm, CORE has the ability to market his team more efficiently than a larger firm, like Corcoran, he said.
“[A] wider reach was not as necessary as it was in the past,” because most real estate buyers and sellers now go to aggregators like StreetEasy, as opposed to brokerages, for information, Lilly said.
“I am really looking forward to the opportunity to be with a company that can help me grow the marketing portion of my team. [CORE’s] going to really assist me with that and that’s going to be really great for us.”
Shaun Osher, the CEO of CORE, added that he and Lilly have known each other “for well over a decade,” since Osher’s brokerage days.
“I’m very excited to stand alongside [Lilly] and build his business,” Osher said.
The addition of at least seven brokers represents a substantial increase in size for CORE, which had 55 agents as of mid-March, according to TRD’s ranking of Manhattan’s largest residential brokerages. Meanwhile, Corcoran had 1,091 brokers.
A spokesperson for Corcoran did not respond to requests for comment.
CORE has also been on a hiring spree as of late. Earlier this month, the brokerage hired top Manhattan broker Deirdre DeRisi from Douglas Elliman and the team of Sidney Whelan and Reggie Grayson from Halstead Property.
Lilly joined Corcoran in 2009. He previously spent 13 years at Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy, which went out of business in 2009. Lilly’s team was recently ranked No. 110 on the list of the top 250 national teams of Real Estate Agents By The Wall Street Journal. Last year, the team was the Soho team of the year at Corcoran.