The Cliffs Did $90.1 Million Last Quarter. The Share Closing Outside the Gates' Own Brokerage Nearly Doubled in a Year.

The Cliffs Property Report for the first quarter of 2026, published April 15, puts the quarter at 68 transactions and $90.1 million, transactions up 6 percent year over year and volume up 26 percent. Strong quarter. The number worth your attention is buried one page later.

The same report shows the in-house brokerage's own book: 44 transactions and $48,070,300, alongside a year-over-year table running back to 2023. That table is the story. Cliffs Realty closed $54.5 million in the first quarter of 2025 and $48.0 million in the first quarter of 2026. Its volume fell roughly 12 percent while the market it sits inside rose 26 percent.

Subtract and you get the rest of the market. Outside the in-house channel: about $17 million in Q1 2025, about $42 million in Q1 2026. The outside share of dollars went from roughly a quarter of the market to nearly half, in four quarters. Every dollar of the market's growth, and then some, landed somewhere other than the community's own sales desk.

Now the part most coverage of a report like this gets wrong, including our own first pass at it. The outside average transaction, about $1.75 million, runs well above the in-house average of about $1.09 million, and it is tempting to read that as outside firms winning the trophy deals. It is mostly product mix. The report's type-of-sale breakdown shows 21 of the in-house brokerage's 44 transactions were homesites, at an average near $330,000. Its average *home* was about $1.79 million, within two percent of the outside average. The in-house desk moves the developer's dirt, which is its job. Outside firms bring house buyers.

One more thing, and it is a lesson in reading charts. The report's competitive analysis puts Cliffs Realty at 36 transactions as selling brokerage against three named competitors at 6, 5 and 4. That looks like a rout. But those four bars total 51 of the quarter's 68 transactions, so 17 sit with brokerages the chart does not show. Against all other brokerages combined the margin is 36 to 32. The claim that Cliffs Realty outsold every other brokerage combined is true. It is true by four transactions.

So the read for a buyer: this market is no longer one channel with a few stragglers. Roughly half the money now moves with independent representation, and the trend has one direction.

We run the Cliffs Collection and we are not affiliated with the community's brokerage. Send us the addresses you are weighing and we will run the comps and the carrying math with you.