“This is one of my favorite buildings to show,” Erica Parks says as she strides around an empty studio at 8 Spruce, a Frank Gehry tower of undulating glass and steel in the Financial District. The leasing officer who let us in watches from the doorway with a bemused smile as Parks films the space on her phone, clacking around the hardwood floors in nude heels and a backless seafoam dress, a Coach bag slung over her shoulder. Her friend and client Vegas, a Rockette-in-training, carries a Gucci bag and follows close behind. Parks examines the in-unit laundry and turns to Vegas: “You’ll have to learn how to do your own laundry,” she says with a laugh.
One reason Vegas may not know how to do her own laundry is because she is a teenager who still lives at home with her mother. Which is also why she’s a typical client for Parks, who is 19 and last year became the youngest licensed real-estate agent in the state. (Although Parks suspects she might be usurped by now.) “I’ve had clients ask how old I am,” Parks says, “and my favorite response is ‘Old enough to be licensed.’” So what kind of teen decides to become a real-estate agent before she can legally drink? A theater kid, it turns out. Parks grew up doing professional theater and pageants, and she moved from Boston to New York City her senior year of high school to attend the Institute for American Musical Theatre. Then she entered Miss New York’s Teen competition and won, which seemed like a great reason to stick around the city. Which meant finding a place to live — and a job. “Everybody and their mother in the theater industry has done real estate at some point,” Parks tells me. “So I was like, Let me try that.” She got her license a month later, announcing the achievement with a set of glamour shots in Central Park, her red hair perfectly curled, again in seafoam (it’s kind of her color): “This girl is officially NY’s Youngest Licensed Real Estate Agent.”
It wasn’t long before Parks joined Bond New York, and then Douglas Elliman took notice and poached her. (That announcement featured more pageant posing at the firm’s Tribeca office, this time in an icy-blue halter dress and gold hoops, with the caption “Douglas Elliman: Erica’s Version.”) When we meet in June, she had just moved agencies again, this time to Mayell, a brokerage focused on millennial clientele. This might sound like the flitting of a teen, but Parks feels it’s a strategic match: Douglas Elliman was too old-fashioned, she says. “My mentors had spent a lot of money posting on RentHop and I was like, You’re listening to old men.” Parks also says she was discouraged from using her personal social-media accounts for work, but she found most of her clients — the majority of them Gen Z — by posting listings on her TikTok and Instagram. Were there other culture clashes involved in being a young agent? “Mamdani just added the pied-à-terre tax, and everybody in my industry hates it,” she tells me. “I’m like, ‘You know what? We should be charging the billionaires.’” She prides herself on working with voucher clients and housing at different income levels. “I feel like Gen Z is really going to change the industry, and I think the boomers might not like that too much.” For Parks, the idea is to lean into what gives her an edge in the industry — her youth, her perspective — not away from it. “Hey, I’m a real-estate agent and my mom said that I could rent you this three-bed with a washer-dryer for no fee,” she says in one of her front-facing videos. “But only if it’s okay with your mom.”
Thus, an afternoon like this, showing Vegas (yes, she’s named after the city) around a $4,600-a-month zero-bedroom. Parks met Vegas while doing the pageant circuit, and she is a typical kind of client: She’s attending Pace University in the fall and looking to move into her own place for the first time. There’s a giddiness to the tour. The two compare their spray tans before we set off to check out the building’s amenities: a 50-foot indoor pool in a room of floor-to-ceiling windows, then a game room, which contains pool tables and a golf simulator. The latter confuses Vegas. What even … is it? “This is normal,” Parks whispers. It’s the mirrored yoga studio, though, that really lights up the two teen dancers. “This is so nice,” Vegas says. As the tour concludes, the girls wave good-bye to the leasing officer. Once outside, Parks fishes a pair of blue flip-flops out of her purse and changes out of her heels. She hugs Vegas good-bye for now — she’ll be joining her later that afternoon at the East Village vintage store Vegas and her mother own, where Parks works part-time.
The industry tends to shed agents, especially new ones — the median income for Realtors who have been working for less than two years is $8,100. But spending an afternoon with Parks, one gets the sense that she’s going to be fine. Parks juggles well, as one might expect: In addition to her job at Vegas’s store, she also emcees, has brand deals (Quince and something called FoxyBae), runs a side business bedazzling clothes for other pageant girlies, and has some money still coming in from her child-acting days. “My friends like to say I’m the queen of side quest,” she says. “I’m always doing something random.”
As for the future, college is not top of mind. “If this is what I want to do and I don’t need a degree for it, why would I spend the time and the money on it?” Parks tells me. What she has thought about, of course, is a potential reality show. She even has a name ready: Parks on Park. But she’s also a pragmatist. Parks was 18 when she started out, but she’s turning 20 in July. It might be too late for any kind of a TV deal. “I think if I was going to get one, it would’ve happened already,” she says.
