One of Douglas Elliman’s top teams is headed for the ‘burbs.
The Michael Lorber Team, founded in New York seven years ago by Michael Lorber and Alexander Boriskin, is expanding to Westchester and Connecticut. The two locales will join the team’s existing operations in the city, the Hamptons and Palm Beach.
The 25-person cohort’s tri-state spread comes as Lorber and Boriskin inked a new five-year deal with Elliman, following the departures of a number of prominent agents at the firm. Earlier this week, Noble Black announced that he and members of his top-producing team had left Elliman for Corcoran.
“Other companies were reaching out to us and wanted to see if we’d be interested in coming to them, but we decided we wanted to stay at Elliman,” Boriskin said, citing the firm’s marketing teams and “streamlined” referral process between markets. “We are everywhere our clients want to be.”
The Michael Lorber Team is the brokerage’s No. 3 large team in the country. Last year, the cohort logged the largest deal volume and commission income among Elliman teams of its size in New York City. It placed 23rd in The Real Deal’s latest ranking of the top resale agents across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens with $76 million in sales.
The team’s namesake leader is the son of Elliman’s longtime chairman Howard Lorber, who abruptly departed the company in October after more than 20 years.
The team’s expansion comes more than a year after it set up shop in Palm Beach, with one of its leading agents in the Hamptons, Adam Hofer, at the helm. Lorber and Boriskin also named Hofer a partner, alongside New York City-based agents Jared Halpern and Pierre Cadourcy.
Lorber and Boriskin tapped Scott Elwell, based in the company’s office in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a leader of its dealings in the regions. Elwell was previously Elliman’s regional vice president of sales in New England and Westchester, and his recent sales include a $4.5 million home in Riverside, Connecticut and a $3.9 million condo in Greenwich.
Lorber said the expansion isn’t tied to the mayoral election in New York — he’d been thinking about it long before Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary — but now the team is ready to handle an expected flow of business outside the five boroughs.
Instead, he attributed the decision to his own search for a home outside the city limits, and though he instead opted to purchase a co-op on the Upper East Side, his brief foray into those markets got Connecticut on his mind. That, plus the agent to whom he used to refer most of his suburban-seeking clients departed Elliman, leaving a gap he figured his team could fill.
“We’re trying to follow the business: Hamptons in the summer, Palm Beach in the winter, Connecticut in the shoulder seasons and New York City in between,” Lorber said. “Live where you work and work where you live.”
The team doesn’t have any listings in Westchester or Connecticut to back its launch just yet, but among its notable listings elsewhere are the $25 million Sagaponack estate owned by “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Marisa Zanuck and her investor husband Michael Green and a $25 million gilded mansion in Bay Ridge.
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