From Broadway Auditions to a Billion in NYC Sales with Greg Mire

You won Rookie of the Year in 2003. That is not everyone's trajectory — most people's first year in this business is basically a bloodbath. What were you doing that year that the people around you weren't? Or was it just your incredible charm? The funny thing is, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.

My guest today didn't set out to sell real estate. He set out to be an actor. Greg Mire is a New York native, but by his own telling, the city intimidated the hell out of him. He moved anyway because you can't audition for Broadway from your couch. What he didn't know then was that everything acting teaches you — listening hard, reading a room, staying calm when the stakes are enormous — is the exact skill set for selling real estate in the most competitive market in America. He got licensed in 2003 and won Rookie of the Year. Twenty-plus years later he's closed over a billion dollars in career sales, nearly 750 million since 2016, was Salesperson of the Year in Corcoran's Chelsea Flatiron office before he ever got to Compass, and has made the Wall Street Journal Real Trends America's Best Agents list every single year since 2017. Today he's the Founder of Turnstone Advisory at Compass, leading a team across Manhattan and Brooklyn. His team's number-one hiring criterion is not production — it's whether you're a genuinely good person.

>> Greg, welcome. >> Thank you so much, my friend. >> You moved to New York to be an actor and said the city genuinely scared you. Two decades later you've sold a billion dollars of that city. What did acting give you that a business degree couldn't? >> Honestly? Acting gave me the best training for rejection one could possibly have. People ask me whether competition in real estate bothers me and I'm like, are you kidding me? I tried to be an actor in New York City. This is nothing.

The rejection in acting is constant, and it's a lot more personal. They're not rejecting an apartment or a price, they're rejecting you. And the grind — there were days I'd wake up at 5 AM, take the train from my apartment in Astoria to the Equity building in Midtown, wait in line for hours just to sign up for an audition, go back to Astoria, maybe sleep for an hour, shower, go back to Midtown to actually audition, then straight to my waiter job.

>> The waiting-tables piece — talk about that. >> You're hustling. You're multitasking. You're dealing with every kind of personality and trying to upsell without looking like you're trying to upsell. I actually love hiring from the service industry — we have a few on the team. If you've done that work well, you already understand the hustle this industry requires and the service it demands. Acting also taught me to listen and improvise, to be in front of people and be comfortable. Between acting and waiting tables, I accidentally had pretty good training for real estate.

>> Where does the acting background show up the most? >> Learning how to deal with different personalities. You can't talk to everybody the same way. Some people want every detail, some just want you to get to the point, others need hand-holding, some need you to push back on them. That's basically acting — you're listening, reacting, figuring out who you're dealing with and adjusting. In one deal there's a buyer broker, a seller broker, a buyer, a seller, a managing agent, a board's attorney, and sometimes multiple of those in the same person. You have to figure out how to deal with all of them.

>> Back to the beginning. You won Rookie of the Year in 2003. What were you doing that year that the people around you weren't? >> I literally didn't know you could buy an apartment. I thought you rented apartments and bought townhouses. I had no clue. When I gave up acting I knew I wanted to do something involving sales and people — I knew with certainty I could not be sitting at a desk all day. Someone at the restaurant said, I'm taking the real estate class, you should too. That was pretty much the extent of my market research.

I was young, stupid, had a ton of energy, and was already used to working hard. Every client felt like an opportunity. Nothing was beneath me. And financially I had an accidental advantage: I wasn't bringing home any money as an actor or a waiter — but I also had no expenses. I lived in a $1,200/month apartment with two roommates on the highway. A lot of people enter real estate late in their lives, from another career, and spend years trying to get back to the income they were producing before. I had nothing to replace. I started making more money than I ever had pretty quickly, and everything felt like gravy.

>> Your team's stated number-one hiring criterion is being a genuinely good person, not production. Is it ever hard when you're sitting across from a giant producer who might be a difficult person? >> I've met people who produce far more than some of the newer agents I brought on, and in many cases I thought they were terrible fits. Not terrible people — just wouldn't fit the culture. If somebody comes in producing a ton of business but makes everybody around them miserable, that's not a win for me. I don't care what they add to the GCI. I want the team members to be happy.

The questions I ask myself: Do I want to hang out with this person? Will the other team members want to hang out with them? Because we're going to spend a lot of time together. Do they add something we're missing — a different personality, background, skill set, perspective? I don't want to assemble ten versions of the same person. I'd rather make a good person a better broker than make a great broker a better person. One you can teach, the other you cannot.

>> You rebranded from the Greg Mire Team to Turnstone Advisory after 20+ years. Why? >> I wanted my team members to have the ability to be the star of their own show. I didn't want one of their clients saying, where's Greg, why isn't Greg here? That's not fair to them, and that's not the business I wanted to build. I'd spent more than 20 years building my own name and reputation — so there was me, but there was also everybody else. Turnstone gave us the opportunity to step back and define our values. What do we stand for? How do we work? What should somebody expect when they work with one of the agents?

I wanted everybody on the team to be proud of the brand and excited about growing it, rather than feeling like they were helping me grow mine. They're a hell of a lot more likely to wear a Turnstone Advisory hat than a Greg Mire Team hat. I can't blame them — I actually feel the same way.

>> What was unexpectedly hard about the rebrand? >> Building the brand itself. There's a lot more work than I anticipated. I took months to pick a name — the name I'd been thinking about for a long time actually got in the way of us moving forward because something about it wasn't sitting right. Once I gave that up, Turnstone Advisory came. Then it's the logo, the colors, the website, the videos, the swag, the timing — you don't want to come out prematurely, you want to come out with a bang. We redid everything: our pitch, our website, all of it. Now we feel like we're coming at things with a lot more strength than we were before.

>> Team structure today? >> Seven agents including myself, two full-time administrative people, a social-media/marketing person, and a virtual assistant who provides admin support to our other admin people. >> All in New York? >> Michelle, who's been working with me for 13 years, is in Brazil. She worked with me in person here for about 10 years, then eventually decided she wanted to be back with her family. We realized we know each other and the business so well that we could do it online. It's worked out perfectly. The time difference is one hour. She knows the business inside and out, she knows me inside and out — she manages me, basically. That's where you want to be. You don't want to have to manage somebody. You want them to manage you if you're doing it well.

>> What stretches and breaks as volume grows? >> If we were still running the business the way we did in 2013, we'd be completely screwed. The business is totally different now — bigger team, more volume, clients expect things faster, and the technology to make that work is available. Something that worked great five years ago makes no sense today. The trick is not getting too attached to the way you once did something. On my team we constantly ask, why in the hell are we still doing it this way? How can we make it better? AI is a perfect example — things that used to take hours can now be done dramatically faster. That doesn't mean we're doing less work or lowering the standard. It means we're spending less time on the stupid stuff so we can spend more time on the stuff that actually matters.

>> Anything you won't systemize because it would ruin the personal connection? >> You can't systemize actual relationships with people. That's the AI-proof part of what we do. Every client is different. Some want to hear from you constantly, some don't. Some you need to talk off the ledge five times a day, some just want facts and want you to leave them alone. Same for negotiation — there's no flowchart telling me when to push, when to shut up, when a seller needs to hear something they don't want to hear. AI can't do that. I want to systemize all the crap that takes me away from those things. I don't want to systemize the things that make me good at my job.

>> Technology that actually makes you a better broker vs. what's overhyped? >> Where AI has helped me most: taking a huge amount of information I've already done the work to curate, and packaging it for the client in a way that's easy to understand. We do an insane amount of comp work for buyers and sellers. I still do that work personally — I don't say, hey Claude, look up the comps for this property, because there's too much nuance. But AI can take all the information I give it and present it clearly and efficiently. It's learned our team colors, has the logo, we built a template. Our seller presentations and buyer presentations have gotten noticeably smoother.

You get out of it what you put in. If you give AI shitty or lazy information it spits shitty, lazy work back. And you have to check everything — sometimes it just makes things up. If you don't know the subject well enough to catch it, you're dead. The buyers or sellers will catch it in five seconds. The other thing: AI has this shine right now where years ago, if people read something on the internet it was true, and now everybody knows that's not. People are still responding to AI output that way. I can tell when a client's suddenly steering a transaction in a wild left turn — they've asked AI what to do in a negotiation instead of listening to us, and what comes back is something that's going to lose them the property, because AI doesn't know the nuances or the people. Imagine New York co-ops — what some allow, what some don't, financial requirements, land leases. ChatGPT doesn't understand the dynamics of this market. That only comes with boots-on-the-ground experience.

>> Private-exclusive listings in New York — when do they actually serve the seller? >> It's not one-size-fits-all. You might want to test a price without burning days on market. You might want to build momentum before launch. You might have a celebrity or a family-dynamic situation where the property needs to be very private — parents getting divorced who haven't told the kids yet, moves that can't be public. A bunch of us are taking properties off the market mid-August through mid-September because New York, like a lot of the country, is pretty dead then — we don't want to waste days on market. The question is: are you using private exclusives effectively, or using them every single time as a matter of practice? On my team, we don't do it as a matter of practice.

At this point we're not even really doing private exclusives that are solely limited to Compass. We're doing something called Rebny revenue-participant-only listings — they go out to all Rebny agents but don't appear on the aggregators (Zillow, Redfin, etc). It functions like a private exclusive for brokers but with broader exposure. Sellers should have the right to determine how their properties are marketed. Being forced to market in a way you're not comfortable with — I don't understand the logic of that.

>> The NYC pieta-tair tax rollout — how is it hitting the market? >> The way it was rolled out is a disaster. It happened very quickly and I don't think it was thought through the way it should have been. People are getting letters saying the city suspects they're using their residence as a secondary residence and may be subject to the tax, and they have to prove it's their primary. Guilty until proven innocent, basically. They did put a pause on it. So far we can't really see evidence it's significantly impacted the market — there are still plenty of luxury sales — but will you start seeing fewer people buying piet-à-terres over $5 million? Probably. The messiest piece: co-ops are supposed to self-police this. I think most co-ops are going to just adopt a policy of pied-à-terre not permitted, because they don't want to deal with it. And the more you limit who can purchase, the more downward pressure on price.

>> Manhattan vs. Brooklyn right now? >> Depends entirely on what part. There are micro-markets within micro-markets. A townhouse in my neighborhood, Cobble Hill, behaves completely differently from a condo in Williamsburg, which is totally different from an Upper East Side 1960s co-op, which is different from a loft downtown. In general, the parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn where my team works most, Brooklyn tends to behave a little more seller-friendly. Cobble Hill is extremely hot always, never any inventory — a listing there is probably going to sell quickly with multiple offers. A luxury condo in downtown Brooklyn with a million units on the market is a totally different story.

>> What's next? >> I want us doing bigger deals, higher price points. I'd love to break into new development on the sell side — we've done tons of it on the buy side but not yet as sellers. I'd love to develop property myself eventually. And I want to keep building Turnstone into something that's bigger than me. Eventually I'd like to produce a little less day-to-day, but I have a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old, so retirement is a long way off.