Can Ryan Serhant scale a national brokerage built on his personality?

A gallery of framed articles about Ryan Serhant flanks the conference table at Ryan Serhant’s Soho office, splashing the broker’s face and top property conquests across the wall.

“I just want to win,” said the real-life Ryan. 

The mounted headlines are just the start. His last name adorns the office building where he sits, splashed across at least 15 windows and three banners in his signature shade of royal blue. It’s a situation most brokers would translate to “winning.”

But Ryan, who has spent the last decade doing yearly business on pace with New York City’s finest, is playing a different game than the one he already won.

Just four years after launching his eponymous firm, the celebrity broker-turned-CEO and his team rank among the top brokerages in the Big Apple with a sales volume outpacing some of the city’s legacy shops. Serhant debuted on The Real Deal’s ranking of New York City brokerages in 11th place, with $235 million in sell-side deals. By its second full year in business, it had risen to sixth place, with more than $542 million in sales.

While publicly traded firms are pinching pennies, Ryan claims Serhant is financially shored up and more: He announced an East Coast expansion in April 2023, and now counts outposts in seven states outside of New York. 

He’s one of the few legitimate real estate players known beyond the business thanks to his roots in reality television, and is looking to find new audiences. The brokerage’s latest venture, a new reality show called “Owning Manhattan” featuring Ryan and others at the firm, made headlines when it premiered on Netflix in June and was one of the platform’s 10 most-streamed shows in the United States a week after its debut. 

But off the small screen, he’s not for everyone. The fact that Serhant is a top broker who isn’t looking to stop selling any time soon could be an issue when trying to pick up top talent, and such focus on publicity could turn off buyers and sellers who place privacy first at the high end of the market.

If Serhant’s traction as a brokerage has so far depended on Ryan’s reputation and influence, the firm’s continued growth will test the stamina of the person at its core. He’s acknowledged both that he keeps an iron grip on the company and that this isn’t manageable forever, but seems at odds with what the future looks like if he does try to keep pace as a founder, CEO and broker. 

“Maybe I’ll give myself cancer at this pace,” he said, his gallon-sized, Serhant-branded water bottle resting on the table beside him. “I don’t want there to be any wasted potential.” 

“I believe CEOs and managers should not be selling, as a general rule.”
Loy Carlos, Nest Seekers

Though the series has boosted his fame — and according to him, his business — he talks as if he’s standing on shaky ground. The fear of losing momentum and “not doing enough” haunts him. 

Which may be why, in between his duties as commander-in-chief, he’s also closing his own deals, relishing the win factor that drew him to the game in the first place. 

“I don’t know another way to operate,” he said. 

Cult of Ryan 

Followers of Ryan — he has 2.2 million on Instagram, for starters — are likely already familiar with the star broker’s rise.

The lore of Ryan, who got his start as an AT&T hand model and had a 19-episode run on “As the World Turns,” has been well-documented across nine seasons of Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing New York,” three spin-off reality shows and three books. 

Through it all, the “eat-sleep-sell” mentality is a hallmark of the persona he’s crafted, and it’s a siren call for other agents seeking a hustler lifestyle more synonymous with investment bankers and tech entrepreneurs than sellers of residential real estate. 

The anecdotes he readily offers to recall his rise to broker stardom depict him as a young, hungry, undeterred seller who would do almost anything for a listing. To win his first new development project, Ryan, then at Nest Seekers, told Tom Elghanayan of TF Cornerstone that he would tattoo the name of the building, 99 John Street, on his chest. 

Ryan’s embrace of the limelight has attracted prolific New York City developers like Extell Development’s Gary Barnett, an odd pairing given Barnett’s reputation of avoiding the public eye. Ryan won over Barnett after posing naked in the window of a resale unit at Extell’s One57 for a photoshoot with Flaunt Magazine in 2017.

The developer tapped Ryan to sell his crown jewel penthouse at Central Park Tower and slapped on what he later called the “headline price” of $250 million, a year before cutting it to $195 million. Despite splashy features across Serhant’s social media and serving as a key plot point in “Owning Manhattan,” the potentially peak sale has evaded him: at the time of publishing, the unit was pulled off the market and Ryan is no longer on the listing. 

Ask most industry players to describe Ryan, and “just fine” likely isn’t on the list of attributes. He’s a polarizing figure whose years on the little screen have won him some detractors and an army of supporters. (He says the supporters are on a mission to give themselves the nickname “S.itizens.”) 

Ryan spent more than a decade on TV, so people feel like they know him, and many already like him, before they actually meet. (Ryan’s familiarity seems to have paid off: Despite extensive efforts by this reporter, those who know and work with him don’t readily offer their critiques.) This turns out to be a good recruiting technique, and he sometimes employs agents who once admired him from afar. 

“Every agent I talked to was there when I proposed,” Ryan said. “Every agent around the world was there when my daughter was born. There’s something very personal about that.” 

Talia McKinney said she “stalked” Ryan for two years before she joined his Nest Seekers team in 2016. Now a broker at Serhant, McKinney is closing $32 million penthouse deals and listing Upper West Side townhouses for $15 million. 

McKinney is aware of skepticism from those looking for cracks in Ryan’s persona, she said, asking whether he’s really as hands-on as he makes himself out to be. But she maintains he stays true to form. 

“I’m sort of living proof of someone who has been with him for a long time for a reason,” she said. “You hear about many agents who jump around from company to company, but I only left one company and it was to go with him.”

Ryan’s among the real estate CEOs who boast ease of access to the top office as a hallmark of company culture (Compass founder Robert Reffkin reportedly calls every agent joining the massive brokerage). But Ryan, and his agents, argue that his ongoing work as a broker makes this contact especially valuable. The dynamic they describe is more of a plebeian leader, not a king in an ivory tower. 

“CEOs like that are professional fundraisers. That’s their skill set,” Ryan said of his peers. “In the words of Kendrick Lamar, they’re not like us.”

Watch a few episodes of “Owning Manhattan,” and you’ll see Ryan doling out listings, placating developers and negotiating deals for other agents in the backseat of his blue Range Rover. He contends he doesn’t do such heavy lifting in real life, but he is quick to contrast himself with other company leaders. 

In one tense moment in the series, Maggie Wu and her W Team left the firm for Compass. Ryan laments the departure, and what it means for the company in the war to establish itself among larger players.

“Do you know these other CEOs that I now compete with? They’re all on boats,” said Ryan, sitting in his Soho headquarters “They’re not in an office. They’re not in a suit, going through it.” 

Growing pains

The next phase of Serhant: solidifying a foothold in expansion markets; recruiting and retaining enough producing agents to sustain sales; keeping the in-house content development machine humming; and widening Sell It, his sales training arm, from potential new agents to sales strategies at large. 

One of the uphill battles Ryan faces is bringing on top talent who can assume the mantle if he shifts his focus. It’s the key to building a brokerage that can transcend and outlast the reputation of its founder.

“Can Ryan take it to the next level? Whether or not he achieves those goals, to me, is dependent on whether or not he can attract and retain,” said Jared White, managing director of Quadrum Global. 

Ryan has cultivated heavy hitters, including McKinney and Kayla Lee, who’s heading sales at the Huron, Quadrum’s condo development in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Sell It now has clients from outside real estate — including IBM and JPMorgan — that want to sharpen their sales strategy. 

The brokerage has even drafted a top name from a firm rooted in old-school New York City real estate. Ravi Kantha, whose former team was known for selling eight-figure townhouses in Downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, jumped from specialist firm Leslie J. Garfield to Serhant in January. 

The move was a surprising one for the former prosecutor, who made his name at the buttoned-up firm — a far cry from the young, flashy, social media-forward Serhant. 

Kantha said he was hesitant to join Serhant when he was shopping around for a new brokerage. Large pictures of Ryan’s face appeared across the company’s website, and Kantha was dubious about the founder’s antics. While Kantha was mulling, Ryan posted a video to his Instagram showing him running through the streets in a giant inflatable ball. 

For brokers, particularly the handful of those near the top of any given ranking, collaborating with another big name has to have a clear benefit. So one could imagine that working in Ryan’s imposing shadow isn’t necessarily a selling point. 

“Brokers have egos,” Kantha said. He added that the majority of established agents are over 50 and don’t want to “play second fiddle to Ryan,” whom they consider the competition. Kantha said he was also concerned about being just another broker on Ryan’s team. 

Despite his reservations, he left for Serhant at the beginning of the year. 

Even the once-skeptical Kantha is now leaning into the brand’s publicity-driven identity. He recently swapped the license plate on his car for one using his last name. 

“CEOs like that are professional fundraisers. That’s their skill set. In the words of Kendrick Lamar, they’re not like us.”
Ryan Serhant

The all-out approach may attract brokers looking to rev their sales power, but it could discourage clients on the high end. 

Loy Carlos, former protégé of Corcoran’s Carrie Chiang and head of Serhant’s Signature division, left for Nest Seekers, Serhant’s previous firm.

Though Carlos said he wishes Ryan the best and described his experience at the firm as “collaborative,” he disavowed a brokerage model that has its chief executive still closing deals. 

“I believe CEOs and managers should not be selling, as a general rule,” Carlos said. “CEOs should be looking at the bigger business and how to grow that business.”

For most of Carlos’ clients, he said, discretion is a top priority, and the level of exposure that comes with a social media-first, TV-starring brokerage would likely be a dealbreaker. (Carlos hasn’t totally escaped publicity: Nest Seekers agents are the subject of reality shows based in London and the Hamptons.)

Selling on the small screen

Ryan’s visibility makes him an easy target for criticism, despite real estate reality TV having become a genre in its own right. 

The premiere of Netflix’s “Selling Sunset” in 2019 revived the glitzy property porn that “Million Dollar Listing” first brought to television but substituted inter-broker drama for the deal talk of its predecessor. 

That set off industry-wide conversations about the role of the broker on the small screen. 

“Reality TV is very deflating to what we do,” Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman said on a panel, seated feet away from Ryan, at The Real Deal’s Showcase + Forum in 2022. “It makes the consumer think all you have to do is look cute, have a fancy car and boom — you can do a deal.”

Those on the inside of the reality television circuit say the exposure, even with the accompanying criticism, is overwhelmingly worth it. 

“If you don’t have haters, then you’re not successful,” said Jason Oppenheim, whose brokerage, the Oppenheim Group, is the subject of “Selling Sunset.” 

“I think most of that is jealousy. … I can assure you that if 90 percent of the people that talk, you know, shit about anything, if they were given the opportunity, they would do it in a heartbeat.”

Not everyone has the secret formula that strikes a producer’s fancy and leads to a show. In a market starved for inventory and reckoning with its own image, TV could hold new appeal for brokerages looking to boost their bottom line. 

“The show is $250 million in unpaid media,” Ryan said. “That’s a commercial we could never afford.” 

The “too good to pass up” mentality has paid off before. He has jumped into pools at luxury developments, thrown elaborate theme parties to kick off sales and done other stunts that generate clicks first, sales eventually.  

“It’ll feel goofy for our competitors until it’s not,” Ryan said of the company’s approach.

He has made recent adjustments to that image, turning down the volume of himself as synonymous with the brand. His face is no longer the first thing visitors see on his website. His coaching business is now just called Sell It instead of Sell It Like Serhant. And McKinney is standing in for him at some of his smaller speaking engagements. 

He’s conscious of the evolution of company culture, where the enthusiasm and unequivocal buy-in rivals an early-stage tech startup. 

“You’re at a company that is young and fun and growing, and the next thing you know, it’s super corporate, you’re having to go through 10 people for approvals,” he said. But he sees now that he can’t be the only one who’s tasked with keeping it fun or keeping it growing in the years ahead. 

“Will I be involved in every single detail?” Ryan said. “No.

“But my DNA and fingerprints will be on everything.”