Ryan Serhant Expands Brokerage to California

Ryan Serhant – the star of Netflix’s “Owning Manhattan” – is looking to shake up California’s residential brokerage landscape as his namesake firm pushes into the Golden State.

Serhant revealed Tuesday the opening of four offices in San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Orange County and San Diego. He’s armed with an initial roster of agents and brokers nabbed from firms such as The Agency, Compass, Engel & Völkers and eXp.

The firm said its California agents did more than $2 billion in deals over the past year. A brokerage spokesperson declined to say how many total agents and brokers joined Serhant’s California team at launch.

The reality television star is not new to the state. He said he’s referred clients to agents in California for over a decade and at one time had a team in Los Angeles. Serhant also said in more recent years several high-net-worth clients have come from California to other markets the brokerage operates in.

In Northern California, Serhant enters a marketplace that finds itself in a “mansion shortage” – driven by the influx of artificial intelligence companies operating in Silicon Valley.

As his firm continues its national expansion, Serhant thinks moving into California right now “makes great sense.”

“Brands, real estate and content all collide [in California] more than any other market, regardless of how the industry is moving or changing or adapting,” he said.

Serhant California details

Ezra Leyton, the former chief operating officer and executive director at Marquis Commercial Properties, is leading Serhant’s California business as the brokerage’s managing director and principal broker for the state. Leyton is also Marquis Capital Management’s former executive director and head of North America Operations.

Serhant also tapped Ben Belack to join as executive vice president of California and a founding member.

Belack confirmed he brought his seven-member team, along with two staffers, to Serhant’s Beverly Hills office.

“Why not,” Belack said of his reason for joining the brokerage. “It’s Ryan fucking Serhant.”

Belack, who was with The Agency for over a dozen years and starred on Netflix’s “Buying Beverly Hills,” called the decision to leave the Mauricio Umansky-helmed brokerage “one of the toughest, if not the toughest, decision of my life.” The move offers an opportunity to grow into a leadership position, he said.

“I’ve known Ryan for some time and… he and I are extremely similar in our approach to the way we run our business overall,” Belack said. “We both love to transfer our skills to other agents. We’re both natural mentors.”

Belack said he’ll be working alongside Serhant’s growth department to find agents that would do well at the brokerage and leverage its technology to grow their respective businesses.

Belack is one of 16 so-called founding agents, who hold those titles for being among the first to join the brokerage and be what Serhant described as “initial flag bearers” for the firm. Serhant declined to say if founding agents hold equity stakes in the company.

Aside from Belack, those early adopters include Lisa Smith, Milana Ostroy and Viviana Cherman in San Francisco; Amie Quirarte in Tahoe; ACME Real Estate founder Courtney Poulos and Patrick Michael in Los Angeles; Annie Clougherty, Todd Davis, Jorge Anzaldi, Greyson Benson and Brooks Bailey in Orange County; and Malena Boetel, Amber Welch, Manuel Sanchez and Robyn Flint in San Diego;

Growth mode

For Serhant — whose six-year-old firm raised a $45 million seed round led by venture capital firm Camber Creek and Left Lane Capital — the push into California is part of his firm’s rapid expansion playing out across the country in recent years.

The brokerage has branded itself as a media and technology play, backed by its AI data and workflow platform S.MPLE (pronounced “simple”). Serhant views his firm’s operational structure as a differentiator in the California market.

“Most brokerages are still built on legacy models,” he said. “As a media and technology company that provides the electricity to agents to sell real estate and to provide the best service to their clients, (we) just operate differently.”

The California launch follows Serhant’s January expansion into Boston.

To date, the business now counts more than 2,000 agents with operations in 16 markets including New York, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Arizona, Nevada, Connecticut, Florida and Georgia.