Richard Ellis

Local Expertise. Global Connections.

Richard Ellis is the real estate broker and exclusive owner of Ellis Sotheby’s International Realty and Ellis Realty Commercial. His success is based on his marketing and communications background and ability to assess unique selling points when listing a property, positioning a property properly to appeal to a specific target market, and in developing marketing strategies. His background is in communications and he graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. Prior to his career in real estate, he worked for large and small advertising agencies in NYC in account management. His marketing experience was directly translatable to the real estate industry and has enabled him to understand the nuances of market research, analytics and technology, which allows him to excel as a real estate broker and owner, who deals with buyers and sellers on a regular basis every day.

He is passionate about listing and selling extraordinary properties regardless of price and meeting the interesting clients who view them.

Rich is a seasoned professional with over 33 years of experience and has grown his business into being the premier, leading luxury real estate office in Rockland and Orange Counties. His business has set all sorts of sales records since 2005, the year he affiliated Ellis Realty with the Sotheby's International Realty brand.

His passion is people, architecture, local history and everything in between. The Sotheby's International Realtybrand has opened doors for him to meet extraordinary people from the service industries to celebrities, to industry leaders at the top of their field.

Richard has been a resident of New Yorkhis entire life, and has lived in Manhattan both uptown and downtown and lived in the Lower Hudson Valley's river communities of Piermont, Upper Grandview and Snedens Landing. His family settled in New Amsterdam in 1660 and was given a land grant by Peter Stuyvesant and he's proud to call a great grandfather a revolutionary war hero, who was captured at his home in the middle of the night and forced to walk shoeless in the dead of winter and imprisoned on Staten Island during the war.

His real estate experience includes selling the only house in New York State history deemed legally haunted, which changed NYS disclosure law briefly in the early 1990’s, in that NYS realtors had to disclose if a seller thought they had a ghost in their home... time to call the ghost busters before a broker?

Richard sat on various boards through the years including the Kennedy Child Study Center in NYC, a school for disabled pre-school children; he was a start up member of the Piermont Historical Society, and board member for the Orange/Rockland Multiple Listing System for 14 years, including president.

He was thrilled to brainstorm with Edward Hopper Museum & Study Center executive director Jennifer Patton, the arts education program for public schools, in Rockland County, and has rolled out the program to Westchester and in 2019 to Orange County too. He loves this program because it gives kids and teens the opportunity to not only learn about Edward Hopper and develop art, but to grow emotionally, and build self esteem through art too.

Richard and his husband Brandon Wagner also have a passion for travelling around the world and meeting new people along the way.

Richard Ellis loves a real estate challenge and is passionate about all aspects of the real estate industry. He can be reached by email, richard.ellis@sothebysrealty.com, or by mobile phone, 914-393-0438.