TOP AGENTS
Brooklyn’s best
A first-ever ranking of the borough’s brokers, including the ‘data nerds,’ the former stay-at-home moms, and the one-time Manhattan-only agents
T
BY CANDACE TAYLOR he business of selling Brooklyn real estate has changed drastically in recent years. When Brooklyn native Karen Heyman first started selling Dumbo lofts in the 1990s, Manhattan residents refused to take the subway there. “I used to have to send my driver over the bridge to pick people up,” recalled Heyman, now a senior vice president at Sotheby’s International Realty. Today, “those same people are now on their third or fourth Dumbo apartment.” Brooklyn brokers have seen their business (and wallets) expand exponentially over the past decade, as a trickle, and then a flood, of resettling Manhattanites ventured across the East River. In particular, agents have benefited hugely from the condo boom of the mid2000s, which greatly upped Brooklyn sales prices (downturn notwithstanding). For example, the priciest listing currently on the market in Brooklyn is a $23.5 million triplex penthouse in the ClockTower Building, a former cardboard factory converted to condos by developer David Walentas; a penthouse at Richard Meier-designed On Prospect Park is priced at $5.1 million.
Meanwhile, large Manhattan brokerages have infiltrated a borough once dominated by small mom-and-pop firms. Despite these changes, there’s still little reliable data about Brooklyn’s real estate companies, or their salespeople. Last year, Brooklyn’s last two remaining multiple listing services — the Brooklyn New York MLS and the smaller Brooklyn MLS — officially merged. The new system, known as the Brooklyn New York MLS, has a membership of nearly 3,000 agents. But large Manhattan firms like the Corcoran Group and Prudential Douglas Elliman do not participate, because they belong to the larger, Manhattan-based Real Estate Board of New York. Despite the scarcity of reliable information, The Real Deal has decided to go where no publication has gone before: a ranking of Brooklyn’s top real estate brokers. Just as in Manhattan, data about Brooklyn brokers’ closed sales is not publicly available. Instead, TRD looked at which brokers were marketing the most property at press time, with the help of the real estate listings database On-Line Residential. Using this information, we compiled a list of the 25 residential brokers who are currently selling the most Brooklyn real estate. Below is a glimpse at the top 10.
their listing at 299 West 12th Street recently sold to actress Jennifer Aniston (though Heyman said she can’t comment on that deal).
No. 2: Mordechai Werde and Michael Ettelson, Prudential Douglas Elliman
Alan and Karen Heyman at 70 Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights, where writer Truman Capote once lived.
No. 1: Karen Heyman and Alan Heyman, Sotheby’s International Realty This brother-sister team is marketing some 19 Brooklyn properties worth nearly $60 million, including several multi-million dollar apartments at the ClockTower. Yet it’s somewhat ironic that the duo is the borough’s top-ranked team, since Sotheby’s doesn’t have a Brooklyn office. Instead, the Heymans — who grew up in Brooklyn — work out of the firm’s 379 West Broadway office in Manhattan, though about 70 percent of their deals are done in Brooklyn. The reason, Karen Heyman explained, is that when she started selling real estate in 1993, the Brooklyn market was far less pricey. So despite her Brooklyn roots, she 52 July 2011 www.TheRealDeal.com
worked in Manhattan. Then one day, she was representing the seller of a loft in Hell’s Kitchen with stunning views of the Hudson River. The only way he would sell, she recalled, was if she found him a new apartment with a comparable view. She’d heard about a new condo known as the ClockTower opening in the then-rough neighborhood of Dumbo, so she took her client there. “We walked around the neighborhood — well, there was no neighborhood — but he thought it was totally cool,” she said. She ended up selling him the apartment, and another one in the ClockTower, the first day sales at the building officially started. Heyman’s Brooklyn business “blossomed after that,” she said. In 2004, her brother Alan joined her in the business, and four years lat-
er, they sold the 14th-floor penthouse at the ClockTower for $7 million, setting a record for Brooklyn’s most expensive condo sale. Currently, they’re also marketing the borough’s most expensive townhouse: 70 Wil-
Mordechai “Mordy” Werde and Michael Ettelson got their start in new developments working for developer Shaya Boymelgreen, who built more than 2,400 apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan during the boom. “We did most of [Boymelgreen’s] sales in Brooklyn,” recalled Ettelson, who said he and Werde are partners who share all of their listings. That helped them get work on other new projects. “It definitely gets your foot in the door for meetings with other developers,” Ettelson said. Of course, the Boymelgreen association could have the opposite effect now that his real estate empire is in tatters amid some 30 lawsuits filed against him. But the duo says their relationship with the embattled developer hasn’t hurt them. “I don’t know too many developers who [didn’t] have problems” during the downturn, Ettelson noted. Besides, he added, “there were a lot of other brokers repping his deals.”
“I felt like I had discovered some piece of heaven. I immediately moved to Brooklyn Heights.” Cheryl Nielsen-Saaf, Corcoran low Street, the five-story Greek Revival in Brooklyn Heights where Truman Capote once lived. The 9,000-square-foot house is on the market for $15.9 million, or more than $1,700 per square foot. Of course, the Heymans still make time for some Manhattan business. For example,
Currently, Werde and Ettelson, who both live in Crown Heights, have listings for more than 50 Brooklyn homes worth nearly $43 million. That includes the 250-unit condo conversion BellTel Lofts in Downtown Brooklyn. The duo took over the project a year ago from Manhattan super-broker
PHOTOGRAPH OF THE HEYMANS FOR THE REAL DEAL BY MAX DWORKIN