Community Highlights: Meet Ryan Serhant of SERHANT.

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Serhant.

Hi Ryan , please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I moved to New York City to be an actor. That was the dream. But auditions don’t pay rent in Manhattan, so I stumbled into real estate almost by accident. I made $9,000 my entire first year. I was broke, unknown, and trying to figure out how to survive in one of the most competitive cities on the planet.What I did have was a performance background, and I started treating real estate like theater. I memorized listings the way I memorized scripts. I fully committed to every single interaction like it was opening night. Slowly, it started working.Then in 2010, I took a swing at something that felt like a long shot — I auditioned for a real estate reality show on Bravo that nobody had heard of yet. Thousands of people tried out. I got the spot. Million Dollar Listing New York changed everything in terms of visibility for me, but I became one of the most successful real estate agents. Over the next decade I built Manhattan’s number one residential sales team, and then I started asking myself a bigger question: what’s next? I saw a real estate industry that was completely stuck in the past. Legacy brokerages weren’t adapting to a mobile-first, attention-driven world. Agents were drowning in fragmented tools and outdated systems. So in 2020 — yes, right at the start of a global pandemic, as people were literally fleeing New York City — I walked away from everything stable and secure and launched SERHANT. I invested every dollar I had. Five years later, we’ve surpassed $16 billion in sales and become the most-followed real estate brand in the world. I’m incredibly proud of that, but honestly, I’m more excited about where we’re going than where we’ve been.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Starting over from scratch in New York real estate with no connections, no money, and no network is genuinely hard. The culture there is deeply “who you know,” and I knew nobody. I had to earn every single inch of it. There were years where I questioned everything.

Then launching SERHANT. during the pandemic was, objectively, a crazy thing to do. Manhattan was emptying out. The market was in chaos. I was a challenger brand going up against firms with decades of history and vastly more resources, and a lot of people in the industry were waiting for me to fail. There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with betting everything on a vision that other people can’t see yet.

But I’ve learned that the struggle is where everything important actually happens. Every obstacle forced me to get more creative, more disciplined, more intentional. I didn’t build this company in spite of the hard moments, I built it because of them.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
SERHANT. is not a traditional real estate brokerage. We’re an AI-native real estate and media company — brokerage, media, education, and technology all living under one roof.

From day one, we built an in-house film studio producing content at a level the industry had never seen. We built a creative team to support our agents’ personal brands. We launched SellIt, our education platform, which now has over 45,000 members in more than 130 countries. And we developed S.MPLE, our proprietary AI platform that automates the repetitive, time-consuming parts of an agent’s workflow, it’s already returned more than a million minutes back to our agents. That’s not a small thing. Time is the one resource you can never get back.

What I’m most proud of, brand-wise, is that we’ve proven the model works. We’ve grown 100% ever year. We rank among the top brokerages in New York City. We did it without the predatory tactics that are common in this industry — we never tried to “buy” talent. We built something people actually want to be part of.

What I want people to know is that SERHANT. exists to help people move forward — whether you’re buying your first home, building a real estate career, or trying to grow a business. That’s genuinely why we exist.

What were you like growing up?
I grew up in a pretty strict household, and my parents weren’t handing anything out, if I wanted something, I had to figure out how to earn it. I remember collecting sticks in the yard to sell so I could buy baseball cards. Even as a kid I was wired to find the angle, find the opportunity, find a way.

I was also a performer from early on. Theater, acting, being “on” — that was always natural to me. I think I just had a lot of energy and needed a stage for it. What I didn’t know then was that all the hustle, performance, and storytelling, would eventually converge into exactly the career I have now.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://serhant.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/serhant/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/serhant/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/serhant
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/serhant
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanserhant

Image Credits
SERHANT. Studios