We were lucky to catch up with Gavin Hammon recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Gavin , thanks for joining us today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

When I first started working in Residential real estate in NYC at Corcoran back in 2009, I had just moved to New York City and didn’t know anyone. I would go to the office early every morning and sign up on a piece of paper that sat at the reception desk – as this was a first come first serve basis. By doing that every morning getting up before everyone else and coming to the office, I was able to capture walk-ins who didn’t have representation who came in looking for someone to help them buy Real Estate. This was before the time that the Internet had really taken off with regards to Real Estate websites and portals etc.
Within my first couple of weeks of doing this, I had a walk-in from a French lady who was in New York looking to buy an apartment for her daughter. To this day, I have helped them transact multiple times over the years and lastly helped them buy a beautiful townhouse in Fort Green. I’m grateful for the opportunity that was afforded to me by this process as it’s not easy getting started in any industry in New York City given the amount of competition that there is – and the real estate market is saturated with real estate agents.
These days agents pay money to play. The StreetEasy and the Zillow‘s of the world have programs that agents can buy into in order to be placed in front of customers. Old school walk-ins no longer happen as much if at all…

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was born in Munich and grew up moving through Europe’s cultural capitals — the kind of upbringing where you absorb proportion and detail before you ever have the language for it. From there I went to boarding school in Scotland, then on to universities in South Africa and the United States. By the time I landed in New York in 2009, I’d lived on three continents and spoke French fluently, but I had no real plan for what came next.

Real estate found me, rather than the other way around. A friend of mine was working at one of the most respected firms in the city, and he suggested I sit down with his boss — no more pressure than that, just a conversation. I went in for the interview and walked out with a job offer the same day. I started immediately, and I haven’t looked back since.

Today I’m a luxury real estate advisor at Compass, working across Manhattan and Brooklyn — Carnegie Hill, Gramercy, Flatiron, Greenwich Village, Tribeca, Soho, Williamsburg, DUMBO. My clients are buyers, sellers, and investors who care about discretion and precision as much as they care about price. The work spans legacy co-ops with real provenance, new-development condos, penthouses, townhomes, and the kind of investment assets that reward someone who’s actually done the underwriting.

What I solve for people, at its core, is complexity. New York real estate is layered — financially, emotionally, architecturally — and most people are navigating it once or twice in a lifetime while I’m navigating it daily. I bring strategy to negotiations, a trained eye to how a property is positioned and marketed, and a global network that matters when a buyer is calling from London or Geneva, not just from the Upper East Side.

I think what sets me apart is the lens I see this city through. I didn’t grow up here — I grew up comparing it to Munich, to Edinburgh, to Cape Town, to the apartments and architecture of half a dozen other places before I ever set foot on a New York co-op board. That perspective shapes how I read a space, how I tell its story, and how I understand what a discerning buyer is actually responding to, even when they can’t quite articulate it themselves.

What I’m most proud of isn’t a single closing — it’s the clients who’ve come back a second and third time, or sent a friend, because the experience felt like something more than a transaction. I take that seriously. Real estate at this level isn’t about volume. It’s about getting it right for the person in front of you.

If there’s one thing I want people to know about my work, it’s this: I’m not here to sell you a listing. I’m here to understand what you’re actually looking for — in a home, in a neighborhood, in a next chapter — and to bring the market intelligence, the marketing instinct, and the negotiation experience to make that happen with as little friction as possible. That’s the job, and it’s one I still find genuinely interesting every day.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There’s one that I think about more than any closing price ever could.
A few years ago, I worked with the doorman of an Upper East Side co-op. He’d worked that building for years, and one of the residents — an older woman who’d lived there even longer — had taken a genuine liking to him. The kind of relationship that builds slowly, in small daily moments, until it’s not really about the job anymore. When she passed, she left him money with one specific instruction: that someone help him buy a home of his own, for himself, his wife, and their three kids.
I was that someone.
Working with him was an absolute pleasure from our first conversation to the day we closed. He was a true gentleman — patient, grateful, completely unjaded by a process that can wear most people down. Finding the right home for his family is probably the most satisfying transaction of my career, and it had nothing to do with square footage or price per foot. It had everything to do with what that home meant to him, and to her, for thinking of him in the first place.
That’s the story I come back to when people ask what this job is really about. Not the listings, not the negotiations — the moments where real estate becomes something closer to a gift.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

Real estate doesn’t pay you for showing up — it pays you for closing, and closings take time. I’d just arrived in New York, I didn’t have a deep network in the city yet, and commission-based income means there’s no safety net underneath you while you build one. I made the decision early on to commit fully to it anyway, which meant living off savings I’d built up before I ever set foot in a brokerage.
There were months where the math was uncomfortable. I watched that number get smaller every time rent came due, with no guarantee of when — or if — the first real deal would land. It’s a particular kind of pressure, betting on yourself in a city that doesn’t owe you anything and an industry where most people don’t make it past year one.
I never seriously considered walking away. I’d given up a kind of stability to be there in the first place, and I wasn’t going to hand that back over a hard few months. So I kept showing up, kept learning the market block by block, and eventually the work started to pay for itself. The income evened out, then it grew, and the savings I’d leaned on became a memory rather than a worry.
I think about that year often, especially now. It’s the difference between someone who chose this business because it sounded glamorous and someone who chose it knowing exactly what the early cost would be — and paid it anyway.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.compass.com/agents/gavin-hammon/
• Instagram: @gavinhammonnyc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavinalexanderhammon
• Other: https://solidadvisoryteam.com/

Image Credits

Romy Rodiek