The leaders of the latest team of real estate agents to join the Serhant brokerage in Washington, D.C., say their local roots have been important to their growth in the industry.
Anna Mackler and Barak Sky, The Sky Group’s managing partners, said this week they are shifting to Serhant after almost two decades at Long and Foster. They are the latest locally based agents to migrate to the New York-based brokerage led by Ryan Serhant. The brokerage opened a D.C. office in July with 35 agents from four area real estate firms.
“With the onset of AI, we wanted to be aligned with a company that was future-planning,” Sky told Homes.com. “Ryan’s vision and how he’s building the company was most aligned with where we thought the industry is going over the next 10 years-plus.”
Serhant, which now has 73 agents in the Washington region, counts a proprietary AI platform among the technology products it offers to help people working in the field to scale up their businesses.
Mackler and Sky grew up in Takoma Park and Bethesda, northwest of the city, and pride themselves on their deep knowledge of various neighborhoods in the district, Virginia and Maryland, collectively known as the DMV. Mackler told Homes.com that since the pandemic, affordability has become more central in buyers’ calculus, meaning they are often looking in multiple neighborhoods at once in different parts of the region.
“It’s really cool for us to share our knowledge of all these different areas, telling people, you could go to these five areas you didn’t even know about with the same budget,” she said.
Sky joined his mother, Chana, at Long and Foster after graduating from college in 2008. Sky was a finance major but there were few jobs in that field in the middle of the Great Recession. His mother, who was winding down her career in real estate, encouraged him to try it out. Mackler came on board a few years later.
Sky Group ranked second among Maryland teams with up to 10 agents in 2024 by the number of transactions they worked on with buyers and sellers, and total sales volume, according to the real estate website RealTrends. The team is now up to 13 members, including Mackler and Sky.
Mackler said the team will continue to offer design guidance on things like floor plans and finishes to seller clients, in addition to traditional real estate services.
