Photo courtesy of CT Realtors
Bryan Tunney
Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Sales, Brown Harris Stevens Greenwich
Industry experience: 21 years
CT REALTORS named Bryan Tunney its 2025 Realtor of the Year. The statewide award recognizes one Realtor each year for outstanding effort as well as service to the community, the real estate industry and the realtor organization. This isn’t the first award that Tunney has won, either: He was honored as the Greenwich Association realtor of the Year in 2013 and inducted into the Greenwich Association’s Hall of Fame in 2023.
Tunney sits on the CT REALTORS executive committee as 2025 First Vice President and will become president-elect in 2026. He previously spent four years as CT REALTORS’ treasurer and was president of the Greenwich Association of Realtors from 2022 to 2024.
Tunney is the executive vice president and managing director of sales at Brown Harris Stevens in Greenwich. He has previously worked at Cleveland Duble & Arnold, one of the oldest real estate brokerages in Greenwich prior to being purchased by Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty.
With a lack of inventory, Greenwich is a seller’s market like much of Connecticut. But a potential change in the capital gains tax could help get much-needed homes onto the market.
Q: Being able to be awarded Realtor of the Year, what does that mean to you?
A: Well, I’m humbled, and I was completely surprised and thankful. It’s so meaningful to be recognized by your peers. I’ve been a part of this organization and industry for many, many years and I value it. It’s a great group of people and I’m very humbled.
Q: Looking at the current market, how has it been for sellers this year?
A: Well, I’ll give you specifically Greenwich, because that’s my primary market. We are still extremely supply-constrained. Currently, we only have 120 single-family homes on the market. Normal would be between 500 and 700 so it’s extremely constrained in Greenwich and, I would say, generally in Fairfield County as well. Right now, we’re still in a seller’s market. I consider equilibrium six months [of supply]. So we’re two to three months, depending on the price range, and the entire market is three months of inventory, which is still very much so a seller’s market.
Q: Given that, how do you try to make a listing bring in as much profit as it’s capable of?
A: Well, this doesn’t sound logical, but I’ve seen it work many, many times. You can’t under-price at home. The more people that you can get involved that want to buy it, the market will bring the price to the fair market price. A lot of people say, “I have to get this” and a lot of it depends on motivation. The key today, as in any market: If you’re motivated to sell, you price it to sell and even if it’s just slightly under market, that will assure you that you will get market price if not higher, because of the added competition when we’re in a seller’s market.
Q: Could further rate cuts, add some inventory onto the market?
A: Of people who want to get a bigger or smaller home, its not happening, especially if they bought within the last 10 years [when interest rates were lower]. So, they have a mortgage between 2 percent and 3.5 percent and now new mortgages, they’re lucky they’ll get around 6 percent. So it’s costing them a lot more money to buy the homes out of pocket. So your normal moving of people who want to scale down, it’s much harder for them, because, if they’re going to get a mortgage, they’re not going to pre-qualify for it. And because there’s such just such a shortage of homes, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because people are staying longer in their homes.
Another thing that we, as Realtors, are trying to get once the government opens up again, is our solution to that is to increase the long-term capital gains exemption. Right now it’s $250,000 for an individual and $500,000 for a couple or family, and that was set in 1991. That, in today’s dollars, is closer to a half a million and a million dollars [respectively]. So if, if they can get this passed, in my mind that’s the biggest thing that will open up [inventory] – especially in the Northeast, where we have very high prices compared to the rest of the country. It will allow somebody who has been in a home for 30 years, they paid it off and they have a big capital gain, this will then allow them to buy their new home for cash. We’re very close to it and that will provide more inventory and allow people who are looking for a home to get it.
Q: What are the benefits to raising the capital gains tax exemption?
A: So if you sell for $2 million in today’s environment, you’d be paying taxes on, with your improvements and so on and so forth, if you have $1 million of profit, $500,000 would be tax-exempt, and you’re going to be paying 25 percent to 35 percent on the other dollars. These homeowners, they’ve been in these houses for years and they don’t qualify for a mortgage. So they can use the proceeds from their home to purchase their new home.
Tunney’s Five Favorite Boat Destinations
- Circumnavigating Manhattan Island
- Montauk
- Cape Cod
- Martha’s Vineyard
- Newport, Rhode Island
