In advance of her ICNY appearance, Inman caught up with Freedman to get her take on recent headlines, hot button topics and to find out what she’s looking forward to at the event.
Inman Connect
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Many businesses in this industry come and go, but Brown Harris Stevens has withstood the test of time. Launched first in 1873 by Charles Brown in Manhattan, the firm has New York in its bones, through and through.
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CEO Bess Freedman has been leading the brokerage since 2018 with a steady hand, guiding it through uncertain markets, significant mergers, industry sea changes and more.
This week, the exec will be speaking with Era Ventures Managing Partner Clelia Peters on stage at Inman Connect New York to discuss the current agent-brokerage environment, what’s happening in New York City now and more.
In advance of that appearance, Inman caught up with Freedman to get her take on recent headlines, hot-button topics and what she’s looking forward to at the event. Here’s what she had to say, edited for length and clarity.
Inman: To start, I wanted to ask if there’s anything new at Brown Harris Stevens that you wanted to talk about?
Bess Freedman | Brown Harris Stevens
Freedman: Well, just today we hired Raphael De Niro [son of actor Robert De Niro], and in New York City, he’s probably one of the biggest names in real estate. He’s one of the most successful agents. He was at Elliman for more than 20 years.
His announcement went out today, and I can just tell you that it’s been beyond. Our agents are so happy, and we’re getting so much feedback from the industry as a whole because he’s so loved and so successful. He’s like the hero of real estate. So it’s just a huge win for us.
Congratulations. And in terms of other planning that you’re doing for the year, anything that you want to share?
We launched a new website recently and we’ve been hiring a lot of talented, new execs and agents, which has been wonderful, and our focus is really going to be leaning in more to what we do best. We’re totally redoing our broker specialist program and an announcement went out the day before yesterday.
So we are the only brokerage in New York City, singular, that manages buildings. We have almost 400 of them, and we assign our agents as specialists, so they appear on the maintenance, they work with the managing agents. It’s really important. And so we’re redesigning that whole program, and our agents are very excited about that. That’s launching this year, and it’s going to be huge for us in New York.
Very nice. I also wanted to ask you about some news headlines recently. We saw the big Compass and Anywhere merger close earlier this year and were curious about your thoughts on how that went down, or if there were any surprises?
I mean, consolidation is nothing new in our industry, but I think the scale of this deal is significant and obviously worth paying attention to, which we are. I think it happened at a record speed. I think agents were shocked at how quickly it closed.
And large mergers are many times driven by a need to sort of satisfy Wall Street expectations rather than what’s best for consumers and agents. We are in such a high-touch business, and the question is, if you’re a fiduciary and you’re working for agents and helping them, when you have this sort of huge, mammoth thing and you have all these shareholders and debt and issues and challenges, I think a lot gets mixed up in that.
We did a merger with Halstead, as you know, much smaller scale and different. But I will share with you that it was enormous to undertake that. It took so much time, and it was a much smaller scale, but we’re merging cultures, systems, professionals, and that was enormous and stressful, so I can only imagine … like, that’s one grain of sand, and they’re the beach.
It’s very complex, and I think it’s hard to maintain a clear culture in that environment. It’s big, and that works for some people, and it’ll be interesting to watch and see how it unravels, but it’s certainly something that is significant. It’s one of the biggest that we’ve seen and in such a fast time.
I give Rob Reffkin and [Compass senior executive] Gordon Golub incredible credit for their ability to grow it and make it as big as it is and create something that they had a lot of haters and naysayers who kept saying they were going to fail. And so they deserve to get credit for their accomplishments.
Okay. Transitioning to the market, I feel like we have seen some more positive indicators for agents lately, but what do you see as the biggest challenge for agents right now in the market today?
I think we’re still plagued by inventory, affordability, complexity. I think the chaos of world events is a distractor. But, the market has been very resilient, given everything that’s going on. There are some markets that are just really constrained for inventory.
Like I was just speaking to one of our agents in Connecticut, and they are in a drought of inventory. In a place like Connecticut, like Greenwich or Darien, New Canaan, it’s not for lack of willingness to work hard and do business; it’s that there’s just no inventory for people to sell. So in markets like Connecticut, the challenge remains a lack of inventory.
We have decent inventory [in New York], and we have pretty good movement. Volume has been good, and the luxury market has really outperformed. So that’s been good.
The discussion about Mamdani and the mass exodus has proven to be untrue. So at least we haven’t seen that. So, the challenges are similar to what they’ve been with, you know, sort of rates and inventory and prices, and they’re going to just take some time.
Right. And thinking about rates, what kind of movement do you expect there in the next year?
I think Fed Chairman Powell, who’s done an incredible job holding the line and doing what’s best, I think he’s watching the data and making decisions based on data, which is what that independent body is supposed to do. And if he’s looking at jobs and inflation, depending on those things, we’ll cut or not.
I really believe in his ability to determine what’s best, as he has done an incredible job at keeping the country out of a recession and getting inflation down, even though he had to do a lot of cuts in a very short period of time. I think he’ll make those decisions, and I trust him to decide, even though I think he steps out in May, and then we’ll have a new Fed chair.
[On Friday, President Trump nominated Kevin M. Warsh as the next Fed chair.] And maybe the next Fed chair will have a different view on things. But I think today, [Powell] has done a really good job.
Turning to Inman Connect New York, is there any kind of message you would like to give attendees or advice about how to kind of navigate the event if they’ve never been before?
I would definitely look at [the agenda] and see who’s gonna be where. There’s somebody named Sahil Bloom, who I love, who is going to be speaking. I would find who you want to hear speak or meet and go to that [talk] and shake hands with the person. I have been to Inman events where somebody is speaking that I’ve never heard of before, and I wait, and I go and talk to them after, and I create a lifelong relationship.
So lean into things that are interesting topics that you care about, people that you respect and admire, and be open to meeting new people. And walk around. Real estate is a relationship business, and you have an opportunity to be in a sea of relationships and connect with people, talk to people, have fun with it, and enjoy.
Any other thoughts that you wanted to share today?
I think it’s important to stay on top of, and we’ve been vigilant about, this private listing network that’s become the topic of conversation everywhere. I think that we have to make sure that we’re giving our sellers good advice and protecting them because you are not supposed to instruct the market — the market is there to serve us. And so I think we’ve been very cautious about it.
It seems like a very manufactured narrative, and we’ve always sold things privately for people, but we do it really privately — not where there are photos on a website with another thousand agents who can see it, but with some phone calls. So I just think things have gotten conflated, and we just have to be careful that we’re educating our consumers.
Do you have more sellers now who are curious about private listing networks?
I was at a meeting with all of my executives, and I said, ‘Are any sellers asking for this?’ and not one executive said they were. I’ve asked agents, not one agent. I asked Fred Peters, Barbara Fox and Hall Wilkie, who’ve been in the industry for more than 40 years, and they said they’ve never had a seller ask them for a private listing network.
We believe broad exposure benefits consumers and supports fair housing principles, which is crucial. But when a seller calls us and is a celebrity or going through a divorce that everybody knows about, and says, ‘Look, I need to sell this. I don’t want anybody to know I’m selling it,’ we say, great, we’ll take care of it.
They sign an exclusive with us where we say no marketing involved. We have the exclusive. And we call top agents at firms we know might be working with the right buyers for this. And we quietly get them in.
So that’s a private listing, a quiet listing, because it’s to protect the sellers’ privacy. A private listing network is something else, and it’s being misconstrued. So I think that people are not being clearly educated on what helps them.
You want maximum exposure if you want to get the highest price, and if you want privacy, you don’t want any exposure, except for your trusted advisor to reach out to the right people to come and see the property, which is what we do and have always done.
I just don’t believe in building a sub-marketplace. It creates fragmentation and distrust.
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Email Lillian Dickerson
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