Fewer than 200 of Howard Hanna Real Estate Services’ over 15,000 agents made the cut.
That’s the headline number behind The Luxury Circle of Excellence, an invitation-only membership network the Pittsburgh-based brokerage launched this month during a two-day summit in New York City.
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To qualify for the inaugural class, agents had to have closed at least 10 transactions over the past three years, each worth more than $1 million, a threshold that serves as a floor, not a ceiling, and one the company says it deliberately set to keep the program aspirational.
Mollie Hanna Lang via LinkedIn
“We wanted it to be something to grow into,” said Mollie Hanna Lang, Director of Luxury Marketing and Marketplace Operations at Howard Hanna, who is spearheading the initiative. “It’s not unattainable, but it will set us apart.”
Connecting the footprint
The Luxury Circle isn’t a marketing badge. According to Hanna Lang and Howard W. “Hoby” Hanna IV, CEO of Howard Hanna Real Estate Services, the genesis of the program came directly from the agent base — specifically, from top producers seeking to identify their counterparts in other markets.
“Who is their Cleveland counterpart in Charlotte or in New York City?” Hanna Lang said, describing what she heard from agents across the firm’s 15-state footprint. The answer, until now, was that there wasn’t a formal mechanism to find out.
The Circle is designed to change that. Members get access to curated programming, cross-market networking, and — most concretely — a warm referral pipeline inside a company that already dominates several of its legacy markets.
The firm closed $583 million in luxury sales in Charlotte in 2025, $494 million across Long Island, and $235 million in suburban New York. In Cleveland, Howard Hanna outpaced its nearest luxury competitor by more than 7-to-1 in unit sales.
Hoby Hanna cited a pattern the company has observed since acquiring Manhattan-based Elegran Real Estate last fall: clients based in Indianapolis, Cleveland, or Charlotte who are buying a pied-à-terre in New York City, or relocating for work.
“A company that’s based in Cleveland but publicly traded, they spend a lot of time in New York City,” Hanna said. “It gave our agents a visible way to expand their relationships for referrals across different markets.”
Why New York, why now
The Luxury Summit NYC wasn’t a coincidence. Howard Hanna entered Manhattan in October 2025 through the Elegran acquisition, and the launch event — held at a $56 million listing at 111 West 57th Street on Billionaire’s Row — was partly a statement to the New York market that the firm intends to compete, not just exist.
“We want to make a presence, make a statement to the other agents in the city,” Hanna said. “We didn’t just open to hope. We’re operators. We’re going to grow and be one of the lead companies in the city, just like we are everywhere else.”
Hoby Hanna
Howard Hanna is already the largest brokerage in New York State by agent count and homes sold, a fact that Hanna noted tends to surprise people. The NYC entry connected that suburban dominance to Manhattan for the first time.
The summit itself was two days of programming led by outside voices, not just internal ones. Speakers included the CMO of Hilton’s Waldorf Astoria brand and an executive from Aston Martin. The framing was deliberate: Luxury agents aren’t just selling houses, they’re selling a lifestyle, and the company wanted them to hear from people who do that at other price points.
“I just sat and heard the CMO of Aston Martin talk about why service at that level matters to their clients,” Hanna Lang said. “It connects our agents back to their own high-net-worth clients.”
Aspirational by design
Howard Hanna has long resisted the impulse to carve off a separate luxury division, a move Hoby Hanna said he’s watched other brokerages make with mixed results.
The Luxury Circle is framed not as a new company or brand but as an acknowledgment that a subset of the firm’s agents operates in a different register and benefits from resources built around it.
“We’re not trying to just be a luxury company,” Hanna said. “We’re trying to service the whole housing ecosystem.”
That philosophy shows up in the threshold criteria. In some Howard Hanna markets, 10 transactions over $1 million account for a meaningful share of the market.
In others — say, parts of Manhattan or coastal Long Island — it’s a relatively modest bar. The firm set it that way intentionally, building in room to grow rather than designing the program only for its top 20 producers.
The program is also funded centrally, which Hanna framed as a structural advantage over franchise competitors. “As a corporately owned company, we said we’re going to pay for it,” he said. “We’re going to make that investment in our agents.”
The next summit location hasn’t been announced, but Hanna hinted at second-home markets, such as mountain communities in North Carolina or lake properties along Lake Erie, where Howard Hanna has a presence and agents with stories to tell.
The buzz from the inaugural event, he said, is already working as intended. Agents who couldn’t attend are asking when the next one is. Agents who don’t yet qualify are asking how to get there.
“Membership has its privileges,” Hanna said. “And I think that’s what a lot of real estate companies don’t do well. They don’t network because they’re separate franchises. We said we’re going to make that investment.”
