The 36 Most Powerful Real Estate Brokers in New York

The city’s top realtors keep luxury prices soaring in the Big Apply, as Zohran Mamdani watches closely.

For all the hand-wringing about a sluggish American housing market, the luxury sector seems to be doing just fine, especially in New York, especially at the very top. In 2025, more city condos, townhouses and coops sold than in the previous year. The median sale price was higher, and inventory, while tight, improved. Rents, meanwhile, continued to climb above previous records. From mid-2024 through 2025, New York had the best performing housing market in the country, according to the Federal Reserve. A-number one. Top of the heap.

“The New York City real estate market in 2025 was a surprisingly strong one,” says StreetEasy senior economist Kenny Lee. “As mortgage rates continued to moderate this fall, buyers and sellers both rushed to the market. With more homes on the market, buyers had more options and the city saw more sales.”

At the same time, another sterling year for Wall Street gave buyers the cash they needed to bite off the best pieces of the Big Apple. “The rich just keep getting richer,” notes Donna Olshan, president of the NYC brokerage Olshan Realty Inc. “In 2020, the top one percent had $31 trillion, and now they have over $50 trillion. So the luxury market is being fed by very rich people.”

That might explain why so many of the realtors surveyed were aghast at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed pied-à-terre tax and rent-freeze plan. But for now, demand for an address in the Five Boroughs remains robust. And as every agent knows, high demand and tight inventory mean one thing: big deals. For our 2026 hot list of the top real estate agents in New York and the Hamptons, THR crunched numbers, surveyed the city’s top brokerages and scoured public records for celebrity sales and blockbuster deals. 

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