A Connecticut real estate license issued in 2006 has now outlasted David Haffenreffer’s entire television career by roughly four to one.
Haffenreffer anchored financial news for CNN and CNNfn in the early 2000s, the same years he was married to Good Morning America correspondent Lara Spencer. Their divorce, finalized in 2015, is still what most coverage of him is built around. The real estate license predates it by nine years.
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The Broadcasting Years
Before CNN, Haffenreffer spent six years in financial radio, most of it with Bloomberg, then two more at Reuters, where he hosted a syndicated personal finance program called Money Talks. A St. Lawrence University graduate from Providence, Rhode Island, he was hired by CNN in 2000 to anchor Ahead of the Curve, a morning program on CNN and CNNfn built for viewers who weren’t professional investors.
In February 2001 he moved to co-anchor CNNfn’s afternoon program The Money Gang alongside Christine Romans, who was then about two years into what would become a 24-year run at CNN. Romans stayed there until 2023, then moved to NBC News, where she now anchors an expanded streaming news program. Haffenreffer’s own run at CNN continued past CNNfn’s shutdown in December 2004. He was still anchoring the network’s entertainment program Showbiz Tonight, a separate CNN Headline News show, as of November 2005.
The Marriage to Lara Spencer
He married Spencer, then a Good Morning America correspondent, on September 30, 2000, at St. Andrew’s Dune Church in Southampton, New York. The New York Times covered the wedding. They had two children, a son, Duff, born in January 2002, and a daughter, Katharine, born in October 2004.
The marriage lasted fifteen years. In a joint statement to Page Six announcing their split in the spring of 2015, the two called it “a sad decision that did not come easily” and said they intended to keep raising their children together.
Building a Second Career in Greenwich Real Estate
Haffenreffer got his Connecticut real estate license in 2006 and went to work at Prudential Connecticut Realty in Greenwich. By his own account on a real estate networking site, he was showing houses full time within a year of stepping away from Showbiz Tonight.
He moved to Houlihan Lawrence’s Greenwich office by 2014 and became a regular market source for local coverage. In a 2018 Greenwich Magazine feature on the local housing market, he said, “I don’t think there’s ever a shortage of buyers.”
Today he’s managing director and brokerage manager for Compass, covering Greenwich, Old Greenwich, Riverside, and Stamford under broker’s license REB.0789525. When the firm added a new agent in Darien last August, a real estate trade publication quoted Haffenreffer directly. “Her reputation for going above and beyond has earned her lasting trust,” he said.
Duff and Katharine Haffenreffer Today
Both children are adults now. Duff studied at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business in Dallas and graduated in May 2025, with both parents at the ceremony. Katharine, who goes by Kate, played lacrosse at Greenwich Academy and earned a Division I scholarship to Vanderbilt University, where she’s also a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma. Haffenreffer helped move her into her dorm when she started at Vanderbilt in August 2023, alongside Spencer and their son.
Haffenreffer turns 59 this August. He still lives and works in Greenwich, in the same industry that has employed him for two decades now, with no public record of ever having remarried. Twenty years is a long time to keep doing something that almost nobody writes about.
