Nearly 75,000 of the country’s highest-producing real estate agents and teams generated a combined $1.63 trillion in sales volume and 2.5 million transaction sides last year, according to the 2026 RealTrends Verified City Rankings. The list spans 5,249 cities, but production is anything but evenly spread. Five metros alone — New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Phoenix — account for roughly $178 billion of that total, and each got there through a noticeably different playbook.
“If real estate is local, recognition should be too,” said Caroline Scanlon, director of the RealTrends Verified program, describing the logic behind expanding the rankings down to the city level. The expanded format identified 24,382 agents and teams who qualified specifically for city-level recognition, giving a far more granular read on where scale is actually being built than a national list could offer.
New York City sits alone at the top, and by a wide margin. The five boroughs combined for nearly $58 billion in production and 1,378 ranked agents and teams, the most of any city in the country. What separates New York from the rest of the field is how much of that volume comes from teams rather than solo practitioners. The city’s 560 ranked teams produced $46.26 billion, nearly twice Dallas’s second-place team total, and New York accounted for 18 of the nation’s mega teams and 15 enterprise teams, the two largest team-size categories the rankings track. That concentration points to a market where scaling a business, not just closing high-value listings, has become the dominant strategy among top producers…