Lisa Lippman says luxury residential agents should stop trying to be friends with their clients.
Speaking on a panel discussion at 75 Wall Street, the top Brown Harris Stevens broker cautioned the younger generation of agents to steer clear of the false notion that their relationship with their clients is anything but professional.
“No offense to you out there, but there’s this blurred line,” Lippman said. “Remember, you’re talking about a lot of money. This is business. It’s business, business, business.”
Lippman’s comments are a stark contrast to the philosophy many agents seek to embody in the era of the reality TV broker. New York City agents at the top of their game appear to power their careers by emulating the lifestyles of their clients: tables at Bilboquet, vacations in the South of France and memberships at Casa Cipriani.
But Lippman, an industry veteran who routinely reigns among the top-producing agents in the city, dismissed that ethos.
“There is this concept out there that if you’re a broker to the rich and famous, you’re going on vacation with the rich and famous,” Lippman said. “Your clients don’t want to see that. They want you to work hard for them. They don’t care what you do on the weekends.”
But other brokers on the panel, one in a series of talks hosted by Platinum Properties, pushed back on Lippman’s take. Tyler Whitman, a former cast member on “Million Dollar Listing New York” and a co-founder of the Agency’s franchise in Bridgehampton, said he does “blur the line” with his clients.
“Many, many times, it has served me tremendously,” Whitman said. “I’ve also learned some difficult lessons from it.”
Whitman said he closed his first $50 million deal with a client who he, at the time, only barely knew. Her apartment had flooded, and she needed to make an emergency purchase, with a condition — “I want it to be the most fuck-you apartment that anyone has ever seen,” she told Whitman.
Whitman cleared his schedule, booked a driver for the day and took his client to showing after showing until she found a home she liked enough to buy. After viewing the property, Whitman said they got back into the car, and she asked him what he considered the dreaded question, what’s the most expensive home you’ve sold.
“Whichever one you buy today,” he recalled responding.
From there, the two bought and sold a number of properties together over the next two or three years, and their relationship blossomed from client to friend. Until one day, she dropped him as her broker over a personal disagreement.
“So it is true what Lisa says,” Whitman conceded. “Take that. It was a big lesson for me.”
Not so fast…
Since Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary, New York City’s luxury brokers have been up in arms about the potential consequences of his election — primarily a flight of wealth from the city if his plans to raise taxes pan out.
“My number-one job will be moving people from New York to Florida. Again,” celebrity broker Ryan Serhant told the New York Post, while Gaia Real Estate CEO told the Wall Street Journal that Mamdani’s plans would be “the death penalty for the city.”
But their concerns are likely overblown, as The Real Deal’s Erik Engquist noted in his latest column. Mamdani can’t raise taxes without Gov. Kathy Hochul’s approval, which she’s unlikely to grant. Plus, previous tax hikes didn’t deplete the city of billionaires, indicating that another probably wouldn’t either.
The number of billionaires in the U.S. has largely been on the rise since 2001, with the exception of a dip in 2008 during the financial crisis and in 2020 during the pandemic, according to a DataPulse analysis of the Forbes Billionaires List.
While tax haven states such as Texas and Florida have gained a large number of billionaires over the years, both still have fewer billionaires than New York and California, which have endured a number of tax increases over more than 20 years. That likely means that further tax increases could send some billionaires packing for greener pastures, but it wouldn’t be the death knell that some agents are predicting.
Other brokers have pushed back against predictions of a mass exodus.
“Anybody that says they are leaving New York ain’t fucking leaving,” Serhant’s Peter Zaitzeff told Curbed. “New Yorkers are not reactive in the long-term sense… They react in the moment out of opinions, but nobody leaves New York.”
NYC Deal of the Week
The priciest deal to land in the city register this week was a penthouse at 111 Murray Street, which closed for $28.1 million, or roughly $3,800 per square foot. Unit PH2 sold to a buyer whose identity is shielded by a trust registered to an address in Greenwich, Connecticut. The condo at the Witkoff Group, Fisher Brothers and New Valley Ventures-developed building once sought $45 million and has been searching for a buyer since sales launched in 2015.
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