Company News

First, some backstory: When I joined Howard Hanna Rand, I had been based in Briarcliff Manor for almost 20 years. My company had other office locations in Pelham and Carmel, but I hung my hat near my home. This past December, I was asked to move a bit north and manage the Yorktown and Carmel […]

The conventional wisdom for people with a house they own who want to buy a new home has always been that they sell their current home before they made an offer on a new home because no seller wants a “contingent” deal on their sale. Also known as a Hubbard Clause or a sales contingency, […]

Most weeks in our training we publish a “sexy stat” about the company. It might be an obscure, cool thing like how our sign appeared in the movie Wakefield with Bryan Cranston carrying it, or some milestone. This past April was a nice accomplishment.  On April 15th, we broke our record for properties put under […]

Writing the year’s wrap up used to be my New Years eve ritual, but with the scale of the job these days it’s impossible to quantify everything by midnight on 12/31. So let’s dive into my happy summary of a great year for the brand on the first business day of the new year. The […]

This marks the first time I have not posted this update on New year’s eve, so it feels weird to wrote a piece about 2020 in February 2021. However, I’ve got great reasons. 2020 was by far the most surreal year of most of our lives. When the pandemic restrictions began in March, one had […]

Spoiler alert: Best year ever by every metric we employ.  Last year’s summary was wrapped up thusly:  In years past, I’ve made numerical predictions, but this year I’m going to be a bit more coy. I’m looking for good agents who want to grow their practices the right way. My role is evolving from chasing […]

I am linking to a short video I posted on LinkedIn recently that acknowledged the firm’s milestone in exceeding $100,000,000 worth of real estate sold in our “home field” MLS for the first time in our history. The MLS scene here is very fragmented, and we belong to several systems (7 to be exact, all […]

In one corner, we have the Hudson Gateway MLS- weighing in at over 1300 firms, 1650 offices, and 13,000 agents. In the other corner, we have J. Philip Real Estate, weighing in at about 80 active residential agents and 2 Westchester offices, with a 3rd in Putnam. Comparing the first half of 2018 to that […]

You learn quite a bit about people when you see how they handle it when life throws them a curveball. For Liz Koski Jessup, who I am delighted to introduce as one of our newest associates, meeting me was one in itself. I’ll explain. A few months ago, one our esteemed associates, Tana McGuire, asked […]

“So, have you written the State of the Firm blog post yet?” I was just asked. Basking in the glow of the Christmas break, with three teenagers here and an 11 year old out with friends as I type this, I laugh because as much as I love writing this stuff, time is a rough […]

Back in 2015 the firm was contacted by a producer in Hollywood asking to see our sign for possible use in a movie they were producing. You might be wondering why they’d contact little old J. Philip Real Estate, but we’ve had a fortunate knack for getting found over the years. In news stories, it […]

Not many entries in this journal are “firsts” for me anymore, and this is a great pleasure to share. One of the firm’s very newest agents is actually the daughter of one of our established agents. It is very tempting for me to wax nostalgic on how young Imelda Cruz Avellan was when I first […]

This past Friday, February 9th the firm had its annual award Gala at The Briarcliff Manor to celebrate a successful 2017. We’ve held the event annually since 2015, and the list of award recipients has grown as our collective professional acumen has risen. While I cannot do each of the dozens of recipients justice in […]

J. Philip Real estate is now closing more than a transaction every business day. The dust is still settling in tabulating January 2018’s final numbers. However, even with perhaps a few straggler status updates for closings we’ve had our best first month ever, with 27 sales for the 31 days of January. Given that the […]

I always want my firm to be chosen, and that doesn’t just go for consumers. It also goes for licensees who are looking for the right brokerage at which to build their practice. So you can imagine my happiness when a past client joins us as an agent. That’s exactly what happened when Geraldine Bien […]

As a kid growing up in Ossining in the 1970s and the long shadow of Urban renewal, I had a first row seat to the decline of Downtown Ossining. The stately old buildings that punctuated centuries of progress, commerce and history were reduced to a crumbling, blighted row of vacant shells. Sadly, in the clearing […]

Some “welcome” posts are more fun than others. This is one of those, because I have known this person for a number of years and have always like her.  Please join me in welcoming Shaun Manning to J. Philip Real Estate! Shaun is part of the “Class of ’83” group I referred to in my […]

Every December 31 since I have journaled the firm’s progress, I have summarized the prior year and chronicled growth, in both numbers and maturity of the brand. 2017 was, in almost every metric, not just the company’s best year, but it also saw an advance in the caliber of people behind the numbers.  First, the […]

I am delighted to (belatedly) announce that as of December 1, 2017, Gloria Hernandez has added the J. Philip Real Estate Briarcliff office to her existing managerial responsibilities. Gloria is already managing our Pelham Center, and it was a no-brainer to have her take the helm in Briarcliff. This raises the number of agents that […]