About
Diallo J. Stevens, Licensed Real Estate Broker. Principal of NYREFCO, LLC.
I got my license in 2002 and sold my first houses in Queens. Within eighteen months I was the top producer in my office; by 2006 I was number one out of a hundred and thirty agents in what was then the number one Century 21 office on the East Coast. I stayed there fourteen and a half years.
What shaped the practice was the crash. I was among the first in my company to work short sales, and three of those transactions were later used by a prominent real estate attorney to teach other brokers how to handle them. Reuters interviewed me about the foreclosure crisis in Jamaica, Queens, which they were then calling the epicenter of it. Around the same time I started taking guardianship and estate sales, because they were difficult and most agents didn’t want them.
In 2016 I moved to Keller Williams, joined the Agent Leadership Council, and stayed in the top twenty percent of producers. In 2018 I was ranked thirty-fourth out of roughly a hundred and ninety thousand agents company-wide. When the company looked like it might not survive the pandemic, I took over as General Manager and became an owner, supervised over a hundred and fifty licensees, and put my own production second for a couple of years. I sold my interest for what I put in — no profit, no distributions — and went back to doing the work I’m actually good at.
Now I run my own brokerage. That’s a deliberate choice. It means nobody takes a cut of your transaction to fund an office I don’t use, nobody hands me a script, and when there’s a judge involved I can act as a neutral without a franchise’s interests sitting behind me.
I’m a relationship person more than a transaction person. But I don’t want the relationship at the expense of the business, or the business at the expense of the relationship. I want both, and I’ve managed to keep both for twenty years with the same people.
I had great respect for Diallo’s abilities from consulting work he had done for my agency in his earlier career as a network engineer. When my wife and I needed a realtor to sell our home, I thought of Diallo immediately, and the choice was completely validated by his performance, which was superb in every respect.
I’m a New York State approved real estate instructor. I’ve taught the REALTOR® portion of first-time homebuyer workshops for Neighborhood Housing Services in Jamaica and Queens — the ones required for grant and down-payment assistance programs — and taught credit repair and seminars for seniors across the city. I’ve sat on panels for the New York State Association of REALTORS®, the Long Island Board of REALTORS®, and the Triple Play conference. I served as an elected member and treasurer of Community Education Council District 25, and as a parent member of the School Leadership Team at PS 165Q.
I’d like your business and I’m comfortable saying so. Tell me the situation and I’ll tell you straight whether I’m the right person for it.
