In the greenroom at the TODAY show, Ryan Serhant, dressed in a tailored sage suit and sporting his signature gray hair, flips through notes as producers buzz around him.

For those familiar with Serhant’s social media persona — all exaggerated gestures and over-the-top enthusiasm — his off-camera demeanor is a surprise. He’s calm, stoic, and laser-focused. He moves with quiet precision until it’s time to perform. Then, he steps into character.

He’s about to appear on a segment called “Jenna & Friends,” helping a woman in Atlanta find her first home. But even here, he’s recognized. “Oh my God, is that Ryan Serhant?” asks comedian Zarna Garg, waiting for her own appearance. “I have your book at home. Can we get a photo?”

He obliges, snaps the photo, and returns to his phone. A producer rushes over: “Remember your three tips for first-time buyers?” He rattles them off without missing a beat.

A few minutes later, Serhant strides into the studio. The host announces: “We’re on a house hunt, helping a viewer find her first home, so we called in luxury real estate broker and Netflix star Ryan Serhant.”

The cameras roll. He beams. His voice booms. He’s on.

By 9:30 a.m, he’s filmed a national segment, trained agents, and posted on Instagram. Every hour is accounted for. Every minute, monetized.

He recently closed the biggest deal of his career: nearly $200 million. His Netflix series Owning Manhattan became an overnight hit, ranking third in the U.S. His eponymous firm surpassed $1 billion in sales this year alone and raised $45 million in outside funding to keep scaling. Still, it’s not enough.

The actor-turned-agent-turned-CEO has one goal left: to make his brokerage No. 1 — not just in New York, but in the world. “The plan is to really see if I can do this,” he says.

If you think it’s all charisma and hard work, you’re missing the real story. In the press, Serhant has been described as charismatic, likable, authentic, and enthusiastic — and he is all of those things. But underneath the polished exterior is something darker, more complicated, and far more potent.

Serhant is driven by “revenge, for sure, 100 percent,” he tells me. “Success is the best revenge.” Revenge on childhood bullies. On gatekeepers who dismissed him. On brokerages that wouldn’t give him a shot. He wants to be first because he can’t bear being last.

That drive is what separates him, and that’s why he’s willing to outwork, outbuild, and outmaneuver anyone in his way.

He sees himself as David taking on the real estate Goliaths — traditional billion-dollar firms with deep pockets. But he has something they don’t: millions of followers, a relentless brand, and a media engine that makes him the center of every deal.

His digital dominance is both his greatest asset and his biggest controversy — critics say he’s “bastardizing” luxury real estate. Serhant doesn’t care. He’s building something many of his competitors can’t replicate: not just a brokerage with a media arm, but a media machine that sells real estate. “We are a media and a technology company before we’re a real estate company,” he says. “We use media to generate more business for our agents than any other firm does combined.”

Serhant is more than a real estate mogul, he’s a blueprint for the modern entrepreneur. He’s part of a generation that doesn’t just build companies, but audiences. His rise signals a shift where influence is as valuable as capital, where a personal brand can rival a corporate one, and where the worlds of entertainment, business, and tech are colliding in ways we’ve never seen before. In luxury real estate, long ruled by buttoned-up brokerages, that’s a radical shift.

For the former actor, the ultimate role is playing CEO until it’s no longer a performance. “I’m going for a grand slam here,” he says. “There is no Plan B. There is no Serhant Two. It all has to work.”

For Ryan Serhant, success isn’t an option. It’s the only outcome.

The door opens to 3,350 square feet of curated luxury: a $9 million pre-war loft in Tribeca, filled with art and rare memorabilia. Serhant steps inside like it’s a movie set, not a listing, because in his world, the cameras never stop rolling.

The first thing Serhant points out is that agents from his brokerage represented both the buyer and seller, both of whom they met through social media. Serhant tells me it sold in five minutes for the asking price of $9 million. (On Instagram, he said it sold in four.)

The loft was off the market, but Serhant was there to capture social content before it closed. Directing his video crew, he highlighted rare memorabilia with the flair of a seasoned performer, every shot designed to pull viewers in.

After Bravo’s hit series Million Dollar Listing: New York made him a household name, Serhant realized the power of visibility. He wasn’t just selling apartments — he was selling moments.

In 2013, when he landed a time-capsule Upper East Side townhouse untouched since the 1980s, he didn’t renovate or stage it. He threw a “Back to the Future” party, inviting guests to post photos of the green tile floors, the whirlpool jacuzzi, and the built-in record player on social media. The property sold as-is for the full asking price of $7.5 million, an early glimpse of the Serhant playbook.

Eleonora Srugo, a top-producing agent at Douglas Elliman and star of Netflix’s Selling the City, said Serhant is known for investing in marketing, and ultimately, in himself. “He’s very well known for doing things that other people may refer to as ‘gimmicky’ with big, over-the-top parties, billboards, and attention-seeking moments,” she says. “But that is his charisma and that is his brand.”

Million Dollar Listing could only capture part of the story, and it was never fast enough for Serhant. By the time viewers saw a property, it had already sold. Serhant wanted faster distribution, a larger audience, and full creative control. In 2018, he launched a YouTube channel to document the unfiltered building of his business. He focused on three pillars: property tours, vlogs, and motivational content, all designed to entertain and inspire.

It worked. His channel now boasts more than 1.4 million subscribers and has directly led to multimillion-dollar deals. One Chelsea townhouse sold after a buyer’s teenage daughter discovered it through one of his YouTube videos. In an era when attention is leverage, Serhant built a machine that generates both, on his terms.

Jason Oppenheim, founder of The Oppenheim Group and star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, says Serhant’s edge is his distribution. The type of press Ryan can generate through social media, he says, is more valuable than traditional press because “it targets his core audience.”

Behind this reach is a steely relentlessness. Even Oppenheim, known for his own tireless hustle, is impressed by Serhant’s pace saying, “He just has more hours in his day than the rest of us.”

Serhant lives by what he calls the “1,000-minute rule.” The logic is simple: We all have 1,440 minutes in a day. Subtract sleep, meals, and basic hygiene, and you’re left with about 1,000 usable minutes.

Serhant wakes at 4:23 a.m, trains at the gym by 5 a.m, arrives at the office by 7:30 a.m, goes home around 9 p.m, and works late into the night. A full-time driver, three personal assistants, and a dedicated media team ensure every minute is maximized.

Donna Olshan, founder of Olshan Realty and a veteran tracker of New York luxury deals, says Serhant’s responsiveness is unparalleled. “If I email him at one in the morning, he will probably email me back in 10 minutes. No joke,” she says. “This guy is working all the time.”

Of course, there’s a personal cost to this level of optimization. “I have like three friends,” Serhant tells me, half-joking but not entirely. “I’d much rather be at the office getting work done on a Sunday than being with other people. Maybe that’s just who I am. Maybe this career was always going to find me.”

His wife, Emilia, acknowledges that balancing business and family during these high-growth years is challenging. Still, Serhant dedicates Saturdays to their daughter Zena — what he calls “Dadurdays.” When he’s traveling, he makes a point to FaceTime her, sharing what he’s working on, and making her feel part of the journey.

The same discipline that fuels his success also isolates him. There’s little room for downtime, unscheduled family hangouts, or even questioning the relentless pace he’s set for himself. It’s a tradeoff, and for now, one he seems willing to accept in exchange for building a business that endures.

You could say Serhant has horrible timing. He got his real estate license on Sept. 15, 2008 — the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. The housing market was in free fall. But instead of walking away, he leaned in.

He made just $9,188 that first year, but Serhant was used to struggling. Growing up on a farm in Massachusetts, he was shy, awkward, and relentlessly bullied, which earned him the unfortunate nickname “Cryin’ Ryan.” He found comfort in acting. “I found it easier to pretend to be other people than I did being myself,” he says. After studying theater in college, Serhant moved to New York in 2006, landed a soap opera role on As the World Turns, and was promptly killed off.

Desperate to stay afloat, he took on odd jobs, including hand modeling for AT&T. Making ends meet in New York wasn’t easy. He needed money for rent, food, and, most of all, the security of knowing he wouldn’t have to move back home with his parents. A friend eventually suggested he try real estate to pay the bills while he waited for his next acting break.

So, on Sept. 15, 2008, Serhant joined Nest Seekers International, a brokerage specializing in luxury properties. What started as a survival job soon became an obsession and his true calling.

Serhant’s first real estate deal was a modest $1,100-a-month rental in Koreatown, which netted him a $550 commission. He kept grinding, deal by deal, until one day, he got a call from a woman looking to buy in New York. Her budget? $2 million.

For the first time since starting in real estate, Serhant saw a real opportunity, and he seized it. That call led to his first major sale: a $2.3 million apartment, earning him a $24,000 commission. The thrill of closing the deal was intoxicating. He was hooked.

Around that time, he saw a casting call: “Are you a top-level real estate broker who wants to be on TV?”

He wasn’t top-level yet, but he applied anyway. During his 2010 audition for Million Dollar Listing: New York, he declared, “I’m the greatest f—ing real estate broker in the history of the world.” The bravado worked. As he later wrote, “I gave them Ryan: amplified.”

Jenn Levy, then the Bravo executive overseeing Million Dollar Listing, saw in Serhant a rare mix that made for compelling television. “On one hand, he’s so perfectly polished with his tailored suits and the hair and the muscles,” she says. “But then on the other hand, he would host an open house and put on a tutu. It became this question of, ‘What will Ryan do next?'”

That unpredictability made him a natural fit. Serhant joined the cast as one of four brokers navigating the city’s cutthroat market. Before filming, a PR executive advised him: “Be what you want people to know you for in two years.” Serhant took it to heart. “You need to be No. 1, or we’ll put you on international television as a failure,” he recalls in a podcast. “It’s all on you.”

That obsession with ownership, and being at the center of it all, propelled him. During his 12 years at Nest Seekers, he built a powerhouse career, leading a team of over 60 agents across multiple markets and closing more than $4 billion in sales. His reach expanded beyond New York into Miami, Los Angeles, and the Hamptons.

Serhant often talks about building his empire from scratch, but not everyone sees it as a one-man journey.

Eddie Shapiro, founder of Nest Seekers and Serhant’s former boss, is quick to underscore the role he played in his journey, saying, “We trained him, brought him to the show, and helped him create a brand and a career. It was one of the greatest experiments, I believe, ever in our industry.”

When I asked Serhant how it felt to hear his former boss take partial credit for his success, he took a minute to think, and said, “I think I’ll use a line from that movie, The Social Network where [Mark Zuckerberg’s character] says, ‘If you want to stand on my shoulders to call yourself tall, go for it.'”

In 2020, Serhant broke away from Nest Seekers to launch his own firm. The move surprised some in the industry, but he saw it as the next logical step in taking full control of his brand.

Once again, his timing was terrible. The world was shutting down, and Serhant was launching a brokerage.

By September 2020, while other firms were in retreat, Serhant was the only show in town. “If I were to start this company today, I’d have to have a parade down Fifth Avenue for anyone to care,” he says. “But because we started during COVID, we were on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.”

A global pandemic may have seemed like the worst time to start a business, but Serhant doesn’t wait for perfect timing. He creates his own.

He launched his brokerage on Sept. 15, 2020 — exactly 12 years to the day after earning his real estate license. Twice now, on that same date, he’s made the same choice: to bet on himself.

Each year, Serhant assigns a symbolic animal to guide his agents: part branding exercise, part cultural north star. For 2025, it’s the orca — strategic, collaborative, and dominant. This year’s motto: “Move as one, dominate as one, win as one.” He says with a smile: “We are graceful while we kill.”

Nile Lundgren, one of Serhant’s earliest hires, says orcas are “apex predators,” which is exactly how the inner circle sees themselves.

Lundgren joined the brokerage in 2021 to help Serhant scale beyond his own personal brand. “I’ll be the guy that takes the meeting for you. I’ll be the guy that you can trust,” Lundgren recalls telling him.

The dynamic was tested early. Working on a $4 million listing at 738 Broadway, Lundgren hit a snag and called Serhant for help. Serhant’s response: “Nile, you know what to do. Close it.”

Lundgren calls it a defining moment: “I was looking for validation, and he didn’t give it to me. That day, he really let me shine, and he taught me autonomy.”

As a boss, Serhant holds his people to the same exacting standards he sets for himself: relentlessly high, sometimes intense, but almost always in service of helping them rise. “There’s a difference between being tough and being fair,” he says. “I think I’m incredibly fair.” He leads with expectation but also with trust, and the people who stay seem to thrive under that pressure.

Talia McKinney, another longtime agent, credits Serhant with sharpening her focus early on. “I was trying to do everything,” she says, until Serhant pulled her aside and advised: “You need to slow down and just focus on one aspect of the work.”

Over the years, these Serhant-isms have become part of the company’s culture. Among them: “Expansion. Always, in all ways,” “The biggest deal you’ve ever done — you haven’t even done it yet,” and “Take care of the work, and the work will take care of you.”

But living by those mantras hasn’t always come easy, even for Serhant himself. Consider the scale of what he’s building: a residential brokerage, a full-service video production studio, an educational arm with courses and coaching, a private client division offering bespoke marketing, an in-house branding agency, and an AI-powered app for real estate agents.

Serhant ran it all without outside funding until 2024, when he raised $45 million from Camber Creek and Left Lane Capital. The decision came after realizing he couldn’t scale the business at the speed he envisioned on his own. “I can either do it by myself and grow slowly with no cushion and no backstop, or I can do it with people whose job is to be real strategic thought partners,” he says.

Harley Miller, founder and managing partner at Left Lane Capital, calls Serhant “one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation” and believes the firm could become the country’s top luxury brokerage within five years. The brokerage has expanded its operations to nine U.S. states, including Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Still, the looming question remains: Can Serhant the company thrive without Serhant the man?

It’s a classic case of what venture capitalists call “key man risk,” the vulnerability that arises when a business depends too heavily on one person. “If he got hit by a bus tomorrow, that would be a major blow,” Miller says. “And over time, you would expect that Serhant is something that is larger than him, but I don’t know if you could confidently say that’s the case today.”

Ultimately, Miller will define success in dollar signs. “I think he builds a multi-billion-dollar public company in the next half a decade, and that would be a success for us,” he says.

But for Serhant, success is about more than valuation. It’s legacy, fueled by a chip on his shoulder from childhood. What drives Serhant now is the need to rewrite the story he and others once believed about him. And the rewrite is well underway.

Serhant is no longer the insecure kid with bad skin, the underdog no one took seriously. He’s built a life most people only dream about: flawless skin, six-pack abs, a Netflix show, a beautiful family, a Brooklyn brownstone, and a brokerage bearing his name. By all measures, he’s made it.

He didn’t take shortcuts. He didn’t have a golden parachute. He worked his way up, all in front of the cameras. So why, when he says he’s growing Serhant into the world’s No. 1 brokerage, do his competitors try to dismiss all he’s built?

Take what happened on May 19, 2022. Serhant shared a stage with real estate power players — Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman and former Douglas Elliman CEO Scott Durkin. The panel quickly turned hostile. Freedman scoffed that reality TV made consumers think “all you have to do is look cute, have a fancy car and boom — you can do a deal.”

Serhant hit back three days later with a five-minute video, likening legacy firms to AOL and Blockbuster, and calling them “kind of scared.” It was classic Serhant: the scrappy disruptor taking on the old guard.

Months later, an employee at Serhant Ventures sent an email offering to train Freedman’s agents. She was incredulous. “We are a diff brokerage. You are asking us to pay Ryan to help our agents?????”

When the response confirmed it, she fired back: “There is a fine line between being unorthodox and being a schmendrick.” (Schmendrick is the Yiddish word for “fool.”) To her, Serhant wasn’t an underdog. He was a predator circling her territory. “I would never let a fox in the henhouse,” she tells me.

Traditional brokerages have followed a familiar playbook, and Serhant is tearing it up. His competitors often use his reality TV background and obsession with image to downplay his entrepreneurial success.

In 2024, they got more content to ridicule when Serhant launched Owning Manhattan, a glossy, high-drama Netflix reality series that follows him and his team of agents as they chase multimillion-dollar listings in New York City’s luxury real estate market. The show is a calculated extension of his brand, positioning him as both CEO and star.

The opening scene of Owning Manhattan doesn’t show him closing a high-stakes deal or leading his brokerage. Instead, it shows him stepping out of the shower — shirtless — before getting dressed for the day. To his fans, it’s just Serhant being Serhant: part showman, part salesman, fully in control of his personal brand. But to some in the industry, it was proof that he was turning real estate into entertainment.

Leonard Steinberg, a 27-year industry veteran and former Compass president, told me real estate reality TV “trivializes what agents do.” He argued that it sends the message: “I’m going to take my shirt off, I’m going to get ratings, I’m going to get attention, and then I’ll build a business.”

But even his critics acknowledge the approach closes deals. “Ryan Serhant, whether you like him or not, you have to admit he works incredibly hard,” Steinberg said.

Compass agent Jason Haber, who used to lose listing pitches to Serhant regularly, called him “a five-tool real estate player” with the rare ability to turn media exposure into serious business. “There are agents out there who may have tinges of jealousy around what he’s built,” Haber says. “When you become that successful, you’re going to bring out detractors.”

And the numbers speak for themselves. Following the premiere of Owning Manhattan, Serhant’s website traffic surged, listing inquiries spiked, and agent inquiries quadrupled.

In the first 35 days of 2025 alone, Serhant’s brokerage crossed $1 billion in sales. He personally closed his biggest deal yet. While details remain private, he posted on Instagram on Feb. 4: “Sold and closed the most expensive home of my entire career today for just under $200M. And I did the deal over the phone.”

“If you actually look at his numbers, you can’t not take him seriously,” says his former Million Dollar Listing: New York co-star Tyler Whitman. “Whether you love him or hate him, your feedback no longer matters because the results are in. And the results are really good.”

On his phone, Serhant pulls up a photo: “Old Man Ryan,” an AI-generated image of his future self. “I think this guy is about 70,” he says. The image is a reminder, he says, that all the stress and struggle — the nonstop chase — is in service of making that older version of himself proud.

So what would that 70-year-old Serhant tell him now? “He’d say, ‘Breathe. You can’t take any of this with you’ — all advice that I probably wouldn’t listen to, as per usual.”

He pauses, then shifts to a story. A CEO client once confided in him about his early days of building a career while raising a family. Serhant asked, “How did you have five kids with that job?” The client didn’t hesitate: He didn’t regret a single one. “I’m sure his life was rough and hard and painful, but…” Serhant trails off, interrupted by a podcast host asking if he’s ready to record.

He is.

Later, on the podcast, the host asks: “You’re a dad and a husband. How do you prioritize where you’re putting your energy?”

“I don’t. It’s definitely hard,” Serhant replies. He recalls how his wife shadowed him for a day and, by the end, turned to him and said, “I get it now.”

Serhant is under no illusions about the toll. When he turned 40 in July, he started seeing a therapist. “He said I am a human ‘doing,’ not a human ‘being,'” Serhant tells me. “And he said that I, from a very, very early age, have calculated my self worth against the things that I do versus the way that I am, which is very true and super sad, I think.”

Then, almost to himself, he wonders aloud: “How do I stop caring about what other people think, and just live my life? But under the public eye, it’s hard, you know? It is hard. That’s why sometimes I yearn for a career where no one knows what I’m doing except the people that I work with.”

He admits he struggles to savor the climb because he’s so fixated on the peak. When I ask what truly makes him happy, it’s not the sales or the professional success that he mentions. It’s his 6-year-old daughter Zena — the pride of watching her conquer the monkey bars for the first time, the flash of determination in her eyes that feels so very familiar to him.

And yet herein lies the paradox of Serhant’s life: The same relentless ambition that made him build an empire is the same ambition that keeps him from ever feeling like he’s arrived.

That fire drives him. It also threatens to consume him — and he knows it. “I’m definitely the kind of person who needs the adrenaline so I can use it as fuel,” he says. “But if you’re not careful, that fuel will also burn your house down.”

Serhant has built a brand on always being in motion. The question is whether he’ll ever allow himself to stop.

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Written by Polina Pompliano | Edited by Laura Entis | Photos & video by Stephen Yang

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