Douglas Elliman Lures Top Texas Producer

UPDATED April 5, 2022, 4:15 p.m.: Douglas Elliman has lured a top Austin agent into its fold, just over a year since it expanded into Texas’ capital city.

Top producer Stephanie Nick-Hurd will leave Kuper Sotheby’s to join Douglas Elliman, which entered the Austin residential real estate market in April 2021. Nick-Hurd has logged more than two decades in the business and has lived in Austin since 1996. She has earned more than $600 million in residential sales, according to a Douglas Elliman spokesperson. Nick-Hurd operates primarily in the luxury submarkets of Central Austin, Lake Austin, West Lake Hills and Barton Creek.

Nick-Hurd is a member of the Austin Luxury League and has been featured in REAL Trends/The Wall Street Journal Report and the Austin Business Journal. She’s been a member of the Austin Board of Realtors since 2005 as well as belonging to Austin Luxury Network, the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing and the Million Dollar Guild.

Douglas Elliman continues to make waves as it increases its profile in the state. The New York company, which ranked second on the Real Deal’s 2021 list of Manhattan’s top residential brokerages, expanded into Texas with the opening of a Houston office in 2019. Offices in Dallas and Austin followed in 2021, as did a farm and ranch division for rural properties in the state. The company went public late last year, splitting from parent holding company Vector Group in December 2021.

Kuper Sotheby’s entered the Austin luxury market, which has become both increasingly active and increasingly tight, in 2014.

Nick-Hurd will be based out of Douglas Elliman’s Austin office at 100 Congress Avenue. She’ll work on the sale of five luxury villas in West Harbour Marina, the newest development on Lake Austin in more than 30 years. The development features avant-garde “dockominiums” — which are luxury, water-based condos of a sort for owners’ trophy watercraft. The agent also works with investors throughout the country to buy, renovate and sell investment Austin-area properties.

Nick-Hurd brings much of her client base with her from Kuper-Sotheby’s, of course. According to a press release, those included “influential and widely known people who value her confidentiality, experience and honesty.”