Through long-term planning, persistence and good relationships, Alli Chiaramonte and Tania Friedland of the ATelier Team have created a high-powered small team climbing its way to the top of NYC’s luxury market.
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Sometimes two people cross paths and the timing isn’t quite right — but later on, it can lead to a beautiful partnership. Something like that happened between Allison (“Alli”) Chiaramonte and Tania Friedland, and the two had no idea at the time that one day they would build a powerhouse team at Compass in New York City.
“We became friends working on this team [at a different firm],” Chiaramonte recalled. “Frankly, Tania trained me. I [did not come] from real estate and the team leader there was not the one sitting down answering my questions. It was Tania.”
The two women met while working at Brown Harris Stevens, then ended up going their separate ways for a couple years and reunited when both ended up at Coldwell Banker Warburg in 2019. Shortly thereafter, they decided to launch their own team, the ATelier Team, at Compass because they realized they worked better together than apart.
Today, the ATelier Team is the No. 8 small team in New York by sales volume, according to RealTrends, and the No. 1 female-led team at Compass in New York. By the end of 2025, they expect to have closed $221.83 million in sales volume for the year.
Here’s how Chiaramonte and Friedland worked together to create one of the top female-led teams in New York City.
Playing the long game with clients
Karishma Sani, Alli Chiaramonte, Tania Friedland, Sarah Minton and Kathryn Landow of the ATelier Team | Credit: Jonathan Grassi
This year, the ATelier Team saw a noticeable shift in the proportion of clients who decided to use the team for buying and selling in subsequent transactions. Chiaramonte and Friedland attributed the evolution to the team’s practice of nurturing client relationships.
About halfway through the year, the team checked in on their sales volume and realized that their figures were trending way above their 2024 numbers, even though it had felt like a challenging year to get each transaction to the finish line. They realized then that nearly one-third of their business was coming from clients who wanted to buy and sell two different properties with the team.
“I think some of it is just maintaining relationships and people entrusting us to make these big life decisions,” Friedland said. “The other part is just kind of the phase of life that people are in — either they’re needing more space for growing families or they’re downsizing from large homes that they’ve lived in for many, many years…”
Chiaramonte added, “I also think in the career arc of being an agent, you generally get your breaks with buyers — that’s sort of where I feel like our momentum originally took off … and I feel like you know you’ve made it when you start getting the listings. I think the bar to be a good listing broker is very high … and I think that’s a real vote of confidence, and I’m very proud of the listing stable we’ve built. I feel like a lot of earlier successful agents will get a few really big buyer opportunities, but it’s when you start seeing the listings come through that you hit that next level.”
Persistence
Even though Chiaramonte and Friedland had one of their best years yet, they said it felt like one of those years in which they had to push extra hard to get deals closed. It took a lot of hard work and persistence to make it all happen for their clients.
“In a year where there’s been a lot of political/financial markets/macro stuff going on, when people get stressed out, every real estate transaction has to be that much more perfect,” Chiaramonte said. “You really need to dot your i’s and cross your t’s, and I think we’ve been really, really feeling that.”
Friedland added, “In those global environments, so to speak, people become very emotionally on edge, and they transfer that into the real estate transaction. So it becomes a more emotional process than maybe it once was or it needs to be. But real estate transactions are people buying and selling one of their most expensive assets, and there are a lot of emotions and feelings attached to that.”
In an extreme example of the kind of year it has been, the pair finally closed a deal in early December that had first gone under contract a whopping three years ago.
As sellers have adjusted their prices to a normalizing market, the teammates have also found themselves in several multiple offer situations this year, which has also made their job more challenging. The pace of regulatory agencies in the city has also seemed slower in the last year, with things like background checks and approvals by co-op boards seemingly taking much longer than previous years, the teammates said.
With a new mayor in town and the U.S. economy still uncertain, several of the ATelier Team’s clients were also very concerned this year about only buying if they could also strategize a “way out” of the property in upcoming years. That has required Chiaramonte and Friedland to be extra thoughtful about each transaction and be sure to alert clients if they feel like their investment in a property will not pay off within the time frame the client is hoping for.
“People are thinking about that optionality and if I buy this home, how am I going to get out of it in two years, five years, 10 years, whatever it is,” Chiaramonte said. “So really working through with people, not just finding them a great apartment and a great deal today, but working through renovations: what makes sense, what doesn’t, other uses for funds, and how does that compare? And the time value of holding multiple apartments and renting while you’re doing renovations become this larger piece of the puzzle that we’re being brought into that I think we weren’t before.”
Maintaining good relationships
Keeping up good relationships within New York City’s greater broker community and with each other is another secret to Chiaramonte and Friedland’s success.
“Especially in the Upper East/Upper West Side, it’s a very small broker town up here and we see the same people,” Chiaramonte said. “So really knowing who to reach out to about what’s coming up, even who to ask for opinions about their experiences with the [co-op] board where they’ve done transactions, maintaining and utilizing those relationships within the industry to help our clients, I think it’s been important and is an effort to grab drinks with those brokers as well as our clients, and not just be an island amongst ourselves.”
The duo said they balance business and friendship well because of their level-headed temperaments, honesty and skillsets that enhance one another.
“Our strengths and weaknesses are different, but they very much complement one another,” Friedland said. “I also think neither of us are hotheaded. So if one of us needs to take the lead on something or has a strong opinion, we’ve never had a situation where the other person is like, ‘I totally disagree and I’m gonna put my foot down.’ We both have strong opinions, but we’re easygoing and mild-mannered in the sense that we respect one another’s opinion.”
Despite their mild-mannered personalities, the pair have learned how to seamlessly balance their roles with specific clients, where one of them will play “good cop” with one client, and then play “bad cop” with another, and vice versa. Since each of the women have families now, it is also a huge relief for them to be able to depend on one another when their personal lives become heavy with responsibilities.
“I feel like having each other has allowed us to flex and be present in our lives and grow the business in a way that we could have never done without each other,” Chiaramonte said. “And also, it’s a tough business. It gets discouraging along the way, and I think having someone to pick you back up and cheer [you on] has been really great.”
“We spend a lot of time together and actually end up buying a lot of the same or similar things,” Friedland added. “So sometimes if we’ve both [bought] the same thing that’s new and we’re excited about wearing it but we’re going somewhere, we’ll call each other before the meeting and be like, ‘Just want to make sure you’re not wearing that!'”
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Email Lillian Dickerson
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