The words “real estate” and “sexy” aren’t often paired in a sentence, but Ryan Serhant insists the sexy aspect of the profession has fueled the popularity of reality television series focused on home selling.
Serhant is the CEO of the luxury brokerage SERHANT and has closed more than $8 billion in sales. He previously starred in the Bravo reality series “Million Dollar Listing New York” and “Sell It Like Serhant” before headlining the Netflix series “Owning Manhattan,” which premiered in June.
In an interview with Collider, Serhant theorized that viewers have fallen in love with real estate reality shows.
“I think real estate is an inherently sexy thing to watch,” he said. “It’s very visual, you know. Watching a TV show about day trading stocks is interesting, but it’s not visual. You kind of have to make it visual. Real estate, the visuals are already there. I mean look at this view we’re in a $58 million mansion right now just for this interview, so I think people like the visuals. I think people like seeing inside wealthy people’s homes, there’s still a little bit of that old school, secret lives of the rich and famous and then seeing what it’s like to work in these high-stakes, high-pressure environments like New York City, it’s just entertaining, you know our stress is your entertainment.”
However, Serhant also acknowledged the real estate profession has some decidedly non-sexy aspects – especially regarding earnings.
“Most real estate agents don’t make any money,” he admitted. “Most real estate agents just have your license and they do on average, two deals a year. It’s actually a little bit less than that. Active agents obviously do more than that, but it’s hard. You know, you have 80,000 real estate agents in kind of the greater New York City area. There’s not 80,000 homes on the market, it’s not 80,000 sales happening every year.”
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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I like to watch this show and see the properties in New York. I live in Scarsdale as a young kid and learned how to ice skate at Rockefeller Center when my Dad was an executive and officed there. However, there are not many residential agents (as is stated by Serhan in this article) that make alot money like he does. I know a top industrial broker from high school and he has sold $85 billion in his career, not even considering what people that worked for him made to add to his commissions. You don’t see that very often either! I laugh when agents that sell $500,000 houses in Texas tell me how well they are doing!
Why laugh at the Texas agents? Trust me, they work as hard if not harder, than Ryan Serhant in NY.
The sexiness component is about to disappear on August 17. Buyers agents won’t get far like they used to by showing muscles and wearing short skirts to sell homes when buyers need to pay agent commissions.
You have just insulted most of the Real Estate industry with that comment!
I agreed with the Ouilda, it is insult for most real estate who actually work hard and do dress professional instead of showing their so called. sexy body? this is why those women that think that showing their body gets them more business is a disrespect to the rest of the woman that are in the industry
There’s nothing ‘sexy’ about selling Real Estate… it’s a lot of hard work, dealing with all kinds of personalities… to close transactions. Many of us are very professional and offer complete integrity services for the meager $40,000 sale to the $415,000 sale. 31+ yrs in business, I know.
I live in a small town in Deep Texas and work very hard and proud of what I sell yearly. Smal town America is not a bad thing.
This show is the product of scripted “entertainment”, neither he nor the program are authentic.
Here, the guy is just creating press/attention for his new show.
When this latest show runs it’s course, he’ll get on real housewives, some bachelor/dating show or celebrity family feud 😉