The 114-year-old New York brokerage sells the top 5% of the housing market - and is now betting a leadership shake-up, a global alliance and a hard turn toward profitability can keep it there.
In 1911, a young broker named Douglas L. Elliman opened a small office on Madison Avenue with an unfashionable idea: that New York's well-off would give up their townhouses for apartments - if a single firm would both sell and manage them properly. The bet took. More than a century later, the company that carries his name is one of the largest residential brokerages in the United States, and it still lives where he pointed it: at the very top of the market.
Douglas Elliman does not sell starter homes. Its stated focus is roughly the top 5% of any market it enters, and the numbers reflect it. The firm's average sale price sits around $1.8 million, and in 2025 its agents moved close to $39.8 billion in property. What began as a wager on Manhattan apartments is now a national brand with a foothold from the Hamptons to South Florida to Beverly Hills - and, increasingly, beyond the United States.
At its core, Douglas Elliman is a residential real estate brokerage. It represents buyers, sellers and renters, and earns most of its money the way brokerages have for a century - on commissions when a deal closes. That makes two variables central to the whole enterprise: how many productive agents the firm can attract and keep, and how valuable the properties they list are. Elliman has chosen to compete on the second lever as hard as the first.
Around the brokerage sits a set of supporting businesses. Douglas Elliman Development Marketing handles the sales, leasing and marketing of new residential buildings - the glossy sales galleries and pre-construction campaigns behind luxury towers in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. There is a commercial arm, a title and settlement business, and a mortgage operation. For much of its modern history the firm also ran Manhattan's largest residential property-management business, though it sold that unit in 2025 as part of a broader cleanup.
The through-line is that Elliman treats a luxury transaction as a production rather than a listing. A high-end sale is marketed with photography, print, events and a global referral network - a level of effort that only makes sense when the price tags justify it.
"Douglas Elliman is a business that is in the expertise business. We're doubling and tripling down on being the thought leader and the expertise leader, and training our agents."Michael Liebowitz, Chairman & CEO
Elliman's customer is, plainly, the buyer or seller of an expensive home - and the people who build those homes. On one side are individuals and families trading in high-value properties, often high-net-worth and internationally mobile. On the other are developers and sponsors who need a firm to launch, price and sell an entire new building. The brand is engineered to be legible to both: a name that a first-time luxury buyer recognizes and that a developer trusts to move inventory.
That customer base is served by more than 7,000 agents across roughly 113 offices, concentrated in New York City, Long Island, Westchester and the Hamptons, then extending to Florida, California, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Washington, D.C. area.
Selling an ordinary house is mostly a matter of price and paperwork. Selling a $10 million penthouse is a marketing and trust problem. The pool of buyers is small, often private, sometimes on another continent, and rarely browsing public listings. The seller wants discretion and a number; the buyer wants to know the property is real, priced sensibly, and worth the story attached to it.
Elliman's answer is to be the connective tissue: local agents who know a specific market cold, backed by a brand and a referral network that can quietly surface the right buyer wherever they are. In 2025 the firm leaned further into this with a private, exclusive-listings approach - a way to market trophy properties to a controlled audience rather than the open web, following industry-wide changes to how listings are shared.
Elliman's main rivals - Compass, The Corcoran Group, Sotheby's International Realty, Coldwell Banker and The Agency - all chase the same affluent client. What distinguishes Elliman is less a single feature than a posture: a long-standing luxury identity, a heavy investment in brand and content, and a global alliance that gives a New York listing a London audience.
The clearest structural difference is that partnership. Rather than build its own offices across Europe and the Middle East, Elliman aligned with London's Knight Frank, letting each firm feed the other high-end referrals. The result is reach without the overhead of ownership - a network effect bolted onto a domestic brokerage.
Revenue comes mostly from commissions, supplemented by development-marketing fees and the ancillary title and mortgage businesses. For a long stretch, Elliman was a subsidiary of Vector Group, a conglomerate best known for tobacco. That changed on December 30, 2021, when the brokerage was spun off as an independent public company and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DOUG. Vector shareholders received one Elliman share for every two they held; the tobacco business stayed behind.
Independence brought scrutiny. As a standalone public company, Elliman's revenue - around $995.6 million in 2024 - and its quarterly losses became public property. That pressure sets up the most consequential chapter of its recent history.
On October 22, 2024, Howard Lorber - who had steered the company for roughly two decades and led it through the spinoff - retired as chairman and chief executive. The board named Michael Liebowitz, a director since 2021 with a background across finance, insurance and hospitality, as chairman and CEO the same day. J. Bryant Kirkland III became chief financial officer. The transition was, by the accounts of the trade press, abrupt.
What followed was a deliberate cleanup. Over 2025 the company trimmed senior staff, sold its property-management business, redeemed convertible notes, and pushed a message that the brand's real asset is agent expertise. The financial turn was real if modest: after years of losses, Elliman reported full-year net income of about $15.2 million for 2025 on that near-$39.8 billion of sales volume. The first quarter of 2026 slipped back into a net loss, a reminder that the turnaround is a work in progress rather than a finished story.
Elliman's expertise is concentrated in the practical knowledge of specific high-value markets - what a particular Hamptons hamlet or Miami Beach block will bear, who the likely buyers are, and how to package a property for them. It backs that local knowledge with technology and content: Elliman Studio, launched in 2019, gives agents a CRM plus marketing and website tools, and Elliman Magazine puts the brand in national newspapers and sales galleries. The firm also publishes closely watched market reports that get cited well beyond its own listings.
"This isn't just an expansion - it's a transformation that positions Douglas Elliman as the truly global brand it is."Michael Liebowitz, on launching Elliman International
In the broad American brokerage landscape, Elliman is a perennial top-tier player - historically ranked among the top three to five firms nationally by sales volume. But its truer position is narrower and sharper: it is one of the defining names in U.S. luxury real estate, alongside Sotheby's and Compass, and it has spent 114 years building the brand recognition that a luxury business runs on. The launch of Elliman International in June 2025 signals where it wants to go next - from the country's most recognizable luxury brokerage toward a genuinely global one.
The company even found its way onto television: the Netflix series Selling the City, which premiered in 2025, follows Douglas Elliman agents through New York deals - proof, if any were needed, that the brand and the business have become hard to separate.