Brokerage Platinum Properties Moves Well Beyond Its FiDi, Residential Roots

Dezireh Eyn was just out of college when she co-founded Platinum Properties with her brother, Khashy, and, by all accounts, they cut their teeth on the job.

Now, 20 years later, Khashy is taking the role of chairman with the operations on the brokerage side of the business under Dezireh as CEO and Teresa Stephenson as president, a transition that makes Platinum a female-led firm.

Over the years, Platinum has branched out beyond Manhattan’s Financial District, the geographic territory where it first carved an unlikely presence in residential brokerage, and where its offices at 100 Wall Street are located. Today, the company has found itself thriving in other habitats such as North Brooklyn.

“We were young — you know, I was in college, Khashi was just two years out — and what we had going for us was that we were just really hard-working with a mindset of like, ‘Let’s just jump into this and do what we need to do to succeed,’” Dezireh told Commercial Observer. “I think it was around 2015 where I identified one of our top agents, Teresa Stephenson, as an ideal partner to join the top and really help work with me to create those operations and the systems and the processes and the organization in general.”

Prior to this period, the company ran on elbow grease, Eyn said, and room for growth was limited, even as the headcount grew alongside leasing and sales transactions.

“We were in commercial leasing, commercial sales, residential leasing, residential sales. We also had an investment arm where — back then, it was focused mainly in investing in multifamily and now is a little bit more in proptech — there was a lot happening,” Eyn said. “We had this moment when we were working with one of our consultants where we discussed that it would be impossible to grow the company effectively if we treated all [lines of business] as one.”

Platinum had a staff of five with 35 agents prior to COVID-19, according to Eyn. During the pandemic, the firm doubled the number of agents and tripled its staff.

“Vision No. 1 is agent growth without losing culture, so doing that in a very selective way,” Eyn said about the company’s ongoing goals. “We’ve just gotten to a point where we have more business than we can handle with our current agent count. Also, there’s a focus on training our agents to be better at their own business development. We have moved one of our staff to a business development role, so all he does is coach agents on that every week. There’s a roundtable.”

Platinum is also navigating new guidelines for buyer agreements that require a higher degree of disclosure about closing cost and fees, a change that springs from a 2024 settlement between the National Association of Realtors and home sellers. There’s also New York City’s pending ban on tenants having to pay broker fees if the landlord hires the middleman. The ban could go into effect in June.

In the meantime, Platinum is dividing the kingdoms of residential, commercial and investment, with commercial leasing taking on more listings in the first quarter of 2025 than what was seen in all of 2024. That’s the division that Khashy Eyn will oversee as chairman.

Platinum was well-positioned for success from the beginning, spying opportunities in a Financial District that had not quite begun its transformation from a purely corporate zone that shut down around 6 p.m. into a 24-hour neighborhood.

“When we first started the firm, it was such a different tone,” Eyn said of the Financial District. “You used to have to advertise in Tribeca and try to get people downtown. We used to offer to pay for people’s commute just to come see the units because, at that time, it was so amenity rich, and there was so much being offered, and the rents were so appealing. But people still didn’t really view it as residential. Throughout the years, as you know, it’s turned into a full-blown neighborhood.”

Getting the client to the Financial District was half the battle, according to Eyn. It got easier after that. Once clients saw the quality of the housing stock and the neighborhood’s proximity to other parts of the city through transit access, it only got easier. It’s still a focal point for Platinum as office-to-residential conversions continue to make the neighborhood a destination for more than just work.

“It’s important as leaders that we’re always there to give our agents information, give them guidance, help with all the uncertainty, so that we can continue to thrive and be one of the premier brokerages in Manhattan,” Eyn said. “In terms of the buyer agreements, we’ve been training, training, training and training. We have multiple different buyer agreements based on the relationship and the situation with the buyer.”

With a master’s degree in fine arts in acting from Rutgers and a background as a corporate facilitator, Stephenson began working at Platinum in 2012 as a rental agent before moving into sales and then a leadership position.

“I think, at that point, they realized that they really needed to structure the company a little bit differently so that it was well positioned for scalable growth,” Stephenson said. “That’s when they asked me to come on board on the leadership side. First, I was overseeing just residential sales, then residential sales and leasing, and then really being kind of the integrator for the whole company, alongside Khashy and Dezireh.”

Platinum has been busy well beyond the Financial District. It arranged the sale of a four-bedroom penthouse at the Huron at 29 Huron Street in Greenpoint, which closed for $5.7 million in October — which beat the old Greenpoint record by $1 million when 190 West Street sold for $4.775 million in December 2021.

“We’ve done a lot of business in Greenpoint. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there right now, because there’s a lot of new development,” Stephenson said. “We do a lot of buyer-lead rep. So, as you may know, the inventory is really tight, especially in other parts of Brooklyn, certainly in Manhattan. But because Greenpoint does have new development in place, it’s a lot easier to help place buyers there.”

But there’s no place like home, especially as office-to-residential conversions accelerate.

“In the Financial District, it’s really going to be an exciting time to see what happens with rentals over the next few years,” Stephenson said. “We have thousands of units coming to the market. We’ve already seen that with 160 Water Street, 25 Water Street, 55 Broad Street — those are already on the market. … It’ll be interesting then to see what that does to retail down here as well, when you’re adding that many new residents to the neighborhood.”

And, while Stephenson and Dezireh Eyn both described the early company culture as “male dominated” with a muted mission statement, the two have labored to derive more meaning that faces inward rather than outward.

“If I’m honest with you, before, I couldn’t remember what our core values were, because they were just kind of generic,” Stephenson said. “It was really about the mission statement, what gets us out of bed in the morning. And, at the end of the day, it’s not about an apartment. It’s about helping our clients and our agents succeed.”

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.