Recording Engineer-Turned-Real Estate Agent Brandon Mason Pumps Up the Volume at Elliman

There are only a handful of people in this world who can say they spent four weeks on a mountaintop with David Bowie. Brandon Mason is one of them. Long before he became a top-producing residential real estate agent in New York City, Mason built a booming career as a recording engineer on projects with renowned artists like Bowie, Norah Jones, Tim McGraw, Bono, Natalie Merchant, Joan Baez, and Shooter Jennings, among many others. Now, six months since returning to Douglas Elliman, he is drawing on the creative prowess and business-building experience gained from his years behind the recording console to develop a unique approach to NYC real estate. The son of a TV news anchor mother and a father in commercial real estate, Mason spent his formative years in Minneapolis. He began performing music in elementary school as a trumpet player. While attending the University of Wisconsin–Madison and playing in a number of bands, the experience of making records locally inspired him to transfer to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied jazz composition and earned a bachelor’s degree in music production and engineering, graduating at the top of his class. “The production process of recorded music is veiled. When I tell people I was a recording engineer, they sometimes think that means I was physically making discs,” Mason said, explaining that the role of a recording engineer was more akin to being a close collaborator, similar to a cinematographer on a film project. Just as a cinematographer would frame the shots and calibrate the lighting to realize a film director’s vision, he said, the recording engineer’s job is to capture and edit sound, and assemble musical elements in a way that translates an artist’s musical statement—their performance in the room—into the recorded medium. David Bowie with producer Tony Visconti at Allaire Studios. (Photo by Brandon Mason) Now, about that mountaintop with Bowie. After landing a gig at the legendary Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, NY, Mason was recruited to help establish a luxurious new residential studio at Glen Tonche, a post-and-beam estate with panoramic views built in 1928 as a summer retreat for an American industrialist. Located in nearby Shokan, atop Tonche Mountain in the Catskills, Allaire Studios opened in 1999. “It was a spectacular property with two absolutely state-of-the-art recording studios and on-site accommodations for the artists who came to work there,” he recalled Not long after opening, Bowie and his longtime producer-collaborator, Tony Visconti, selected Allaire as the primary facility for recording  Heathen , Bowie’s 23rd studio album. For Mason, the experience was a master class in creative practice and process. “David would go into the studio at 6:00 in the morning to write songs, and Tony and I would arrive sharply at 10 to record the demos—it was just the three of us,” he recalled. “We would record the demo for the first song that David had written that morning, have lunch together, and then record the demo for the second song he had written that morning. And these were not half-baked ideas—these were fully-formed Bowie songs. That was the approach. Then over the weeks that followed, David’s musicians would come in one-by-one to record their parts and enhance David’s demo tracks, which remained central to that album.” Opening Allaire gave Mason his first experience with building a business from the ground up, and he soon amassed enough credits and relationships to strike out on his own. Over the next dozen or so years, he worked constantly, from back-to-back sessions in New York, Los Angeles and Nashville to gigs in New Orleans, Toronto, Seattle and Asheville, North Carolina. Mixing recordings with Shooter Jennings. Brandon (at right) with Ringo Starr and producer George Drakoulias in the control room of Studio 2 (the Van Halen Room) at Sunset Sound in LA. Mixing recordings by Donna Lewis. Mason (at far left) with the Don Byron Group. His work with Bowie (on  Heathen  and its 2003 follow-up,  Reality ) led to a series of projects with the psychedelic rock band Secret Machines, including becoming their producer for their eponymous album and engineering several productions on the soundtrack to Across the Universe , director Julie Taymor’s 2007 jukebox-musical film based on the songs of the Beatles. This led to several subsequent projects with the film’s musical visionary, Academy Award-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal. Working alongside acclaimed record producermusic supervisor and friend George Drakoulias, Mason went on to work on numerous albums and film projects, including Floria Sigismonde’s biopic Runaways , Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder and Secret Life of Walter Mitty , and The Zuton’s 2008 album release, You Can Do Anything . By 2013, however—with the increasingly precarious economics of the recording industry and the demands of a growing family—Mason concluded that it was time to turn the page. For his final musical project, he recorded and mixed two albums worth of songs with Shooter Jennings (who remarked in an interview that Mason, a longtime friend, was “the kind of guy you trust”). Given his lifelong interest in real estate through his father’s background and his own experience with buying homes in New York, the decision to reinvent himself through real estate felt intuitive. “I knew that I needed to continue to work for myself,” Mason said. “I wanted to go into a field that had unlimited potential as far as building my own business was concerned. It was clear that residential real estate, particularly in New York, was the right fit.” Starting out in 2014, he dedicated himself to mastering the nuances of real estate, from learning the inventory and the players to lead generation and relationship-building to understanding market dynamics and marketing strategies. He joined Douglas Elliman in 2016, working first with Howard Margolis , Marie Espinal and Jeff Adler before becoming a member of Josh Rubin’s team. A Playlist of Recordings Engineered by Brandon Mason Over the course of his nine years in the industry, Mason has built a business that combines his capacity for operational efficiency with a solutions-focused approach. After leaving for a short stint with another brokerage, he was persuaded to return to Douglas Elliman in July. “It’s like coming back home,” Mason said. “It’s a huge, very positive step forward for me personally and for my clients.” The plan now is to accelerate and expand his operation by elevating the volume of transactions. “A lot of brokers try to do fewer deals at higher dollar volumes,” he said. “I’m focused on building a high deal-volume business. I’ve refined my systems, processes and best practices through the extraordinary mentorship and support of Douglas Elliman. Now, we’re poised for 2024 to be a breakout year.” Reflecting on his decision to leave the music business, Mason isn’t looking back. “The more I saw the revenue model for recorded music deteriorate, the more comfortable I became with the decision to move on,” he said. “Plus, there are a lot of similarities between my previous work and what I’m doing now. Between projects as an engineer, I was always on the hunt for my next recording project—meeting artists, watching them perform, establishing relationships and building trust. Likewise, with a seller or buyer, it’s a matter of cultivating relationships so that I’m always there for them to advise on timing, valuation, and strategies and to ultimately deliver the very best solutions.”