Leslie Garfield Launches Townhouse Data Dashboard

Leslie Garfield is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a makeover.

The specialty brokerage, known for trading in townhouses, has rebranded its website and launched a new data dashboard focused on its primary property type.

The 20-person shop teamed up with data startup Perchwell to design the interface, called the Townhouse Index. The publicly available platform shows users a snapshot of the latest townhouse closings using data from the city register, its own back-end data and other sources such as Streeteasy.

The dashboard displays metrics based on data spanning the last 12 months, with new deals added to the analysis as they land in public records and are vetted by the team. It also features a map of townhouse closings for the year, color-coded by price range, in neighborhoods across Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, where Garfield primarily operates.

Using the index, users can track metrics like annual changes in closing volume and the number of transactions on a neighborhood level. Other charts show quarterly closing prices since 2021 and sales volume separated by properties’ width.

Take the West Village, the location of some of the city’s largest townhouse deals, for example. Select the neighborhood from the dropdown menu, and you’ll see 27 townhomes have sold in the last year for a combined more than $330 million — almost double the volume from the previous year. The priciest deal was for a multi-family home on Morton Street, which traded for $35.5 million in July.

Pretsfelder said the firm worked with developers for roughly two years before taking the index live, focusing on data integrity to ensure deals that aren’t strictly townhouses or “arms-length” transactions don’t wind up in the feed. He said he hopes the index will serve as a resource for not just consumers, but also academics and journalists.

“Truth builds trust,” Pretsfelder said. “Brokers don’t always have the highest reputations in the world, and we really try to deliver honest credible advice to our buyers.”

The dashboard’s launch comes as other brokerages are also staking claims on their own corners of the data market. In New York, Donna Olshan of Olshan Realty is known for her weekly report on luxury contracts, and now Douglas Elliman’s Eklund-Gomes Team is pushing its own Olshan-style report in South Florida and another weekly dispatch in New York.

Other firms have taken it a step further. Earlier this month, Compass, which has long emphasized its focus on technology, launched a consumer-facing platform for clients to track the status of their pending sale. The interface comes as Compass is amassing its own off-market listings database, called private exclusives, which only other Compass agents can view.

“Data has been a little bit commoditized in the marketplace,” Pretsfelder said, adding that Garfield’s townhouse specialty, and the data that comes with it, differentiates the index from other data tools on the market.

Though Garfield isn’t gleaning a referral fee from its provider network, the firm is following in the footsteps of other brokerages that have leaned into what they describe as a holistic universe. The Agency, founded in Los Angeles, has long marketed itself as a lifestyle brand and has recently added an art advisory component designed to serve its collector clients.

Demand for townhouses, which historically competed with large co-ops, surged during the pandemic, as buyers sought outdoor space and distance from their neighbors, especially for turnkey townhomes.

In the first half of 2022, the number of townhouse sales increased more than 50 percent compared to the same period in the previous year, with dollar volume up 35 percent, according to data from Garfield.

“All of a sudden, people didn’t want to have to worry about whether my building is going to restrict access to my kids’ friends, or am I going to have to go into an elevator with someone who may be sick,” Pretsfelder said.

The townhouse market’s growth has stabilized since the pandemic-era buying frenzy, though key metrics are trending up. In Manhattan last year, the average price per square foot rose 10 percent annually and 9 percent in Brooklyn, according to a report from Garfield. The number of sales in Manhattan dipped 6 percent year-over-year in 2024, while transactions in Brooklyn rose 6 percent.