For NYC Agent Jordan Shea, Knowledge Is the Sharpest Edge
by David Hay
July 2025
Toward the end of a recent conversation with me reflecting on his 15-year career in New York City residential real estate, Jordan Shea remarked that being successful as an agent was, to a large extent, about “just showing up.”
Coming from anyone else, this might sound like an insufferable cliché. But when you learn what “showing up” means to Shea—and what that means for his clients—you understand why he’s risen to become one of Douglas Elliman’s top NYC agents. Indeed, I sometimes wonder when he ever sleeps.
Not only is he Director of Sales for Monogram New York, the new luxury condominium tower in Midtown East, he is actively selling stellar properties across the city.
When we first spoke, he was preparing to show a beautifully redesigned residence at 42 White Street, one of only five in a classically Neo-Greco building in Tribeca completed in 1835. Undertaken by its savvy owner, the redesign has left no surface or amenity untouched. The apartment was listed for $4.25 million.
Just six days after the listing went live, the property went into a bidding war. Five days after that, the contract was fully executed for above the asking price. A successful outcome that owes a lot to the careful planning and its positioning in the market by Shea.
It’s a window into how carefully this broker works: knowing everything about the property, the market, the location, and then marshaling those data and insights into the sales campaign.
“You can never know too much,” he asserts. “I’m aiming to be the most educated, most influential broker that I can be—I have to know everything.”
That relentless pursuit of knowledge is one of the ways Shea shows up for his clients. It also fuels his relentless daily output of episodes for his podcast Best & Final, which he records every weekday morning.
“I have to come up with something to talk about every day,” he says. “It’ll most likely be something I haven’t before—it has to be.”
To take one for example, Episode #52, on May 14, touched on “the MTA's plan for a 684-unit housing project in Harlem, a new 12-story mixed-use building planned for the Upper West Side, Fanatics expanding its office space in Hudson Square, a major mortgage extension and renovation plan for 1211 Sixth Avenue, a $21 million pre-foreclosure action on Canal Street, several property sales and financing deals across Manhattan, and legal action against a Greenwich Village property for allegedly operating as an illegal short-term rental.“
Even more impressive is that Shea managed to cover all of that ground in a mere thirteen minutes. That wide range of expertise is also in demand: he is a regular contributor to Good Morning New York and has been profiled in WWD and Real Estate Weekly.
What occupies him most days and night, of course, is his role at the Monogram (above). Comprising 191 residences, the highly distinctive tower on East 47th Street, overlooking the East River and beyond, was designed by the New York City-based Ismael Leyva Architects (ILA), with interiors by the avant-garde Shanghai-based firm Neri&Hu. A year ago, when the sales team started doing pre-construction tours at their offsite sales gallery, the going was tough at first.
“It requires a lot of imagination to purchase at these prices without actually being in the apartment,” he acknowledged.
But by Thanksgiving, the first closings happened, and people started to move in, almost as fast as they were ready.
“We had the second-highest sales absorption rate in the city,” Shea recalls.
Among the listings now available is one of the penthouses, with an offering price of $4,989,700.
Shea and the sales team at Monogram have sold 70 apartments there, with 120 more to sell.
Having launched his real estate career at Douglas Elliman in 2010—remarkably, less than 24 hours after arriving in NYC from Florida—Shea is enough of a veteran to call himself “seasoned,” particularly next to the rising generation of real estate pros who don’t appear to put the same emphasis on deeply understanding the complexities and trending changes of the business.
But he makes sure that his clients do. When he talks with prospective clients, among his standard questions concerns what sort of return on investment they want.
“I ask them to consider that, if they buy this property, how long are they prepared to own it before they make a profit,” Shea says, noting how many of them don’t appear to have considered it before.
It’s one of the hard questions that he believes are very much part of his job to ask. It gets everyone on the same page early on. And it reassures his clients that they have an agent who is showing up for them.
David Hay is a well-known architectural writer and playwright. His stories have been featured in The New York Times, Dwell and New York.
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