Meet Rick Kelly

Rick Kelly is the Founder & CEO of Alta Real Estate and a RealTrends-ranked Top 50 Manhattan real estate agent by sales volume. Over a 20-plus-year career, Rick has closed more than 700 transactions representing over $1 billion in sales — with $30–$40 million in annual volume — making him one of New York City's most consistently productive residential and commercial brokers. His work has been recognized by The New York Times, The Real Deal, and UrbanDigs, and he holds a perfect 5.0-star Google rating across 30 public reviews and 469 verified transactions on Zillow. Rick's deep market expertise spans Manhattan's most sought-after neighborhoods — including the Upper West Side, Lincoln Square, Tribeca, Chelsea, and Central Park West — as well as Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Long Island City, with a primary focus on properties in the $2M–$10M range.

Rick serves a diverse clientele that includes luxury homebuyers, first-time buyers, commercial investors, and corporate relocations, with particular depth in tech executive relocation from the West Coast and international moves from Europe. His team operates with fluency in Italian, Spanish, and Chinese, enabling seamless service across a global client base that has taken Rick to Spain, France, Portugal, Lithuania, Belarus, and China on behalf of his buyers. This multilingual, cross-border capability — combined with Rick's own conversational Italian and Russian — positions Alta Real Estate as one of Manhattan's most internationally capable boutique brokerages.

What distinguishes Rick beyond his production is his blend of Southern warmth, New York tenacity, and hard-won personal experience buying and selling multiple homes and apartment buildings. His client-first reputation is built on frankness, responsiveness, and market fluency across all price points and property types. Whether guiding a first-time buyer through a co-op purchase or negotiating a multimillion-dollar selling dollars’ worth of real estate including private residences, multi-family buildings, development sites and new luxury developments, Rick Kelly brings the same level of expertise, hustle, and integrity that has defined his career for over two decades in the ultracompetitive New York City real estate market.