When Dezireh Eyn walked into her first Manhattan real estate office as a college intern, she didn’t know that the fast-paced hustle of brokers in their twenties would reroute her future. Now, nearly two decades later, she is the CEO of Platinum Properties, the family-founded brokerage based in New York City’s Financial District. Since stepping into the top role in January, Eyn has pushed the firm into a new chapter—anchored by a rare all-female executive team, a flexible full-service model, and a company culture she describes as “empathetic, decisive, and collaborative.”
Eyn’s path to real estate was almost accidental. As a student planning for law school, she needed a summer job and jumped at an internship her brother found for her. “Before then, I only knew suburban real estate—postcards and minivans,” she recalled. “But in Manhattan, it was all young people hustling from appointment to appointment.” She quickly earned her license and, at 19, was already making enough to call her parents and tell them she could cover her rent. Real estate, she realized, wasn’t just a stopgap. “I loved people, I loved closing deals, and I loved being independent,” she said. It was addictive.
In 2005, Eyn and her brother, Khashy, co-founded Platinum Properties while she was still finishing her senior year of college. From the start, they focused on an overlooked market: residential rentals in the Financial District. At a time when Wall Street’s towers were largely seen as business-only, they carved out a niche convincing tenants to live in high-rise buildings with luxury amenities. “Looking back, I feel like we were pioneers in helping build the Financial District into a residential neighborhood,” Eyn said.
That willingness to go where others didn’t would become a pattern. Two years into their venture, the siblings expanded Platinum into a full-service boutique firm—moving beyond rentals into sales, commercial leasing, and investment. It was a strategic decision to create a “bulletproof company,” Eyn explained, one that could survive any market by pivoting into whichever area was strongest at the time.
Today, the firm remains intentionally boutique—staffing about 14 employees in-house and 80 active agents—but Eyn believes that size gives Platinum a competitive edge. Larger, institutional brokerages can struggle with bureaucracy, she says. Boutique firms, on the other hand, can be nimble, deeply human, and culture-driven. At Platinum, staff have access not only to training but even life coaching if it might help them grow. “We know each other,” Eyn said simply. “There’s a culture here that you just can’t replicate at scale.”
That culture is now being shaped by her leadership team, all of whom are women. Eyn emphasizes that she didn’t set out to hire an all-female group, but the executives she brought forward shared her values and “excelled operationally.” The impact has been tangible. “Our culture is much more aligned, our agents are better supported, and the leadership style is empathetic but decisive,” she explained.
For a woman in a field where most CEOs are white men, setting a new tone of leadership mattered. “In real estate, if a man is assertive, it’s seen as powerful. For women, it can be read as being too aggressive. I had to learn to find a voice that could be heard.”
That voice now extends beyond her own firm. Eyn has become known for hosting cross-brokerage networking platforms and panel discussions, sometimes drawing more than a hundred brokers from competing agencies. “I don’t see them as competitors,” she said. “So much of this industry is co-broked. We all gain when we share information and raise standards together.” For Eyn, these events are partly about reshaping mindsets—from scarcity, where colleagues see each other as rivals, to abundance, where collaboration leads to progress.
Her collaborative spirit also feeds into how Platinum has navigated the shifting regulatory landscape. With the passage of the FARE Act and new buyer-agency requirements, many firms scrambled to adapt. For Platinum, already priding itself on transparency, the changes only reinforced practices long in place. In fact, Eyn says preparation made them stronger: “We role-played the new conversations with our agents for months. Because of that, we became a trusted name in a confusing market.”
Looking ahead, Eyn is careful about growth. Platinum could have swelled to hundreds of agents over the past 20 years, she says, but the focus was always on quality, culture, and relationships rather than size. That philosophy will continue as she and her brother divide leadership—her over residential, him over commercial—to position both sides for expansion. The firm has begun exploring acquisitions but will stay rooted in Manhattan and Brooklyn rather than chasing growth in other cities.
“There’s a hole in New York for a strong, mid-sized independent that really knows the city inside out,” Eyn said. “We think Platinum can fill that space.”
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