Success was never a guarantee, and it didn’t happen overnight, but Miami’s market is ripe for brokers seeking momentum.
That was the consensus among Danny Hertzberg, Margit Brandt and Dawn McKenna, some of Florida’s top brokers in conversation at The Real Deal’s Miami Real Estate Forum 2025 on Thursday. Each of them had already put years into their real estate careers by the time the pandemic triggered a boom in their respective markets: Miami, Palm Beach and Naples.
They were well-positioned to receive the flood of wealthy buyers, but in a panel discussion exploring how they became agents with $100-million-plus listings, they described more humble beginnings.
Brandt, a Palm Beach agent with Premier Estate Properties who has closed more than $1 billion in deals since 2022, discussed cutting her teeth as a 21-year-old agent in New York too young to be taken seriously. Hertzberg, the son of Miami real estate doyenne Jill Hertzberg, told the story of pivoting from a legal career to real estate just in time for the global financial crisis to rock South Florida’s market in 2009. McKenna pivoted from her career as a Chicago-based interior designer and today runs Coldwell Banker Realty’s Dawn McKenna Group in Naples, Park City, Chicago, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and New Buffalo and Harbor Country in Michigan. Her team has closed nearly $800 million in sales this year, a volume that took years to build.
“From 2003 to 2017, I was just an agent with two assistants doing $150 million a year,” she said. “If you get nothing from me, get this: Just go for it.”
The three brokers are now well versed in working at the absolute upper echelons of the luxury real estate market. Brandt brought the buyer in the $150 million sale of Palm Beach’s Tarpon Island last year. Hertzberg had the listing on a La Gorce Island assemblage consumer goods mogul Anand Khubani bought for $100 million. McKenna helped broker a record $225 million sale in Naples in April, and has the listing for the Naples estate Gordon Pointe, which hit the market last year asking $295 million.
“We’re off market making adjustments right now,” she said of Gordon Pointe. “I will tell you we’ve had 26 showings… It’s a cornucopia of people.”
South Florida’s typical buyer demographic has expanded from Northeasterners, Midwesterners and Californians to include more international buyers from a greater range of territories, the agents said. With Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York, the trio agreed another wave of wealthy buyers would make moves to South Florida, citing concerns about safety and quality of life.
McKenna noted that a New York client of hers who previously bought a $40 million condo with her was planning to tour homes with her in Naples after Thanksgiving. Brandt said sellers are already responding to the increasing demand.
“The sellers are acutely aware. I had a lot of sellers be like, ‘He won, we’re increasing the price 20 percent,’” she said. But the Mamdani victory hasn’t slammed the brakes on New York’s market like Florida’s brokers predicted, she said. “I’m talking to friends in New York who are still saying they’re seeing contracts signed.”
Hertzberg confirmed that within weeks of the June primary that anointed Mamdani as the Democratic candidate, a New York-based client of his who had a deposit down on a $10 million property canceled his contract and bought a home in Miami.
“We all received a lot of calls yesterday,” he said. But, “most of them were people venting.”
