A real-estate industry reeling from sexual misconduct accusations examines its culture
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
- Prosecutors accused luxury real-estate agents Oren and Tal Alexander of sex trafficking this month.
- They are the latest in a series of top figures in real estate accused of sexual abuse or harassment.
- Some in the industry say its structure, partying, and cult of personality are all partly to blame.
The Alexander brothers, luxury brokers who New York prosecutors accused of sex trafficking this month, are the latest in a series of top figures in real estate accused of sexual abuse or harassment.
The brothers, Oren and Tal, have denied the allegations.
Still, the accusations have made some in the industry β which is dominated by women but mostly led by men β reflect on its permissive, decentralized culture that parties hard and, too often, multiple people told Business Insider, puts women into uncomfortable or dangerous situations.
While it's far from a mass reckoning like Hollywood's #MeToo movement, the series of accusations against major real estate players over the past year and a half has prompted some in the industry to look inward and consider whether its traditional practices and lack of uniform safety precautions may have contributed.
Sue Yannaccone, the president and CEO of Anywhere Real Estate Inc., which owns multiple real-estate-brokerage chains, including Century21, Coldwell Banker, and Corcoran, told Business Insider that real estate has more to do to address some of these issues.
"Real estate is not unlike other industries that have had to, unfortunately, reckon with a pattern of discrimination and harassment of women," Yannaccone said. "Holding offenders accountable is an important and effective step in our progress, and there is still more work to be done across all sectors to ensure women can always thrive in safe, supportive, and equitable work environments."
The lax structure and low barrier to entry in real estate often mean careers are built largely on an individual agent's personality and charisma. It can also create opportunities for bad behavior to go unchecked, said Brian Boero, the cofounder of 1000watt, a real-estate branding and marketing company.
With over 1.5 million agents or brokers in the United States, it's similar to "the Wild West," he said. He added that many of them operate as independent contractors, acting as free agents.
"You have really good people, and you have really bad people. It's hard to paint this industry as a whole with a broad brush," Boero said. "The employee relationship does not exist, and people can, more or less, do whatever they want with very little supervision."
A series of accusations
Oren and Tal Alexander first rose to prominence as real-estate agents at Douglas Elliman before splitting off to found their own brokerage, Official Partners.
The Alexander Team, as they were commonly known, sold over $260 million in real estate in New York in 2023, the real-estate industry trade publication The Real Deal reported.
The Alexanders "used their prominent positions in the industry to induce other women to attend events and parties" where they later sexually assaulted them, prosecutors said in an indictment earlier this month.
Prosecutors accused Oren, Tal, and a third brother Alon, who works at the family's security firm, of operating a sex-trafficking scheme in which the brothers β and others β victimized dozens of women dating back to 2010. The brothers obtained drugs to "surreptitiously" give the women and planned the assaults in advance, prosecutors said in the indictment.
Attorneys for the three brothers, whom police arrested in Florida earlier this month, did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The twins denied the allegations when they were first reported.
James Cinque, a New York attorney representing the Alexander brothers, told BI in response to a story published before their arrest outlining four women's claims of assault and sexual misconduct that he and his colleagues had "asked them not to comment while these matters work their way through the legal system." Cinque added they're "comfortable that they will ultimately be vindicated."
Meanwhile, the success of eXp, an emerging real-estate brokerage that has a market cap of about $1.8 billion, has been overshadowed by complaints of sexual misconduct against some of its agents.
Five female eXp employees, in two separate lawsuits filed in 2023, accused agents Michael Bjorkman and David Golden of drugging them at work-related events. Four of the women said they were also sexually assaulted, according to the lawsuits. The New York Times first reported the cases against Bjorkman and Golden.
Richard Schonfeld, an attorney representing Bjorkman, told BI that the lawsuits are "one side of the story." Peter Levine, a lawyer for Golden, didn't return requests for comment from BI but told the Times the charges against Golden were "baseless and without merit." Trial dates for both cases are set for 2025.
Representatives for eXp, who didn't return requests for comment from BI, emailed a statement to the Times, highlighting the industry's decentralized nature.
"The claims in this case stem from alleged assaults by independent real estate agents who were never eXp employees β which we handled with speed, seriousness, and deep respect as soon as the accusers brought it to our attention, in line with our values and with the law," it read.
The National Association of Realtors, the largest trade association for real-estate agents in the United States with more than 1.5 million members, is also facing troubling allegations.
One of the most notable involves Kenny Parcell, a Utah real-estate agent and former NAR president who resigned in August 2023 after The New York Times published an exposΓ© detailing multiple accusations against him and the organization.
The Times' report was based on interviews with 29 current and former employees from NAR and its affiliates who said Parcell and other NAR and affiliated company leaders repeatedly engaged in abusive and inappropriate behavior, often without facing consequences.
In June 2023, Janelle Brevard filed a lawsuit against NAR, accusing the organization of sexual harassment, retaliation, and racial discrimination. In the lawsuit, Brevard, a Black woman, said she was fired from her role in podcasts, video, and marketing after ending a consensual relationship with Parcell.
Brevard ultimately withdrew her lawsuit after entering into an agreement with the organization, the Times reported. Brevard did not respond to repeated requests for comment from BI, and her attorney declined to comment.
"The allegations are not true," Parcell said in a four-page statement in 2023. "Nothing has changed" since then, he wrote in an email to Bl on December 23. "My resignation from NAR was in no way an admission of guilt β it was a good faith effort to put NAR and its members first," he said.
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for NAR said the organization's "new leadership has undertaken a comprehensive review of our policies and procedures and continues to work every day to help NAR employees feel respected and supported."
Parties, star-agent culture, and a long road ahead
The real-estate industry can feel unsafe at times, especially for women, as the job has inherent risks. Agents are commonly expected to meet with clients, who might be strangers, alone at homes that could be secluded or lack cell reception.
In a NAR survey of 1,423 licensed real-estate agents this year, women agents were twice as likely as men to report experiencing a situation at work that made them fear for their safety, and 54% of women carried a weapon or self-defense tool compared to 47% of men.
Still, Boero said the industry's internal culture β its hard-partying traditions and the "cult of the superstar" β also presented problems.
"The Alexander brothers were like that: high-profile, flashy, wealthy, did a ton of business. We tend to elevate, emulate, and worship those types of figures in this business. And they're not always men, but they frequently are," he said. "There is this cult of the top producer in the business that, I think, has maybe obscured bad behavior over the years."
PartiesΒ are also a central, sometimes problematic, component of real-estate culture. In an industry where success is often tied to how connected you are, brokers often frequent social events to meet and mingle with other brokers, current clients, and prospective clients.
"Parties and awards and all of that stuff is very big in this business, which means there's a lot of partying and drinking, sometimes at scale," Boero said, "which, again, sometimes creates the conditions within which bad people can do bad things."
Brooke Cohen, one of the attorneys representing all five plaintiffs in the eXp cases, told BI that socializing is often essential in real estate as an opportunity for making deals, networking, and advancing your career.
That means women can find themselves in uncomfortable environments. "It's important that in this industry some parameters are put in place," Cohen said. "We really would like it to be better for people who have to attend these events to do business."
Yannaccone said women's prevalence in the industry motivated her to create What Moves Her, a program that supports women in real-estate leadership.
"Our work is just one piece of a larger effort toward progress that includes not just the many brave voices of female agents and leaders, but many of our male counterparts as well," she said. "It's our hope that through our collective effort, we can help create an industry that truly operates on shared values of integrity, accountability, and good governance."
