Ask Alana Miller how to break into luxury real estate and she’ll give you a simple formula: she sorts it by price and starts at the top. She earned her luxury certification in her second year as an agent, when most new agents are still learning the paperwork, because she wanted something to point to when a seller asked why they should trust her with a $3 million house. Her tools were an expired list and a marketing plan a seller could actually see.
On a recent episode of the REDX podcast, host Hannah Rabé talked with Miller about how to break into the luxury real estate market with only a few years in the business, and how she moved from her first $500,000 listings to a $3 million one. Miller is a New York State licensed associate real estate broker working the Staten Island, New York, and New Jersey markets. She got her license in 2022, and by her own count she has closed 57 transactions worth $35 million since, top producer three years running.
Watch the full conversation on the REDX Podcast:
Quick Links:
Miller’s mornings start the same way, often before she is out of bed: she pulls up the fresh expired search on REDX and scans whatever came in overnight. In New Jersey, where she says she is permitted to cold call, she sorts every property on that list by price before she makes a single dial.
“I sort them by price and I start with the highest price ones first because I’d rather go for the big one. Listen, you sell one big one… if I go sell one big one that’s like four little ones to me.”
The list Miller sorts every morning is REDX’s Expired Leads data: homeowners whose listings expired without selling. By her account, New York’s rules keep her off the phone with most of those sellers unless she has talked to them in the last 18 months, so there she works the same sorted list by email and by knocking on the door. Wherever you practice, check your own state’s calling rules against REDX’s Real Estate Agent’s Guide to the Do-Not-Call List before you pick up the phone on any expired list.
Miller started at the bottom of her own market’s price range. Staten Island’s entry-level homes run $500,000 to $700,000, by her account, and that’s where her first deals came from. She wanted the bigger properties, and she already knew the question a seller would ask her.
“I wanted the big ones. I wanted the million-dollar, the $3 million properties,” she said. “And I said, well, who’s going to hire an agent with so little time… as an agent, no matter how many I sold?”
Her plan for how to get luxury listings started with earning the credentials that answered that question before a seller could ask it. In her second year as an agent, she earned her luxury certification and became an associate broker, the earliest her state allowed.
The strategy paid off on a $1.5 million listing that had sat on and off the market for a while. Miller says New York’s rules kept her off the phone, so she knocked on the door instead. A few follow-up calls later she had the listing, and by her account she sold the overpriced home in two months to her own buyer for $1.35 million.
Every expired seller Miller meets has the same wound. Their house did not sell, and in her experience most of them can point to exactly why. Naming that reason out loud is the opening move in handling expired listing objections from a seller who feels let down by their last agent.
“I explained that their house had no marketing. It was just sitting on the MLS,” she said.
So she leads the appointment with what she is going to do differently: a video home tour, distributed on her Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. At her former brokerage, which also used Pinterest, that reach ran to three million potential buyers a month, by her account, built up over years.
“My motto that I just recently came up with with my own branding … is maximum exposure for maximum price.”
None of that marketing is free. Miller estimates she puts a couple hundred dollars a month into it, and each video tour runs her $500 to $600 to produce, by her account. She tells sellers she is investing in selling their house before she ever gets paid herself.
Luxury listings do not move at expired-listing speed, and Miller says so herself. “They do take longer to sell though. I will say that,” she told the podcast.
Her own numbers show the trade. In her first full year she closed 22 homes for $12 million total, by her account, most of them $500,000 to $600,000 properties. The next year she closed about 12 properties, also worth $12 million, because more of them were million-dollar homes.
“My first year I sold 22 houses, but those 22 houses were all five and $600,000 houses for the most part,” she said. “My second year… I had I think 12, but still 12 properties at $12 million is the same as 22 was the year before.”
The dollar total held steady while the transaction count dropped by nearly half. Pacing is the part of how to break into luxury real estate that agents underestimate, and Miller makes that trade on purpose: fewer closings, each one bigger, with a longer runway between contract and closing.
Follow-up is where Miller’s luxury pipeline actually gets built. Her method for how to get luxury real estate listings keeps every seller who says they are not ready yet in the system, tracked until the month they said to call back.
She keeps a spreadsheet organized by month, from January through December. Each name carries a note on why the seller was not ready and when to try again. By her count, her July list alone carries 20 to 30 names of people who told her to call back next summer.
That system is how a door knock or an email that goes nowhere the first time turns into a signed listing months later. Miller checks the list every time that month comes back around, and often the seller who was not ready calls her first. It is one of the most reliable ways to list more expired listings from leads an agent already has.
She runs the same logic after a sale closes. When she sells a home in a given neighborhood, she uses GeoLeads™, REDX’s neighborhood-level lead product, to mail and email every other house on that block, turning one closed deal into her next round of prospects.
Miller’s own advice to the podcast’s listeners was simple: get the expired list, call the expireds you are allowed to call, and email the rest. Building a system around that habit is what took her from $500,000-range listings to a $3 million one. Her answer comes down to five steps any agent can start this week.
Miller has kept adding credentials since that first luxury certification: an accredited buyer’s representative designation, a National Association of Realtors commitment-to-excellence certification, and a broker price opinion certification, by her account. “There’s no more room on my business card,” she said.
“I’m certified in all of it. Why not hire me? I am the one for the job.”