Alta Real Estate, the Manhattan-based boutique luxury brokerage, has been awarded the Real Estate Board of New York’s 2026 Residential Deal of the Year—the industry’s highest honor for residential deal-making—for the sale of Penthouse 2 at The Platinum, a 4,335-square-foot, five-bedroom triplex at 247 West 46th Street in the heart of Times Square.
The property had been listed unsuccessfully five times over ten years with four prior brokerages before Alta closed it in May 2025. The award was presented at REBNY’s annual ceremony on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
“This recognition is bigger than any single transaction,” said Kelly. “Four brokers and five listings over ten years could not get this property closed. We did—not because we have more agents or a bigger ad budget, but because we had the time, focus and creativity that boutique allows. REBNY’s recognition is a validation that in the most complex deals, judgment and persistence still beat scale.”
About the Award: REBNY’s Residential Deal of the Year recognizes the top residential transaction closed during the previous calendar year, evaluating perseverance, ingenuity, determination, creativity and professionalism. It is the most prestigious honor a residential broker can receive in New York City and is decided by a panel of senior industry judges from across the brokerage community.
Alta’s winning submission centered on the May 2025 sale of Penthouse 2 at The Platinum (247 West 46th Street), a 4,335-square-foot, five-bedroom triplex that closed for $6,662,500—the highest Midtown Manhattan resale in the five years since the onset of COVID-19 and a building record for The Platinum.
Inside the Deal: PH2 at The Platinum had been listed on and off five times over a decade with four different brokerages, with prior asking prices reaching as high as $21 million. By early 2024, it had come off the market once again with a most recent ask of $9 million.
Kelly began a sustained cold-outreach campaign in February 2024 to the owner—an Ireland-based physician, art collector and winery proprietor—and after weeks of email and voicemail follow-up, was awarded the exclusive in spring 2024 following a custom international marketing proposal.
Alta relaunched the property at $8.5 million. After a slow showing cycle in a Midtown submarket that had been among the hardest-hit segments of Manhattan’s post-pandemic recovery, the seller elected to pursue an auction. The auction was reduced in price, rescheduled and ultimately failed to produce a registered bidder—leaving the listing stalled and the seller in dispute with the auction company.
In January 2025, a buyer who had previously walked away from the property re-emerged through a new broker. The complication: a 4% commission was still owed to the auction company under the existing contract if the deal closed within the contract window and neither buyer nor seller was willing to absorb it.
Rather than walk away or wait out the contract, Kelly negotiated a four-way commission arrangement: the auction company agreed to accept a significantly reduced fee, and Alta, the buyer’s broker and the buyers themselves each contributed to cover that fee. The deal closed at $6,662,500 on May 14, 2025—almost exactly one year from the day Alta received the exclusive.
“The deal was won at the table, not in the listing,” Kelly said. “We had a willing buyer, a willing seller, and an obligation everyone wanted to walk away from. Getting it done required every party — including us — to give up something so the deal could close. That kind of structure is hard to engineer at scale, and I think that’s part of what REBNY recognized.”
The Case for Boutique: Alta Real Estate operates with a fraction of the headcount of the firms that typically dominate REBNY’s top honors. The firm has produced more than 700 closed transactions and over $1 billion in lifetime sales volume under Kelly’s leadership, with $30–$40 million in annual production. Kelly is a RealTrends-ranked Top 50 Manhattan agent by sales volume and personally holds a perfect 5.0-star Google rating across 30 public reviews and 469 verified transactions on Zillow.
“Boutique is not a smaller version of big,” Kelly added. “It’s a different operating model—one where the founder is on every hard call, where the agent who shows the property is the one structuring the close and where a deal that takes ten years to make finally gets made because someone refused to let it go. REBNY’s recognition tells the market that model still wins.”
Alta Real Estate, founded and led by Rick Kelly, is the only boutique firm to receive this year’s top residential honor—a category historically dominated by Manhattan’s largest brokerages, including Compass, Douglas Elliman, Corcoran, Brown Harris Stevens, Sotheby’s International Realty and Serhant.
