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Diane Ramirez
CEO,
Halstead Property
About Diane
Diane M. Ramirez is Chief Executive Officer of Halstead Property and she is well-known for her passion and devotion to the residential real estate industry. She is a 35-year veteran who started her career in Palm Beach, Florida where she worked as an agent for a number of years before returning to her hometown – New York City – and embarking on a successful and exciting career.
Together with Clark Halstead, she helped found Halstead Property in the Fall of 1984. Their vision for the company was a high-end firm that utilized advanced technology combined with old fashioned elegance that covered all segments of the market and was located in the communities that they serviced. Due to their vision, Halstead Property became the first big firm to utilize storefront offices in Manhattan as well as the first to be on the West Side and in Downtown.
Under her leadership, Mrs. Ramirez has strategically grown the firm from its original goal of three storefront offices in some of the most important communities in Manhattan to its current size of more than 2 dozen offices with 1,000 agents throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, Riverdale, the Hamptons, Hudson Valley, Hoboken, New Jersey and Fairfield County, Connecticut. A recent growth area was in Hamptons where Halstead has two offices in both East Hampton and Southampton.
Mrs. Ramirez was appointed by the Governor to the Department of State Real Estate Board in 2010 and is still an active member. She is also an active member of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), where she serves on the Board of Governors, their Executive Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of the Residential Division which she co-chaired for four years, as well as the Board of NY1Residential.com. She is a member of the Residential Brokerage Division, Interfirm Forum, which she co-chaired for two years. She is currently a committee member on Admissions and has served on the Ethics Committee and Education Committee (in which she also served as co-chair for two years). In addition, she is an accredited continuing education teacher for the State. Mrs. Ramirez is also a member of the Real Estate Brokerage Managers Council – the professional organization of business management, which serves real estate brokerage owners and managers, and in 1996, she earned the industry-recognized CRB designation.
In 2007 at the REBNY annual Gala, Mrs. Ramirez was presented with the ‘Henry Forster Award.’ Instituted in 1990, this prestigious award is presented annually to a real estate professional with an outstanding record of achievement and conduct both within the industry and the community.
Mrs. Ramirez is involved in philanthropy both in and out of the real estate community. In January 2009, she was recognized for her community service when she was presented with the Kenneth R. Gerrety Humanitarian Award from REBNY. In addition, she has been presented with the New York Moves ‘Power Women’ honor, the Mann ‘Real Estate Firm of the Year’ Award and the OTTY ‘Eastsider of the Year’ Award, both of which acknowledge outstanding involvement in the community. Mrs. Ramirez was also honored by the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter with the Celine Marcus Community Service Award. She and her husband, Sam Ramirez, are long-standing supporters of the Valerie Fund in New Jersey (an organization which helps children with cancer), and were honored at their annual Thanksgiving Gala in 2006 for their outstanding involvement and dedication to the charity.
Mrs. Ramirez resides in Manhattan with her husband, Sam Ramirez, who is the founder and CEO of the investment banking firm, Samuel A. Ramirez & Co., Inc. Their son, his wife and their three children also dwell in Manhattan; and, their daughter resides in Connecticut with her husband and two children.