A 500-square-foot home with an asking price of $675,000 makes an efficient introduction to Greg Burns’s corner of real estate. He had that listing at Montauk Shores in 2016. For buyers accustomed to counting bedrooms, the proposition required a second look. The Atlantic was doing quite a lot of the selling. A small building could occupy a very large place in someone’s imagination.
Burns works with Compass in the Hamptons, alongside his brothers Matt and Ryan. Their territory includes homes with pools, houses on the lake and places close enough to the beach to make extra rooms seem less urgent. The familiar arithmetic of real estate still applies. It just has competition from the distance between the front door and the water.
There is something useful about beginning his story with a modest footprint. Much of the language surrounding Hamptons property concerns abundance: more land, another bedroom, another place to entertain. Burns’s work at Montauk Shores offers a different question. How much house does a buyer need when the chief attraction is immediately outside it? The answer has produced some unusual prices.
Before the beach house, the building
Burns’s earlier working life involved buildings in Manhattan. At Vidaris, a green energy consulting firm, he helped New York City properties become more sustainable and worked on the LEED certification process. That places his professional beginnings among the practical demands of operating and improving buildings, before the sales particulars and summer rental calendars.
His route into brokerage began at a local Montauk agency, where he spent two years. He later worked at Sotheby’s International Realty before joining Compass. The sequence matters more than a tidy origin myth: consulting, a local agency, an established brokerage, then the team in which he works today. His career has moved through several ways of understanding a property.
He studied communications at Ithaca College. His professional network reaches across East Hampton and Manhattan and includes contractors, consultants and architects. Those are concrete connections in a business where an attractive room can prompt less photogenic questions about what it would take to change, maintain or improve a house. His background gives the property photograph a practical companion: the building behind the photograph.
Three brothers, one patch of coast
Greg, Matt and Ryan grew up in the Hamptons and developed their own client relationships before bringing their work together as the Burns Team. Their shared surname makes an uncomplicated business name. The working arrangement brings separate experience into one local practice, covering buying, selling and renting.
The team describes more than 30 years of combined experience. Its website displays $250 million in team sales volume and more than 100 sales transactions. These are collective career figures, rather than a tally of Greg’s individual deals. They help describe the scale of a family business whose actual work is conducted one property and one client at a time.
The brothers’ local connections extend to designers, appraisers and mortgage brokers. There is a pleasantly unglamorous quality to that list. A person buying a coastal house may arrive thinking about the view; the transaction eventually requires people who know how to assess the property and get the details settled. Familiarity with a community has a very practical use when it helps answer those questions.
Career figures reported by the Burns Team; no measurement period specified. These totals cover the team.
A trailer park with expensive geography
Montauk Shores began as a campsite in the 1940s. In 1976, regulars bought the property after its owners filed for bankruptcy. The land was divided into 199 parcels. Its history helps explain the oddity that later drew so much attention: a community associated with campers and manufactured homes occupying beachfront that wealthy buyers increasingly wanted.
By 2016, Burns’s 500-square-foot listing was part of a market in which access to Ditch Plains could command a substantial price. The compact dimensions were easy to state. The value attached to stepping out near a surf beach was harder to reduce to a conventional property comparison. The address did not become less desirable because the house happened to be small.
In 2017, he and Matt were associated with another Montauk Shores listing, a 550-square-foot, two-bedroom home asking $1.495 million. Greg supplied a compact explanation: “The location is still priceless.” The asking price, of course, was quite specific. The remark captured why buyers would consider it in the first place.
“The location is still priceless.”Greg Burns · Montauk Shores, 2017
The view beyond the headline
A later Montauk Shores property shows why the community cannot be understood as a single price attached to a single kind of unit. In July 2019, an 825-square-foot home listed by Burns went into contract after an asking price of $1.495 million. It stood on the eastern perimeter, rather than directly on the oceanfront.
The home had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, cedar siding, white oak floors, walnut kitchen cabinets and ipe decking. A fireplace completed the picture. Its appeal involved interior finishes and a more private position as well as the broader location. The particulars were different from those of the smaller oceanfront home, even when the asking figures happened to match.
This is where a local agent’s job becomes more interesting than repeating a headline about expensive trailers. Waterfront position, privacy, condition and floor plan remain distinct considerations. A spectacular price elsewhere in the community cannot do all the explanatory work. Buyers still have to decide which version of the place suits them, and what compromises they are prepared to make.
There was also the mansion
Burns’s work with his brothers has reached the opposite end of the size spectrum. The three represented an approximately 8,000-square-foot Montauk mansion on 7.6 acres, offered at $9.5 million in 2018. Its story ran through developer Carl Fisher and a later owner, Bobby Akin, who bought it in 1956.
The house had extensive wood paneling, local-stone fireplaces and six en suite bedrooms; the property also included a guest house with five en suite bedrooms. Matt expressed the hope that a buyer would retain and improve the main structure. It was a listing with architectural history and a question about its future, as well as a considerable amount of floor space.
Placed beside the compact Montauk Shores properties, the mansion makes the breadth of Greg’s practice visible. One buyer might be considering how much space to maintain. Another might be deciding whether very little indoor space is enough. The same coastline can accommodate both questions. The agent has to listen closely enough to know which one the client is asking.
The price a buyer actually paid
The quieter part of Burns’s record sits in completed transactions. At 7 Woodcrest Drive in East Hampton, a newly built four-bedroom house sold for $1.85 million on January 18, 2019. Greg, Matt and Ryan appeared among its listing agents, with Ryan identified as the buyer’s agent. The house offered 3,122 square feet above grade and a finished lower level.
At 4 Sulky Circle, also in East Hampton, a three-bedroom house sold for $1.995 million on April 30, 2021. The listing named the three brothers and described a home renovated in 2019, with 2,500 square feet and a heated pool. These sales put ordinary transaction details beside the more attention-grabbing beachfront stories: dates, dimensions and completed prices.
The distinction remains useful in the latest chapter. Unit 6 at 100 Deforest Road drew attention in spring 2026 with a $2.15 million asking price. The approximately 600-square-foot, two-bedroom oceanfront home ultimately sold on September 22 for $1.5 million. Greg and Matt appear on the listing record. The closing figure was $650,000 below that earlier ask, about 30 percent. Even near the ocean, an asking price begins a negotiation.
A summer measured in useful answers
Another part of the practice faces Lake Montauk. At 2 Lakeside Court, a property page naming Greg describes a four-bedroom contemporary with approximately 2,000 square feet, an expansive deck and a waterside pool. The page marks the property sold and displays $3.495 million. The setting supplies another version of coastal living, with lake views taking the place of an oceanfront position. Put alongside the Montauk Shores homes, it is a useful reminder of how much variety sits inside the word waterfront. The buyer’s preference still determines which view, and which kind of house, makes sense.
Outside work, Burns lives in East Hampton with his wife Kelsey and their three children. His interests include snowboarding and beach volleyball. They are small biographical details, but they give some shape to a life spent around places other people are trying to reach for a holiday or a change of scene.
One client’s account of a Montauk summer rental offers a more everyday picture of his work. In an April 2017 testimonial, David described a tight budget, a house that fit and an agent who kept communication moving between renters and owners. The episode concerns responsiveness and making arrangements work, rather than a record price. For the person trying to settle a summer, those details can carry considerable weight.
That is a fitting place to leave Burns: among the different meanings clients bring to a house. Some want a pool and room for guests. Some want to be closer to the water. Some need a rental that works within a firm budget. His career has moved from the workings of Manhattan buildings to the choices of people on the East End. The square footage is easy to print. Understanding what someone hopes to do with it takes a conversation.