In this episode of Brokers Angle, Hal Coopersmith sits down with Michael Davis, a seasoned New York City real estate broker at Compass, to discuss his unique career trajectory, insights into the commercial and residential markets, and the systems that have fueled his long-term success. Michael shares an optimistic outlook for both residential and commercial markets heading into 2026, noting increased activity, more reasonable landlord pricing, and rising competition, all reinforcing his belief that New York City remains an electrifying place to do business.

Transcript

Hal Coopersmith: Welcome to Brokers Angle. I’m Hal Coopersmith. In this episode, we’re speaking to Michael Davis of Compass. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Davis: Hello.

Hal Coopersmith: So tell us how you got into the real estate industry.

Michael Davis: Okay, that’s a deep dive. So I moved to New York City in 2001 to become a famous actor. Turns out, I didn’t love acting. I just wanted, I loved movies, but became apparent that I didn’t need to be in them just because I love them. I was taking acting classes in Tribeca. I met a really cool guy who owned a real estate firm. I needed a job and I shamelessly asked everybody for work when I was 24 and he said, Hey, I own a boutique real estate company in NoHo. Why don’t you come work for me? I did. And the name of that company is Corbet and Delay Owners Nick Delay. Super cool guy. I’m actually his son’s godfather, so we were super tight. Still are. And I worked there for 13 years and that’s the long and short of it before I joined Compass in 2017.

Hal Coopersmith: And what sort of things were you doing for those 13 years?

Michael Davis: So, we started off in my early, early years. I began in 2004. That’s when my real estate journey began and we started as a residential rental company and we focused on the tenant rep side. So I was the renter’s agent helping them look for rentals across Manhattan in certain parts of Brooklyn back then, but mainly Manhattan. Our business model changed toward 2008, maybe 2010, where we pivoted to commercial just because we found that there wasn’t a platform for tenants as a tenant rep at commercial. So, again, we were not a big brokerage, and we were not able to take market share as a listing agent or a landlord rep. So we found our niche as tenant reps, and it worked really, really well. We had endless clients who needed help because there’s not easy to search for listings, or at least it was not easy to search for listings and retail spaces, office space back in 2008, 2010. So we took over.

Hal Coopersmith: Nothing harder than residential rentals on the tenant side.

Michael Davis: Yeah. A lot of, a lot of activity and a lot of hedging your bets, back in those days when we were advertising in, you know, the New York Times Village Voice print, those were the early days of residential rentals, but yeah, there’s a lot of hard work run into establishing yourself as a real estate agent back then.

Hal Coopersmith: And so, what were you doing to find clients on the commercial side when you were doing commercial tenant rep?

Michael Davis: A lot of networking, a lot of paid advertising. New York Times. LoopNet did not exist back then. I mean, Craigslist. CoStar existed, but it did not have a front end back then. So LoopNet did not exist. LoopNet’s not much of a front end anymore anyway, which we can get into that, but there’s still not a great platform for tenants to search for commercial spaces.

Hal Coopersmith: That’s exactly right.

Michael Davis: Yeah.

Hal Coopersmith: So what are some of the pain points that you see aside from tenants not being able to have a great platform? What are some of the other pain points that you see?

Michael Davis: So as a tenant rep in commercial, some might call me an interloper in the commercial world, just because I have a background in it, but I don’t focus on commercial anymore. It was not sustainable during the pandemic. I’m so glad that I pivoted back to residential during those years. And now I do both. As a broker with commercial background at Compass, which is not generally a commercial brokerage, I get a lot of referrals. So people who, other agents who hear that I’m doing or that I have a background in commercial contact me, sales managers contact me and they feed me a lot of business, which is fantastic in 2025. But the pain points of commercial searches for tenants is transparency and so far there’s no platform that has created a streamlined approach to searches for tenants, CraigC, LoopNet, which is owned by CoStar, they often don’t provide pricing. Let me repeat. They don’t provide pricing. It’s not transparent. It makes it very, very difficult for people to understand or to know what their options are. And it is incredibly frustrating to me as a tenant rep, because during my searches I have to work overtime to get basic information. Like what’s the price per square foot? Is a division possible? Is it even available? I don’t want to poo CoStar, but they have a monopoly and they just they make incredibly difficult, it’s a very antiquated platform, and there are not too many of them.

So when tenants hire me. To represent them in on the commercial side, they sign agreements. Number one, first and foremost, my time is money, but energy’s invaluable and so much energy goes into commercial searches. But I have so much work I need to do and it’s generally email and I have to fire off emails asking if it’s available, what’s the price? And there’s this back and forth. It’s like a courting process for these listing agents. I have to court each and every one of them. And if there are a hundred search results in my search, I’m spending days going through this. Whereas CoStar, if you’re listening, you could just publish the prices online and save everybody a lot of time, but also transact a lot more. Cause if it was transparent, more deals are going to happen faster. Instead, we live in this very antiquated, slow approach world and commercial, which is again, why I like to do both residential and commercial.

Hal Coopersmith: So could you talk a little bit about your pivot more towards the residential side? You mentioned the pandemic was a big, big factor in that, and then how you’re able to balance both.

Michael Davis: So first of all, I run a team at Compass, the Davis team and I have agents that work on my team, I have a director of operations. So I have support for residential and commercial. On the team, I’m the only one who does commercial. So if I find a tenant or client who is serious and prepared, then I take them on. Nobody else on my team does.

Prior to the pandemic, I started to notice, or in, for my business and in general, the retail market was softening 2017, well, let’s say 2016, 17, 18, 19, leading into the pandemic, the Amazon effect was in full effect where a lot of commerce was online a lot of landlords, sorry, landlords. A lot of landlords were greedy and they wanted higher prices. There was a really high vacancy rate. Retail was everywhere. It was available. There were just so many options for tenants, and in a way it was prohibitive because the prices were so high and the landscape was changing entirely. Landlords were stubborn. Most of the stubborn landlords were smaller landlords, compared to institutional landlords who were a lot more amenable to balancing their books. And so they were more eager to get deals done. But whatever the case going into the pandemic, the retail and office, well retail market in particular was on a decline. And so I realized I needed to focus more on residential because I earn a living on commission. It’s a hundred percent commission. And if I’m not doing deals in commercial, I’m not getting paid.

There’s a lot of opportunity in New York City, but my instincts were correct because as soon as that pandemic hit, the entire market shut down. I don’t need, we all remember, but the residential market exploded during the pandemic. It was a terrible time. A lot of unfortunate circumstances, but I hate to say it, the pandemic was one of the best things to happen to my residential real estate career. There was so much activity, there was an explosion on both sides, buying and selling interest rates were low, sellers were moving around, moving out of Manhattan into the greener pastures of Brookly, and then a lot of people in Brooklyn were just moving out of the city.

So there were these migration patterns that I was capitalizing on. I transacted so many deals during 2020, 2021, and then until the middle of 2022. Commercial real estate at that point, for those years, for those three years was just on hold. It was not my focus or a priority at all, and I’m grateful for that.

Hal Coopersmith: So you talked a lot about the pandemic being influential in your business. How were you able to court those residential clients at the time?

Michael Davis: So in 2025, I’ve been a real estate agent for 21 years. I started this business in 2004. By 2020 I had established myself as, as a notable, dare I say, a top agent at Compass. I ran a, my team has been recognized by the Wall Street Journal for five years in a row. So I’ve been doing something very, very well. And during the pandemic, my phone just started to blow up clients who knew residential, residential buyers and sellers just started contacting me. Of course, I do my own marketing as well, so I capitalized on that. But in general, people or my sphere of influence reached out to me, and then I’m very active on social media too, but buyers contacted me. It was like no other time in my career.

Hal Coopersmith: So you’re a little bit humble. You say you got ascended through the ranks of Compass. But one of the things I know about you is that you’re really systematized. How do you focus on those systems, which is something that I truly love.

Michael Davis: Well, first of all, thank you. So, for the commercial side whenever I connect with a client, I set them up with their own Google platform. Compass uses Google G Suite or the Workspace Suite. So I create folders for my clients. I have template emails, which help them understand every step of the process. So from the moment we connect, of course I send out my agent agreement with them, have them sign that. Once they do, we get to work, I run my searches. I try very, very hard to make sure every client knows where we are right now in the process and then what’s next and what’s down the road. I always have my introductory call too, but in general, I set them up with a Google Drive. I set them up with templated emails that feel personalized because they are, everybody’s search is nuanced. So I am very systematic in communication. So email, platform, and then the search.

So again, CoStar. CoStar believes in PDFs, sending out PDFs. There’s no digital front facing platform like Compass has collections, which is like a Pinterest visual dashboard where you can communicate on each property like it’s a text message thread that’s specific to each property. CoStar, given that they have a monopoly, should really institute or implement some kind of online digital platform for communication with their clients, whether it’s sellers or institutional landlords or on the front end for tenant reps on the leasing side. So anyway, just putting that out there. Again, I cannot emphasize this enough, but there’s a lot of information that I have to convey to clients. I also set up spreadsheets, which is helpful for understanding what your options are so they can see price per square foot, overall pricing, I like the Gantt spreadsheet if you use that. Anyway, I like clarity and this is a way that I’m able to communicate the process, options and overall timeline.

Hal Coopersmith: What do you do on the residential side, what do you do with your emails that you use our templates, but make them feel more personal?

Michael Davis: So with residential, I actually created a, for example, for buying, I created a purchase process page on my website. And if you know how websites work, you can create, you can create one particular page that jumps with every URL, it’s called a slug, so I have I think nine different slugs. Which is there are nine steps in the purchase process that I’ve outlined on my website. And whenever I am communicating to a client or to a buyer where we are in the process, I have a templated email that helps that I send to them, that jumps to the next step on the process. And it’s incredibly resourceful for so many of my clients. They think so, and I think so. And what gives me peace of mind is that they know where we are every step of the way. They can scroll up and down on this website so they can see the entire pro, like not just the broad strokes, but the very, the very specific detailed steps, but I’m still sending that to them. Every process, as soon as we, as soon as we meet, we have a getting started email. The next is getting pre-approved unless you’re a cash buyer. The third step is search, and we use Compass’s collection platform, which is just incredibly valuable to me and then, you know, making an offer, what does that look like? What are the offer types? And then you’re in contract. So I send one of these emails with beautiful graphics, it’s an enjoyable experience if I do say so myself. But, I send this to them for every step for clarity.

Hal Coopersmith: And you did talk about experience, which I think is really important. What do you do to enhance the experience for your clients?

Michael Davis: Well, communication is key to a happy home, and I pride myself on communication. I pick up a telephone. I’m almost 50 years old, I believe in the telephone. A lot of people like texts these days. Texts are helpful, but speaking to somebody where they can hear your tone and they can understand me in my objectives better, but also it’s an opportunity. Telephone calls are an opportunity for people to ask questions and communicate information a lot quicker than an email or text message or. Slack or whatever digital communication you want to have these days. I’m old school. I like the telephone.

Hal Coopersmith: Well, I’m glad that you brought up the telephone. I think it’s one of the most important tools that we actually have in real estate that a lot can get lost in. Even from legal standpoint, exchanging documents, emails, whatever that might be, when you’re able to speak on the telephone, it can really diffuse a situation. Other people have talked about that on this podcast about the importance of the telephone. I’m glad that you brought that up, just that it’s something that may be an older technology, but still one of the most important ones.

Michael Davis: Absolutely. I am kind of stuck in the middle of a contentious tenant-landlord dispute right now. For one of my properties and the tenant is experiencing some challenges and going through something and she’s only been communicating with me via text and I’m like, Hey, just give me a buzz, like let’s talk through some things. And it was two weeks that she was only texting me. Finally, I got her on the telephone and when I did, it was great. We got to communicate. You have to hear my voice. I wasn’t, there was no, I was not being adversarial. It was just information needed to be conveyed in a very practical way. And that happens over the telephone. Like we’re emotional creatures, us humans. And so when you put that digital barrier between us, it can complicate things and people can read into tones, but when you speak to them, us, when we speak to each other, we convey information and tone and sympathies and all sorts of perspectives that you don’t get from a text.

So yes, the telephone is paramount to my business and success.

Hal Coopersmith:  So in terms of the residential world. What are you seeing in the current market and what are your predictions for 2026 for New York City?

Michael Davis: What am I experiencing right now? 2025 has been one of the best years of my career. It’s not the case for every agent. Most agents, I don’t know. So many agents fizzled out during the pandemic. I thrived. And I’m grateful for that.  some agents are not thriving this year. I am, 2023 was one of the worst years in my career. But last year and then this year is, it’s, it’s been phenomenal. I’m finishing the year strong and when you’re a commission-based real estate agent. Like this feels great, especially going into the next year. So I just want to put that out there because I’m going into 2026 with a lot of momentum and that’s me. But what am I seeing in the market, the residential market is strong. Interest rates have come down a little bit, but also after interest rates increased in May or June of 2022 they stayed between 6 and 8%, depending what kind of products you’re taking out, for mortgages, this is the new normal, unless they continue to drop and people capitalize on the fed  dropping rates or daily changes to any kind of products that are released by banks, I mean, this is the new normal. It is what it is. There’s a lot of cash in New York. I have a lot of cash buyers, which is great, but for me it’s just, I’ve been fortunate with residential.

Next year, I hope that it’s going to be great too. There’s so much turbulence in, in the financial markets with our administration and we’ll see how things shake out with, with Momani. I’m cautiously optimistic. There’s so much money in New York City, just average people have crazy, crazy amounts of money. So I’m confident that it’s going to be great. That 2026 is going to be great.

In the commercial markets. What am I seeing in the commercial markets? I am seeing, I’m seeing a retail and a lot of office space leasing quickly. Landlords have gotten a lot more reasonable with their pricing. They’ve dropped prices and there’s competition. You and I just did a deal together where we had to move like the wind to secure a deal because, because an operator that we were working with lost out on multiple, on multiple retail spaces because we were making below ask offers, and then a tenant credit came through and stole the deal. And I think they lost three deals, which is why the last one that we did, I made sure to, I made it clear that we can’t play games, we can’t make offers, or we can’t make below ask offers. In fact, to get the deal done, we came in above the asking for the rent. So, and you moved so quickly to secure this. Thank you.  I couldn’t have done this without you, Hal Coopersmith, but the reality is the commercial landscape to me is trending upwards. I think that New York is a great place to be. People want to be here. It’s the coolest place to be. It’s interesting and electrifying and all of these, all of the activity that we’re seeing, and I think I believe vacancy is lower today, but going into 2026, I think we’re going to be in a very competitive commercial market as well, which is inspiring to me because there had been a lot of vacancy in New York.

So hopefully people fill up those retail spaces, office, hopefully people go back to work. I know we have the hybrid model, but I like being in a work environment where I can collaborate with people. So anyway, I’m optimistic about 2026.

Hal Coopersmith: Well that is a great note to end things on and thank you very much for that praise, Michael. It was a great deal to work on. Appreciate it and you were great as well. Thank you for being a part of Brokers Angle.

Michael Davis: Thank you very much. I love you Hal Coopersmith.