The president of Douglas Elliman has been terminated, less than a week after the sudden retirement of Howard Lorber, the parent company’s chief executive officer.
Scott Durkin’s exit was disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday morning.
Douglas Elliman Inc. is one of the nation’s largest real estate companies. Mr. Durkin served as president and chief executive officer of its brokerage arm, Douglas Elliman Realty, reporting up to Mr. Lorber until last week.
Mr. Durkin spent nine years at Douglas Elliman, joining the company as an executive vice president in 2015 after more than two decades at the Corcoran Group, a rival real estate company. He rose to Elliman’s chief operating officer in less than a year, and he took over the role of president in 2017.
Mr. Durkin was not immediately available for comment. Representatives of Douglas Elliman also were not immediately available for comment.
But over the past year, allegations of sexual harassment by its brokers and financial troubles have engulfed the brokerage.
Earlier this year, The Real Deal, a real estate trade publication, reported that two former star Elliman agents, the brothers Tal and Oren Alexander, were facing lawsuits from two women who accused them of sexual assault. More reports followed, including in The New York Times, and other women filed additional suits.
Nine more women came forward in The Times’s investigation. In addition, five real estate professionals told The Times that they either had personally told executives about assaults or had been told about them by company executives, but that the brokerage had continued to support the brothers.
None of the women who spoke with The Times said that Mr. Durkin had any knowledge of the incidents. But two of them said they had alerted other top executives at the firm.
One of the women who came forward said she had told Mr. Lorber that she believed she might have been drugged by Oren Alexander in 2010 after attending a birthday party in Manhattan.
Another agent, the “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” star Tracy Tutor, told The Times that she had shared a drink with Oren Alexander at a cocktail party in 2014 and then blacked out. A fellow broker told The Times that he had found her in the bathroom with Oren and had pulled her away, and that he later alerted another top Elliman executive of the incident.
Responding to those allegations, Stephen Larkin, a spokesman for Douglas Elliman, said that an incident had been raised casually and confidentially to Mr. Lorber without specifying who might have been involved, rather than in the form of an official complaint to human resources.
“Had any such complaints been received, those complaints would have been thoroughly investigated,” Mr. Larkin said in an earlier statement to The Times. The statement did not address a second allegation raised by The Times.
The allegations came amid tumbling stock values for the company. Since 2021, Douglas Elliman’s total market value has plummeted to around $130 million, from more than $900 million.
As news broke last week of Mr. Lorber’s sudden retirement, many executives in the real estate industry attributed that shock exit to mounting criticism of how he had steered the brokerage’s finances and to his failure to adequately address the sexual assault allegations against agents in the company.
The post More Changes at Real Estate Giant Amid Turmoil appeared first on New York Times.
