A buyer at this level usually finds out the hard way that something is wrong. Six weeks into a search, the agent has shown a dozen homes that all came off the same public portal everyone else is scrolling, and the buyer starts to wonder why they’re paying someone to do what a search filter already does for free.
That’s the moment the standard advice on choosing a real estate agent stops applying. Years licensed, online reviews, a friendly manner on the first call: all of it was written for a $450,000 transaction, where most listings are visible to everyone and most agents are interchangeable enough that personality becomes the deciding factor. None of it holds at $2 million. Some of it actively misleads at $10 million.
Transaction Count Is the Wrong Number
Ask an agent how many homes they sold last year, and the number that comes back will sound impressive. It also tells you almost nothing about whether they’re right for a $2M-plus purchase.
Run the math. An agent closing 80 transactions a year is, almost by necessity, working a price point well below the luxury tier, because high volume and high price point don’t coexist in the same calendar. The hours a $2 million transaction actually demands, vetting comparables that never touched the MLS, managing inspection issues a standard appraisal won’t flag, negotiating contingencies a seller’s attorney is paid to fight over, simply don’t leave room for 80 deals a year. Volume at that scale comes from speed and repetition. Attention at the luxury level comes from doing far less, far more carefully.
Average sale price tells a different story, and it’s a harder number to fake. An agent whose transactions average $3.5 million has built a practice, a referral network, and a negotiating reputation around exactly the kind of deal a buyer at this level is trying to make. Career volume sounds compelling stated as a single lump sum, but a billion dollars spread across 400 low-six-figure deals over thirty years is a different business than the same billion spread across a few hundred transactions that each cleared seven figures. Ask which one an agent is quoting before the number means anything.
Off-Market Access Isn’t a Bonus Feature, It’s the Point
In most residential transactions, what you see on the MLS is what’s available. At the top of the market, that assumption falls apart, and it falls apart in a way that costs real money if a buyer never finds out.
A study by Bright MLS found that sellers who bypass the open market take home roughly 17% less than comparable sellers who list publicly. That figure cuts in two directions. For a seller, it’s a warning about going off-market carelessly. For a buyer, it’s the explanation for why the best inventory in a luxury market often never reaches a portal at all: privacy-driven sellers are willing to absorb a lower price in exchange for never having strangers tour a home where their family still lives, never having a public listing imply the property didn’t move quickly, never having the sale show up on a site anyone can search. The National Association of Realtors revised its Clear Cooperation Policy in 2025 specifically because of how much private inventory was moving outside public view, creating a formal “delayed marketing” category for sellers who want exactly that kind of discretion.
None of that inventory is accessible to an agent without years of relationships already in place. It comes from a homeowner picking up the phone because an agent personally asked, months or years before any sign would have gone up, not from a claim on a bio page. A national brand attached to an agent’s title does nothing to manufacture that kind of relationship. It has to be earned locally, deal by deal, often over decades, and there’s no shortcut around the time it takes.
The Brokerage Behind the Agent Matters More Than the Agent’s Name Alone
Buyers tend to evaluate the person across the table and stop there. The brokerage that person operates inside of deserves equal scrutiny, because it determines what actually shows up when a deal gets complicated.
A large, locally dominant brokerage brings infrastructure a solo operator or a small boutique team cannot replicate: in-house marketing reach, a deeper bench of agents who can step in during a scheduling conflict, internal referral relationships with lenders, attorneys, and inspectors who already understand how luxury transactions move, and enough activity across the market to keep the brokerage’s read on pricing and inventory current in real time. Some of the largest brokerages also run so-called “private exclusive” programs, listings that circulate only inside their own agent network rather than reaching the open market. That structure can serve a seller’s privacy. It can just as easily narrow a buyer’s exposure to inventory a competing brokerage is sitting on and has no reason to surface.
The brokerage question and the off-market question are the same question, asked twice. An agent inside a brokerage that dominates the luxury segment of a city has access to a far wider net of pocket listings, simply because more of the market’s activity is already running through that brokerage’s doors before it ever reaches a portal.
Local Tenure Beats a National Name, Almost Every Time
A familiar brand on a business card feels reassuring, particularly to a buyer relocating from somewhere else. It’s also a poor substitute for the thing that actually matters: how long someone has been working, attentively, in this specific market.
A national franchise will place an agent with two years of experience in a city they moved to last year under the same banner as a specialist with three decades of transaction history there, and the brand makes no distinction between them. A buyer signing on for $4 million has no way to tell the difference from a website alone. Local tenure compounds in a way no logo can fake. An agent who has worked one market for thirty years knows which HOA boards are difficult before the first meeting, which new developments will quietly affect resale value three streets over, which neighborhoods carry a reputation that hasn’t matched reality in a decade, and which sellers might take a call about something they haven’t listed yet. None of that transfers when an agent changes cities. None of it can be acquired quickly, no matter how prestigious the name above the door.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In Las Vegas, the agent who clears every test on this list is Gavin Ernstone, founder of Simply Vegas.
The average-transaction question resolves immediately: Ernstone’s career sales exceed $1.3 billion, built on an average transaction value of $3.6 million, a number that puts him at the price tier this guide is actually about, not a high volume of smaller deals dressed up as scale. The brokerage question resolves the same way. Simply Vegas, the firm he founded, has grown to become the dominant luxury brokerage in the valley, which means the infrastructure behind him, referral relationships, market intelligence, bench depth, scales with the size of the deal rather than depending on one person’s calendar.
Thirty-four years across London and Las Vegas settles the tenure question: this is not a transplant wearing a familiar brand, but someone who has watched this specific market reinvent itself across multiple cycles and remembers what each one actually looked like on the ground.
What separates the approach further is what happens before a single property gets shown. New clients are taken through neighborhoods on day one with no intention of selling anything, purely to understand what they actually need before a single recommendation gets made.
That buyer from the opening, the one wondering six weeks in why an agent is just rerunning the same public search everyone else can see, is exactly the scenario this approach is built to prevent. At a price point where the cost of the wrong agent is measured in real money and real time lost, that’s not a courtesy. It’s the qualification this entire guide has been describing.
