Corcoran lands top spot in first-ever UrbanDigs NYC brokerage rankings

The Corcoran Group rallied in the first quarter of 2022  as the top brokerage by signed contract volume in Manhattan and Brooklyn, according to the real estate analytics firm Urban Digs’ inaugural quarterly rankings of the top 20 brokerages in New York City, Inman has learned.

Released on Thursday and shared exclusively with Inman, UrbanDigs’ “Contracts-Signed Top Brokerage Rankings” show that The Corcoran Group inked $2.54 billion in contract volume in the first quarter of 2022 with a total of 1,183 contracts signed in Brooklyn and Manhattan. UrbanDigs pulled data for the list from the Real Estate Board of New York and the Brooklyn MLS.

Compass came in a close second, with $2.51 billion in contract volume and a total of 1,404 contracts signed during the quarter.

Douglas Elliman rounded out the top three and clocked in as the only other brokerage to breach $1 billion in contracts signed in the first quarter in Manhattan and Brooklyn, with $1.87 billion in contracts signed across 903 contracts.

UrbanDigs’ New York City brokerage report, which will be released quarterly and include monthly breakdowns, will include brokerages’ contract data — not closing data — in order to paint a more real-time picture of the market, the analytics firm told Inman exclusively. Closings can often take weeks or months to complete.

“Tracking the dollar volume of signed contracts gives us a more real-time look into the money flowing into real estate,” UrbanDigs co-founder John Walkup told Inman in an email. “Volume typically leads price, so tracking the value of contracts signed gives us insight into the ‘pressure’ behind price trends. Additionally, breaking down contract signed dollar volume by brokerage helps illuminate how the competitive landscape is changing.”

Additionally, the firm plans to break the reports down by luxury and non-luxury units by the second quarter of 2022.

By borough

Filtering the data by New York City borough illuminates a few noteworthy data points.

In Manhattan, for instance, Compass netted the greatest contract dollar volume signed, at $1.85 billion across 921 contracts. Corcoran was close behind at $1.74 billion over 690 signed contracts.

Corcoran, Compass and Douglas Elliman, meanwhile, closed out the quarter significantly ahead of competing brokerages by signed contract volume.

The remaining top brokerages were largely the same as the combined Manhattan and Brooklyn list with a little shuffling.

Nest Seekers fell nine spots in Manhattan while RE/MAX currently has no franchises in Manhattan. Douglas Elliman, Brown Harris Stevens, Sotheby’s International Realty, Serhant. and Coldwell Banker Warburg also took top spots.

In Brooklyn, the top players remained in place, but across the board brokerages performed similarly in terms of contract volume distribution. Walkup said that’s what is revealing about the localized nature of Brooklyn real estate.

“There’s a clear power-law distribution, but it was interesting to see that Brooklyn had a wider dispersion of deals across the brokerages,” Walkup told Inman. “To me, this suggests that the local area ‘feel’ of some Brooklyn neighborhoods is still best captured by local brokerage offices. Of course, we expect the top of the list to be populated by the usual suspects (such as Corcoran, Douglas Elliman, and BHS). But, it’s the mid-size/boutique-size that is most telling.”

Momentum Real Estate and Ben Bay Realty, two boutique brands that don’t have national recognition, are in the mix among Nest Seekers International and Keller Williams, names more familiar to consumers nationally.

UrbanDigs’ rankings don’t take into account properties that aren’t listed on the MLS or any other off-market deals, which could impact overall rankings. The data also only includes resale and new-development residential deals, not commercial ones.

In 2021, Compass became the top performing brokerage by transaction volume with about $251 billion in sales volume, according to RealTrends 500 list released in March. Douglas Elliman also made it into the top 10 brokerages by sales volume at no. 6 with about $51 billion in sales volume.

T3-Sixty’s Mega 1000 rankings, released Thursday morning, named Compass and Douglas Elliman as the no. 1 and no. 6 brokerages in the nation by sales volume, respectively.

Email Lillian Dickerson