Ranking the Top Brokerages on the Upper East Side

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Manhattan’s Upper East Side is the biggest slice of the city’s residential pie. Its $7.6 billion in home sales last year accounted for 23 percent of the island’s total, so success there has a major impact on a brokerage’s performance overall.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the top five firms in Upper East Side sales were also the top five brokerage firms citywide, according to The Real Deal’s rankings, though the order is shuffled a bit.

To measure brokerages’ success in selling homes in the park-to-river Upper East Side area, TRD tapped into the dataset of 58,000 deals from 2022 in our citywide brokerage ranking, looking specifically at sales in the Upper East Side proper, Lenox Hill, Yorkville, Carnegie Hill and Upper Carnegie Hill.

Compass, which ranked No. 3 citywide, took the top spot on the UES with $1.3 billion in sales — 17 percent of total volume for the area — across 649 deals. Douglas Elliman was second with $1.17 billion in volume and 547 transactions, followed closely by the Corcoran Group with $1.16 billion and 383 deals.

Brown Harris Stevens placed fourth with nearly $968 million in volume across 452 deals, and Sotheby’s International Realty rounded out the top five with just over $661 million in sales in 211 transactions.

The average prices achieved by most of the top 10 firms ranged from $2 million to $3.4 million, but two boutique firms stood out with exceptionally high averages. No. 8-ranked Modlin Group averaged over $8.2 million across its 12 UES sales last year, while ninth-place Leslie J Garfield, a townhouse-focused brokerage, averaged nearly $7.8 million on its nine deals.

Resales accounted for 85 percent of the money spent on Upper East Side homes last year. On resales alone, Elliman ranked first with $1.08 billion in volume and Compass was second at $1.06 billion. Off-market deals totaled $891 million.

Nearly 72 percent of the homes sold were co-ops, but those sales amounted to less than 55 percent of total volume.

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