Like many agents of her generation, real estate was not Nikki Field’s first career.

“Many of us old guards started with something else and evolved into real estate,” said Field, who leads a team at Sotheby’s International Realty in Manhattan. “I am sure you have heard this story so many times before: We had a career, then we went off to raise some children, then, once the children reached a certain age, we went back into what at the time was deemed socially acceptable part-time work. But, boy were they wrong at how much work this job involves.”

Since starting her career as a “part-time” agent, Field has gone on to become one of the country’s most successful agents. In 2022, The Field Team was ranked at No. 59 on RealTrends The Thousand mega team rankings, recording $387.7 million in sales volume in 2021.

RealTrends recently caught up with Field to discuss her career and the keys to building a successful real estate team.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Brooklee Han: How did you find your way into the real estate industry?

Nikki Field: Well, it was rather serendipitously. My background is in brand marketing. My husband has a marketing agency and back in the 90s we were really known for branding and positioning our clients in places to succeed. But in 1996, when our two daughters had enough of me constantly being around and I knew in order to maintain our relationships I was going to have to get out of their lives a bit after being president of the parent teacher association and running all the fundraisers and doing all the things that mothers do (laughs). My husband and I decided that I couldn’t go back into his marketing agency because by then it had grown to almost 200 people and I had been out for 14 years, so it would not be right for me to come back into an upper management position. So, my husband and I decided together, since we are a team and still are after 43 years of marriage, the real estate would be a great part time job for me.

My very first day in it I was terribly nervous because I had never sold anything before. I knew marketing and branding, but I did not feel confident selling. But, by the second day, I knew I loved the job. It was just so interesting, and you meet all these extraordinary people, and I had been stuck by the luck of the real estate gods to be in the Manhattan market. After I survived that first week I was completely hooked.

BH: What were those first few years in the industry like for you?

Field: I was truly luck because in 1996, the Manhattan market was moving fast — all jets were on fire. I lived on the Upper East Side, and I had a big Rolodex from all my work with the schools, so I have no trouble starting out. How I first started in the field, however, was someone threw a medical office listing at me because a lot of people didn’t really want to do medical offices, particularly elite brokers. I knew nothing about medical office, the only thing I knew was from visiting my gynecologist, but I dug deep and sold it for more than its list price. From there I became a medical office specialist. Through branding I knew that specialization was going to be the way I could climb forward fast. So, I convinced by broker at the time to make me a specialist and he gave me a few months trial run and within a couple of months I had sold so many medical offices. Eventually I got calls from doctors with offices in elite buildings on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue asking if I could sell their office, which I knew I could because at that point I was a medical office specialist. But what that did was get my name in the building, so from there, people upstairs who had penthouse apartments would see my sign and then call me to sell their apartment.

BH: Can you talk about your transition from selling medical offices to selling residential real estate?

Field: It was less than a year from when I started to when I moved over to residential. I received a penthouse on Fifth Avenue to sell after selling a medial office on the ground floor and I had great success with the listing. So, I marched right back into my manager’s office and said, ‘You’ve just lost your medical office specialist, I am now your penthouse specialist.’ Back then there were no such thing as specialists and people who had penthouses and prime pieces of real estate all of a sudden felt more comfortable taking a bet on me because I was a penthouse specialist, so I knew everything there was to know about penthouses. From there I started doing townhomes and you see a lot of international buyers purchasing second homes or investment properties with townhomes, so that enabled me to build a strong international network. So, when the bottom dropped out of the Manhattan market in 2008, I still had a lot of international markets I could work in and international buyers I could work with.

BH: Could you tell me a bit more about how you leveraged your marketing and branding experience, as well as your rolodex of contacts to grow your business?

Field: Back then agents were not really allowed to develop their own personal brands. It was very challenging, and the agencies felt threatened that the brokers would then carve off into their own companies. So, there was no allowance made for agents to promote themselves and their own brand. But by 1998 I was brought over to Sotheby’s, which was my ultimate goal when I had started two years before. Even before I was in real estate, I knew branding and it was clear to me that Sotheby’s was THE luxury real estate brand in New York, and I wanted to be there. So, when I started at Sotheby’s I asked if I could do some co-branded marketing materials with the brokerage branding and my own branding, and I wanted to start a team with different agents specializing in specific types of properties and clients. They were really concerned about how this would impact their branding, so they gave me a six-month trial run with both, and it just took off.

BH: How did you structure your team when you started it and what were some of the specializations?

Field: I had geographic specialists, so Upper East Side and Upper West Side. Then I also had a townhouse division, as well as people who specialized in new developments and walk-ups and entry level properties. Sellers like working with specialists because along with the agent’s experience and negotiating skills, they know this person knows that specific market because they specialize in it.

BH: What were some of the challenges you faced in building out your team?

Field: I have trained literally scores of people to build up their own teams and there are always two main challenges: recruitment and managing. I made a huge number of mistakes building my team and have lots of crashes and burns over the years and through that I learned that recruitment is essential to a successful team. The number one thing I look for is not so much their qualifications, but their ability to be flexible and to work within the existing team culture. Are they collaborative? Will they help someone else? Will they share information? You need someone with that personality and that mindset that works well in a collaborative environment.

What I recommend a lot of the time is that you don’t necessarily bring in another partner or someone that already has traction in the business, but hire a newbie, that is brand new to the business, but has the motivation, the skill sets and it hungry to grow. That is the best way to not only build strength but promote loyalty and longevity in your team. I have one team member right now that has been with me for 19 years and another for 17 years. The average number of years for our team members right now is 11 and many of these people started out as assistants or interns or mentees who learned our culture and how we do things and then decided to join us in a more senior capacity.

BH: What are some of the things you enjoy about working in such a unique market as Manhattan?

Field: Manhattan is such an incredible market, and I am just so blessed that I found a husband from Manhattan who married me and then insisted we stayed here, otherwise who knows where I might be selling real estate. But Manhattan isn’t your standard real estate market, it is really a tale of many markets. You have the young, just out of grad school renters, who are just starting to explore more of the city, then you have those who are renting their second place and are starting to look at entry level properties.

The entry level markets are so fascinatingly fun and everyone on my team has to be in entry level for a while because while it is the hardest, it is the golden return of real estate. The people you successfully guide through their entry-level purchase end up becoming your multi-time buyers and sellers, and they are the ones who then give you referrals, organically growing your business. One of my first residential clients was the daughter of a friend of mine and I helped her buy her first studio apartment and now I have helped her buy and sell seven properties.

 BH: So many agents I speak with credit their success to having a set routine each day that ensures they make the most of their working hours. What are three things you do every day that you feel contribute to the long term success of your business?

Field: I start my day at 4:30 am and I do that even on the weekend because of the strength of our internationals business, which for the last four years has been about 60-80% of our income. So, I am on the phone talking with people overseas while it is still within their business hours. I am really up and running though by 8:30 and that is when I start calling my local clients. Some people end their day with calls, but I think it is far more impactful first thing in the morning because I know for me and probably a lot of other people, that by the end of the day you just want to switch off and not think about business. By catching people first thing you are both more clear-headed and you can tackle things in a more pro-active manner. And while the day can get busy, I always make sure to carve out 30 mins to an hour to do something for myself, whether that is work with my personal trainer, call a friend whose husband is in the hospital, meet with my daughters for lunch.

BH: What is something you are working to change in the real estate industry?

Field: I have really been working with agents and brokers on their succession planning, and I am finally starting to see companies come onboard with the idea. Now we have a program in place that trains family members or close friends on to how to take over a retiring agent’s business. I see so many agents retire and when they leave their entire business dies because they have no plan in place that allows the business, they have built over the years to continue on without them.

I have a group in Manhattan that is just mothers and daughters in real estate, and we have 27 top-producing mom and daughter teams. I brought my own daughter into the business about eight years ago from her job at Morgan Stanley and together we have introduced numerous points of how you train those young 20-somethings that are brand-new to real estate to take over a business you have cultivated for decades. I highly recommend that every agent who knows they are planning to leave the business in the next 10 years develop a succession plan.

BH: Talking about agents new to the business, what is your best piece of advice to someone starting out in the industry?

Field: Become a mentee. Identify someone that has been in the business for a while, that you respect and that happened to be in a segment of the market you think you will do well in. Then volunteer your services, run open houses, do as much as you can for them for free and hopefully they will quickly see your value and take you on as a full-time partner, but if not you will have the highly valuable credential of working for an uber producer.

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