The Puget Sound Business Journal ranked the top 25 residential real estate firms ranked by residential sales volume in millions, for 2006. The top 5 were:

1. Windermere ($23,709.6 / 60,200 transactions)
2. J.L. Scott ($12,745.6 / 32,590 transactions)
3. Coldwell Banker Bain ($7,998.7 / 19,131 transactions)
4. Re/Max International ($6,649.4 / 19,662 transactions
5. Prudential Northwest ($2,997.6 / 8,719 transactions)

20 more were listed, including Gordon Stephenson’s RPA, Real Property Associates. (Stephenson is on the Board of Directors at Zillow.) This year, his firm placed #17 with a reported volume of $146.9M in sales. Stephenson took issue with last years ranking of #16 for Excel properties, and I believe he was correct, though I was not able to verify that as that company has become a John L. Scott franchise.

RPA is one of the largest independent real estate brokerages in the Northwest and had 283 transactions reported last year with 35 agents, which comes out to about 8 transactions per agent. That is significanlty better than the NWMLS average of 4.1 transactions per agent in 2006, down from 5.2 in 2005.

Interestly enough, no so-called or self-identified “Discount” or rebate model real estate firms, including Zip Realty, Help-U-Sell, Redfin or MLS4Owner made the list of top 20 real estate firms in the Seattle area.