The Gut Renovation of Ryan Serhant

He was a real-estate striver slinging cheap rentals until ‘Million Dollar Listing’—and a pandemic market—made him the plutocracy’s broker of choice.

- Andrew Rice

Ryan serhant wanted to elevate. On an unseasonably beautiful winter morning, the real-estate broker was gliding around the rooftop terrace of a penthouse in Soho, trailed by a woman camera crew and sizing up the angles. He hoisted himself above the terrace wall, placing one Prada boot on a planter, the other on a piece of wicker furniture. “This way,” he said, “I’m in the sun.” Serhant wore a light-blue pin-striped suit, a baby-blue Hermès tie, and a brilliantly white smile, which I could see because he had stripped off his navy-blue mask, which was branded with an S. From the knees down, he was contorting to hold himself steady. But his upper half was bathed in light, with the Empire State Building framed over his shoulder.

Serhant, who is 36, makes his living selling luxury apartments, and he does it through the force of his personality, which flows like a torrent through many channels. A longtime star of the Bravo series Million Dollar Listing New York, Serhant has 1.5 million followers on Instagram and a million subscribers on YouTube. He is into video production and motivational speaking. The self-promoting performance is all meant to support his new brokerage, Serhant. (that’s not the end of this sentence—the period is an emphatic part of the brand). He calls it “the future of where real estate, tech, and media collide.” Launching a firm to cater to a tiny, ultrawealthy stratum may sound counterintuitive at a time when spindly new condo towers stand empty and swaying and the city’s status as the global center of culture and wealth is uncertain. But Serhant knows how to create his own reality.