How to find a good real estate agent on Staten Island.

Ask for specifics, not adjectives. A good agent can tell you how many homes they closed in the last year, in what neighborhoods, and at what price range. Look up their verified reviews on Google, and ask for the names and numbers of recent clients you can actually call. On Staten Island, ask how many of their deals were on the Island itself versus other boroughs. I have nearly a decade full time, $40M+ closed across Staten Island and Brooklyn, and 90+ verified five star Google reviews - and I am happy to connect you with past clients.

Ask how long they have worked full time, how many deals they closed last year, and how well they know your specific neighborhood. For sellers, ask about their pricing strategy, marketing plan, and average days on market. For buyers, ask how they find off market homes and how they handle multiple offer situations. Then ask how they communicate and how fast they respond. The answers tell you whether you are hiring a full time professional or someone doing this on the side.

Watch for an agent who overpromises on price to win your listing, then pushes for a reduction two weeks later. Be wary of anyone who is slow to respond, vague about their track record, or unfamiliar with your neighborhood. Part time agents, no verified reviews, and pressure to sign fast are all warning signs. A good agent gives you honest numbers up front, even when they are not what you hoped to hear.

It matters a lot. Staten Island is a patchwork of very different neighborhoods - Great Kills, Todt Hill, Tottenville, and the North Shore each price and sell differently. A local agent knows the school zones, flood maps, commute realities, and which blocks command a premium. That knowledge translates directly into a sharper list price for sellers and a better read on value for buyers. An agent who mostly works other areas will miss the details that move the number.

A team means someone is always reachable and no detail slips, which matters most during offers and inspections. Joseph leads the Bridge and Boro Team, so you get his strategy plus the coverage of a team behind every showing, call, and deadline.

They are lead-generation businesses first. Agents pay for placement or hand over a slice of the commission when a referral closes, so a top spot proves marketing spend rather than results. Use them to build a shortlist if you like, then do the real check off-platform: pull the agent's Google reviews, ask for the last ten Staten Island addresses they closed and the list-to-sale ratio on each, and confirm they work the Island full time rather than part time from another borough.

There is no magic number, but look for volume built steadily over years, real first and last names, and reviews that describe specific situations rather than one-line praise. A dozen reviews all posted in the same week is a red flag. Joseph has 90+ verified five star reviews at a perfect 5.0, accumulated across nearly a decade of full-time work on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, and you can read every one of them on his Google profile.

It is free and it takes about two minutes. Go to the New York State Department of State eAccessNY public license search and enter the agent's name. You will see their license type - salesperson, associate broker, or broker - the license status, the expiration date, and the brokerage they are affiliated with. Confirm the name on the license matches the person you are talking to and that the brokerage matches the sign on their card. Disciplinary actions are published by the Department of State's Division of Licensing Services, and you can request the record. It is also worth checking whether the agent is a REALTOR, which means they belong to the Staten Island Board of Realtors and are bound by its Code of Ethics, giving you an additional complaint channel that a non-member agent does not have. None of the agent directory sites do this check for you. Joseph is a licensed New York State Associate Broker and a SIBOR member, and is happy to give you his license number to look up before you ever meet.

It usually means they paid, or the site scraped public data and built a page to sell leads against it. Expertise.com and HomeGuide generate city pages algorithmically and monetise the contact form. Angi charges for placement and for each lead. None of them verify a single closing. Treat those pages as a starting list of names, then do the verification yourself - license lookup, closed sales, Google reviews with real names attached - and you will find the ranking order has almost nothing to do with who is actually good on Staten Island.

No, and it is worth being blunt about this because those firms rank highly for exactly this search. They are established Staten Island companies with real market share, and each has excellent agents. Each also has brand new agents and part-timers, and the sign in your front yard does not tell you which one you got. Brokerage size buys you a marketing budget and a name buyers recognize. It does not buy you the specific person who prices your home, runs your open house, and negotiates your inspection credits. Interview the agent, not the office: ask for their personal 12-month closed count on Staten Island, their list-to-sale ratio, their average days on market, and three recent client phone numbers.

Selling from a distance changes what you should screen for. You need an agent who will physically handle things you cannot: meeting the estate attorney, coordinating the clean-out, letting in the inspector and the appraiser, checking on a vacant house, and handling the DOB and certificate of occupancy questions that come up on older Staten Island homes. Ask specifically whether they have closed estate or probate sales before, whether they can work with your attorney directly, and whether they can do a full video walkthrough so you can see the property's condition honestly. Ask how they handle remote signing. Joseph has closed a number of estate sales for out-of-state heirs and will tell you on the first call whether the timeline you have in mind is realistic.

This is the question almost nobody asks, and it is where deals quietly go sideways. Ask it directly: when you are away, who shows my house, who answers the buyer's agent, and who calls me. A solo agent with no coverage plan means your listing goes dark for a week, and that week is often the first two weeks when buyer attention is at its peak. Joseph works under the Bridge and Boro Team specifically so there is continuity - the same people, already inside your file, already aware of your price floor and your target closing date. Make the agent answer with a name, not a reassurance.

No, and it is worth being blunt about it. Neuhaus, Tom Crimmins, Wonica, Homes R Us, Leader Properties, Prodigy and Connie Profaci are all legitimate Staten Island firms, and every one of them has strong agents and weak ones under the same roof. All of them list to the same SIBOR MLS with the same syndication out to the portals. What actually varies is the individual: how they price, how they negotiate a counter, how fast they return a call on a Sunday. Compare people on their own last twelve months of closed Staten Island units, list-to-sale ratio and median days on market. A logo is not a credential.

Exclusive right to sell means the agent earns the commission no matter who produces the buyer, including a buyer you found yourself. Exclusive agency means you owe nothing if you truly sell it yourself with no agent involved, but you owe the full commission if any agent brings the buyer. Most Staten Island listings are exclusive right to sell, and there is a practical reason: an agent who might get cut out at the finish line is far less likely to spend real money on photography, video and paid promotion. If you have a specific buyer already circling, say so before you sign and ask for that person to be carved out by name for a set number of days. That is a normal, reasonable request and any straight agent will do it in writing.

Three to six months is the normal range on Staten Island, and six months is not unreasonable for a house that needs a real marketing runway. What matters more than the length is the exit. Ask directly whether the agreement can be cancelled, by whom, with how much notice, and whether you owe anything if you cancel. Get the answer in writing before you sign, not after you are unhappy. Also ask about the protection period, the window after expiration during which the agent still earns a commission if a buyer they introduced comes back. Joseph's position is simple: if the relationship is not working, you should not be trapped in it, and a listing that needs a contract to hold it together was mispriced or mismarketed in the first place.

Not automatically, and the reason is arithmetic rather than loyalty. On a $800,000 Staten Island house, a half point of commission is $4,000. If the cheaper agent nets you even one percent less on the sale price because the marketing was thinner or the negotiation was softer, that is $8,000 - you paid $4,000 to lose $8,000. The number that decides whether an agent is worth their fee is their list-to-sale price ratio and their average days on market against the borough average, not their rate card. That said, a high commission does not buy competence either. The right approach is to ask every agent you interview for their last ten Staten Island closings with list price, sale price and days on market, then divide. Compare that number across agents first, and only then compare fees. An agent who will not produce that data is telling you something. Ask Joseph for his at 917-905-2541.

Agent websites routinely display brokerage-wide or team-wide inventory in a way that reads as personal production, so a page full of sold homes is not proof of anything by itself. There are three checks that take about ten minutes. First, ask for the addresses and look each one up - SIBOR records, public deed records on ACRIS, and the listing history on Zillow or Redfin will all show who the listing agent of record was. Second, ask whether they were the listing agent, the buyer's agent, or a team member on the file, because those are very different jobs. Third, ask for three past clients from the last twelve months and actually call them. Named Google reviews with real first and last names, tied to real transactions, are harder to manufacture than a sold gallery. Joseph has 90 verified 5.0 Google reviews and will give you the addresses and the references without being asked twice. Call 917-905-2541.

A licensed real estate salesperson has completed 77 hours of coursework and passed the state exam, and must work under a broker. An associate broker has met a higher bar: additional coursework, a broker's exam, and documented transaction experience, but chooses to work under another broker's firm rather than run their own. Realtor is not a license level at all, it is membership in the National Association of Realtors, which brings a code of ethics and MLS access but says nothing about experience. So when you see all three words on a business card, the one that reflects earned experience is associate broker. Joseph is a licensed associate broker and a Realtor, and he leads the Bridge and Boro Team. The useful follow-up question for any agent is not which title they hold, it is how many Staten Island homes they personally closed in the last twelve months.

Be careful. There are honest people doing two things well, but a dual role creates a real conflict at exactly the moment you need clean advice. If your agent also earns on the loan, they have a reason to steer you toward a particular lender rather than the one with the best terms, and a reason to keep a shaky buyer alive rather than tell you the financing is weak. New York requires affiliated business arrangements to be disclosed in writing, so ask for that disclosure and read it. The safer structure is an agent whose only compensation in your deal is the commission, who then refers you to two or three independent lenders and lets you compare. Ask any agent directly: do you or your brokerage earn anything on my transaction besides the commission? A clear yes with the disclosure attached is fine. A vague answer is the problem.

Understand what you actually signed up for. When you fill out a cash offer form or a home value widget on one of those sites, your contact information is usually sold to whichever agent or investor pays for that ZIP code, and in many cases that agent owes the referral company twenty five to thirty five percent of their commission on your deal. That does not automatically make the agent bad, but you were not matched on merit, you were matched on who bought the lead, and the referral fee is money that is no longer available for your marketing budget. You are allowed to interview that agent alongside two others you found yourself. Ask directly whether they are paying a referral fee on your transaction and what percentage. A straight answer tells you a lot.

Ask for the last twelve months of closings as a list, with address, list price, sale price and days on market, and then look at the distribution rather than the total. An agent who closed eighteen homes between 500 and 700 thousand is not automatically the right person for a 1.4 million dollar house, because the buyer pool, the marketing and the negotiation are different at the top of the market. The reverse is true too. Volume in the ZIP code is easy to advertise and easy to misread. What you want is three or more closings within roughly twenty percent of your expected price, in the last year, ideally in a comparable property type. Every closing is public record, so you can verify the list against ACRIS. An agent who hesitates to hand over the list has told you the answer.

Active listing count is the most-quoted number and one of the least useful. It tells you how much business an agent won, not how much they closed or what it sold for. Two agents with eight active listings each can be running completely different businesses: one has eight homes priced right and moving, the other has eight homes sitting because they bought the listing with a high number. Ask for the sold list instead, with list-to-sale price ratio and days on market, and ask how many of those active listings have had a price reduction. A high active count with a high reduction rate is a warning, not a credential. Joseph carries a deliberately smaller number of listings at a time because a Staten Island listing needs an agent who can answer the phone on it.

They mean the agent took a course and paid a fee. That is not nothing - it shows someone invested in learning - but no designation is a substitute for local closings, and none of them are licensing requirements in New York. What actually matters here is narrower and easier to verify: sales in your ZIP code and your price band, SIBOR membership, an active New York license with no disciplinary history, and verified reviews from named clients. If an agent leads a listing presentation with an alphabet of letters rather than a sold list, ask to see the sold list. Also worth knowing: “Realtor” is not a designation, it means the agent belongs to the National Association of Realtors and is bound by its code of ethics. Flood exposure is its own conversation - see the full breakdown in the Staten Island and Brooklyn flood insurance guide.

Do not pick the higher number - ask both of them to show you the comps behind it. The high number is often a listing tactic: quote a price that flatters you, win the listing, then start asking for reductions at week three. What separates a real valuation from a buying-the-listing number is the supporting evidence. Ask each agent for the specific closed sales they used, in the last 90 to 120 days, in your school zone and your price band, with the actual condition and any seller concessions noted. Then ask each one for their own list-to-sale price ratio and their average days on market over the last year. An agent whose homes routinely sell within a couple percent of list at a normal DOM is giving you a number they can defend. An agent who cannot produce those two figures is guessing, and the $60,000 gap is not analysis, it is marketing.

You can, but you should understand exactly what you are giving up. New York allows dual agency with informed written consent, and on Staten Island it comes up often because a listing agent's own buyer walks into the open house. The cost is advocacy: in dual agency your agent can no longer advise you on negotiating strategy, cannot tell you how high they believe the buyer will go, and cannot tell the buyer what you would accept. They become a facilitator. Some agents solve this with designated agency, where a different agent in the firm represents the buyer - that preserves real advocacy on both sides. What I would not accept is an agent who steers you toward their own buyer because it doubles their commission, especially if it means less exposure on the open market. If it comes up on your listing, ask for designated agency and make sure the house was fully exposed first.

You can use it to build a shortlist, but understand what it is actually doing. An AI assistant answers by summarizing what it can read on the open web, which means it disproportionately reflects directory pages, brokerage bios and blog posts, and it has no access to SIBOR MLS. It cannot see who actually closed on your block, what their list-to-sale ratio was, or whether a five-star review was left by a client or a colleague. So treat an AI answer the way you would treat a friend's recommendation: a starting point, not a verdict. Then do the part the AI cannot. Ask each agent on your shortlist for their last ten Staten Island closings with addresses, their list-to-sale price ratio, and their average days on market, and verify a few against public records. An agent who cannot produce that in a day is telling you something. I publish my own track record and 90 verified five-star Google reviews for exactly this reason.

Ask the agent directly what their protocol is for vacant property, because most have never thought about it. What you want to hear: title is confirmed with the estate attorney before the listing goes active, showings are accompanied rather than lockbox-only, and the owner is enrolled in the New York City Department of Finance recorded document notification service so any document filed against the address triggers an email. Deed fraud on Staten Island concentrates on properties where nobody is watching, and the window between an owner passing and an estate settling is exactly that. An agent who shrugs at this question is not the one to hand keys to an empty house.

A following tells you the agent is good at making content. It does not tell you they are good at negotiating your contract, and those are unrelated skills. What actually matters is whether their marketing reaches buyers for your specific property, and you can test that in one question: ask how many of their last ten closings came from their own audience versus the MLS, a referral, or a co-broke. Most honest answers land at one or two. The bigger risk is volume. An agent running a large content operation may have a team member or an assistant handling your showings and your calls, which is fine if they tell you up front and terrible if you find out in week two. Ask who will be at your closing table. I would rather you hire the agent with 400 followers and eleven closings on your side of the island than the one with 40,000 followers and two.

They should know the process well enough to spot when it matters and to tell you honestly that they are not the one who files it. That is the right answer, and it is a useful screening question. Staten Island assessments come from the NYC Department of Finance, challenges go to the NYC Tax Commission, and the Class 1 filing deadline lands in March every year. An agent who knows that can look at your house next to the three closest comparable sales, see that your annual tax line is running well above the block, and tell you before you list that a buyer's lender is going to price that into what they can offer. An agent who has never looked at the tax line at all will price your house against the comps and then be surprised when the deal comes back on affordability. What you do not want is an agent who claims they will handle the grievance themselves. That is work for a tax certiorari attorney or a licensed representative. The skill you are hiring for is recognizing the problem early, not filing the paperwork.

It is one of the cleanest tests there is, because it separates agents who negotiate from agents who just relay messages. When a seller asks to stay in the house for a few weeks after closing, a weak agent says yes to keep the deal calm. A good one asks the questions that decide whether it works: does the buyer's lender allow the delay, and for how long, since most conventional loans cap owner-occupancy delays around 60 days. What is the daily rate. How much sits in escrow, and what specific conditions release it. What happens if the seller does not leave on the agreed date, which is the scenario nobody wants to discuss and the one that actually costs money. Then they put all of it into the contract rather than a side email. Ask any agent you are interviewing to walk you through a post-closing possession they handled. If they can describe the escrow amount and the per-diem from memory, they have done it. If it turns into a vague answer about how it usually works out fine, they have not. Here is how the arrangement actually works.

Given how many Staten Island houses have a finished basement or a mother-daughter setup, this is one of the fastest ways to separate a real local agent from one who works off a script. Ask three questions. Which community districts on Staten Island are in the Local Law 126 pilot. What is the difference between Local Law 126 and Local Law 127. What does the Plus One ADU grant actually cover and roughly how much is available. An agent who works this market should know that the December 2024 City of Yes laws created a 10-year compliance path for existing occupied basement units in 15 designated districts, that Local Law 127 sets the citywide ADU building standard going forward, and that Plus One grants run up to $125,000 for qualifying homeowners. If you get a vague answer about how it depends on the DOB, you are talking to someone who will also be vague when your buyer's attorney raises the certificate of occupancy. I wrote the whole thing up at /legalize-basement-apartment-nyc-2026/, which you are welcome to use as the answer key.

No, and an agent willing to do it is telling you something about how they will handle the rest of your transaction. New York licensees have a duty not to make material misrepresentations, and marketing a three-family use on a two-family certificate of occupancy is a misrepresentation that follows you personally as the seller into the disclosure and into any post-closing claim. What a careful agent does instead is describe what physically exists in factual terms, disclose the C of O accurately, and separately explain the legalization path under the Local Law 126 pilot so the buyer can price the upside honestly. That approach gets you the value of the space without creating a liability. If an agent's pitch is that everyone on Staten Island does it this way, remember that everyone is not the person whose name is on the deed when a buyer sues.

Transaction count, essentially. Portal badges of that kind rank agents by closed volume or closed sides inside the portal's own dataset, sometimes weighted by price. They do not measure list-to-sale price ratio, days on market against the local median, how many of an agent's deals fell apart before closing, or whether a single client would hire that agent twice. An agent can land in a “top 1%” bucket by doing very high volume at thin margins with a large support staff, which is a fine business and may be exactly wrong for a seller who needs someone on their own property. Use the badge as a signal that the agent is active, then ask the questions the badge cannot answer: what was your average list-to-sale ratio last year on Staten Island, how many of your listings needed a price cut, and can I call your last three sellers.

Ask for the date on the data. There is a lot of Staten Island market content online that reads as current and is not - national directory guides in particular quote days-on-market and median price figures that were captured a year or two before you are reading them, because nobody goes back to update hundreds of city pages. The test is simple and it works on any agent: ask what the median days on market was in your specific price band last month, and ask where the number came from. A full-time Staten Island agent pulls that from SIBOR in about a minute and will tell you the date range they ran. Someone quoting a round national figure with no source is repeating something they read. The same test works on price: ask for the last five closed sales near you, by address and close date.

It is a reasonable starting point and a poor finishing point. The SIBOR directory confirms someone is a licensed member in good standing, which is genuinely worth verifying, but membership is a dues question, not a performance one. The directory does not rank agents, does not publish anyone's list-to-sale ratio, does not show how many deals fell apart, and does not distinguish the agent who closed thirty Staten Island houses last year from the agent who renewed a license and closed none. Use it the way you would use a bar association listing: to confirm the person is who they say they are. Then do the part the directory cannot do for you. Ask for the last ten closed sales by address and close date, ask what the list-to-sale ratio was on those, and ask how many were in your price band. Any full-time Staten Island agent can pull that from SIBOR in a few minutes, and the ones who hesitate are telling you something.

It tells you the team produced volume inside that franchise, and very little else. Franchise awards are internal rankings scored on gross commission or closed sides among offices flying the same flag. They do not compare that team against the rest of Staten Island, and they do not measure list-to-sale ratio, days on market against the local median, how many deals collapsed between contract and closing, or whether the person who wins the award is the person who will actually sit at your kitchen table. Large award-winning teams frequently route listings to junior agents once the listing appointment is over, which is the single most common complaint sellers bring to a second agent. The question that cuts through it: who specifically handles my listing, who shows it, who calls me after each showing, and who is in the room at closing. Get the name, then look that name up.