Last year, broker Kyle Blackmon, 34, sold former Citigroup Chairman Sanford Weill's penthouse on Central Park to 20-something Russian heiress Ekaterina Rybolovleva for $88 million—the largest residential transactions on record in Manhattan. Also in New York, 29-year-old Caroline Bass found fashion personality Tim Gunn a penthouse duplex on Upper West Side. In 2010, Soly Halabi, a 29-year-old agent who is a junior-college dropout, brokered a deal for Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to buy a 20,000square-foot mansion across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $44 million. And this month, Josh Flagg, a 27-year-old broker in Los Angeles who stars on Bravo's reality show "Million Dollar Listing," got the listing for Hollywood producer Gavin Polone's $15.9 million house in Beverly Hills, having just sold a house a few doors down for $6.3 million.
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Noah Rabinowitz for The Wall Street Journal "A decade ago, I didn't know too many kids who said 'I want to be a real-estate agent when I grow up.' Today, I hear that all the time," says Dottie Herman, chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman. "Being an agent is a whole different ballgame today—you have to know the financing and the market better because home buying is much bigger part of every American's investing strategy." The National Association of Realtors' Young Professionals Network—primarily a group for younger brokers—has seen its membership swell in recent years to 29,000 today, compared with 18,000 members in 2009. And Ms. Herman says the number of brokers under 30 in her Manhattan office has doubled. Enlarge Image