I Ran Out Of Money… Now I Sell Real Estate To Billionaires | Ryan Serhant

Ryan Serhant’s career began far from luxury real estate: he was born outside Houston, Texas, in a house rather than a hospital and moved roughly eight times before fourth grade. He attended many schools, says he was poor at sports despite his parents putting him into many of them, and found his strongest early ability in theater, school plays and musicals.

Serhant attended college in upstate New York, graduated in 2006 and moved to New York City to pursue theater and acting. He also tried to enter law school but was not admitted, leaving acting as the path he initially pursued.

His acting career failed financially after roughly two years in New York, culminating in his debit card being declined at a grocery store. Faced with needing income, he refused to move home or ask friends for money because he wanted to earn his own way forward and avoid owing people.

Serhant entered real estate in September 2008, almost exactly as the financial crisis and Great Recession were beginning. He chose real estate partly because a license allowed him to control his schedule, and the collapsing market became the environment in which he learned the business.

His earliest real-estate work consisted largely of apartment rentals and direct prospecting rather than prestigious listings. He found people through Craigslist, met prospects at Starbucks and approached people he thought might need larger homes, including expectant parents, earning commissions of roughly $500 or $1,000 that helped him pay his own rent and establish himself.

Serhant says his original financial benchmark was simply to find a way to make money independently, stating that if he could make $2,000 a day, he would pursue real estate. Once the business began working, he put theater and acting aside professionally and became increasingly serious about sales.

He nevertheless sees his roughly 20 years of theater experience as preparation for his eventual real-estate success rather than wasted time. Acting had trained him to memorize information, perform under pressure, communicate emotionally and, most importantly, tell stories.

Serhant says he never tied his identity permanently to becoming an actor or to any single profession; he “chose success” rather than choosing one career. His stated goals were financial independence, control over his own life and eventually being able to afford the life and home he wanted without constantly worrying about monthly costs.

This goal-first mindset made changing industries psychologically easier for him. He describes trying several possible roads until real estate produced what he calls “product-market fit” between his personality, entrepreneurial instincts, personal brand and the market.

He argues that careers and businesses should evolve with circumstances rather than remain attached to their original form. As an example, his company now occupies a SoHo clubhouse in a building originally developed as Tommy Hilfiger’s New York flagship store—a property whose useful role changed as traditional flagship retail changed.

Serhant’s business has expanded well beyond his original brokerage work. He says his brokerage now generates approximately $4 billion to $5 billion in annual sales and has agents operating across eight states.

His public profile was built substantially through Million Dollar Listing New York, which ran on Bravo for about 10 years. His media footprint later expanded across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other social platforms.

Serhant says he has written three books, with his first, Sell It Like Serhant, eventually becoming the foundation of a broader sales-education business. The brand also produced a separate television show before developing into an education operation serving salespeople beyond real estate.

The education company, SellIt.com, has been under development since roughly 2019 and teaches both individual salespeople and businesses. Serhant presents continuous sales training as a major part of his own operating system rather than simply a product he sells to others.

His organization also operates a production company devoted to creating top-of-funnel content. Media production is therefore integrated into the sales business rather than treated merely as outside publicity.

When Serhant entered real estate with essentially no sales record, he studied what successful brokers possessed that he lacked: connections, information and confidence. He concluded that connections could be accumulated over time, while publicly available market information could be learned immediately.

He deliberately compensated for his lack of experience by memorizing information, using a skill developed through acting. His view was that established brokers carried market knowledge from years of experience, but a newcomer could deliberately study much of the same information.

Serhant believes genuine confidence can be manufactured through preparation rather than empty bravado. In his framework, knowledge plus relationships eventually create confidence, allowing a newcomer to behave more like the experienced professional he intends to become.

He calls this future-oriented confidence “Big Money Energy,” the title of his second book. The idea is not, in his telling, to pretend to possess money or achievements one does not have, but to act according to the standards of the person one expects to become.

His central sales insight became that information alone rarely differentiates a salesperson; storytelling does. He summarizes the distinction as “facts tell, stories sell”: successful salespeople can take accurate facts and arrange them into narratives that create attention and emotional attachment.

Serhant therefore combined his real-estate identity with his existing identity as a storyteller. Rather than merely reciting specifications about properties, he began creating stories around the same underlying facts without changing those facts.

That storytelling strategy naturally developed into a media strategy. Serhant says his team has produced four national television shows, creates property tours continually for social media and uses video as part of the sales process itself.

He cited a $60 million home that he says he sold through video without ever meeting the buyer. For Serhant, transactions like this demonstrate that media can become part of the actual distribution and sales machinery for extremely expensive property, not merely a branding exercise.

At the time of the interview, Serhant said another television series was scheduled to appear on Netflix within a few months. He again described the show as an extension of the same underlying strategy: using storytelling and media to occupy a distinctive niche.

Serhant’s path onto Million Dollar Listing New York began with an open casting call in March 2010 at the Hudson Hotel in Times Square. Roughly 3,000 New York real-estate agents attended, while Serhant himself had been working in the industry only a little over a year.

He recalls New York having roughly 50,000 real-estate agents at that time and estimates that the number later grew to around 80,000. The casting process therefore placed a very inexperienced broker into a large competitive pool searching for people presented as the industry’s best.

Instead of presenting himself as the inexperienced agent he actually was, Serhant deliberately presented what he calls “future Ryan.” He told the casting team he was among the best because he believed he was showing them the person he intended to become one or two years later.

This “future self” idea also shapes how he thinks about entrepreneurship more generally. He says an entrepreneur effectively works for his future self, making present-day sacrifices—including showing up consistently, sleeping properly and taking care of health—so that the future version of that person benefits.

Serhant’s audition involved calculated projection of an image he did not yet materially possess. Although he actually traveled around New York by subway with a MetroCard, when the Los Angeles casting team asked how he got around, he answered, “black car by day, Range Rover by night.”

He acknowledges that he did not own the Range Rover he described and says he believed he could obtain one if production required it. His distinction is that people should not lie about facts, but should confidently project the future they are actively working toward.

When the casting team asked how much real estate he sold, Serhant avoided giving a number because he had only recently begun selling. He answered simply that he sold “a lot,” then moved the conversation forward rather than emphasizing his limited track record.

Serhant compares this future-oriented positioning to how investors value companies based partly on expected growth rather than only historical revenue. He argues that reality-TV casting similarly concerns whether someone can become a compelling on-camera personality over the coming production cycle, not merely what that person has already accomplished.

Asked why the producers should cast him, Serhant declared that he was the greatest real-estate broker in the known universe despite the producers having never heard of him. The deliberately oversized answer reinforced the confident persona he was presenting.

The audition did not produce an immediate result; roughly nine months passed before Serhant was cast. Four brokers were selected to film the first season, but producers told them only the three strongest would survive into the final edited show.

The first season was filmed throughout 2011 and released in 2012. The structure meant Serhant had effectively won the casting process without yet being guaranteed that his filmed work would actually appear in the finished series.

Serhant argues that modern real-estate marketing dollars are generally better spent digitally because platforms offer faster distribution and more precise audience control. His preferred channels include TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

He has not completely abandoned traditional advertising. Agents and developers working with his firm still use print in certain markets, including Palm Beach and the Hamptons, and the company sometimes uses newspaper advertising, digital banners and other conventional formats.

His position is therefore not that traditional advertising has no value, but that its economics often compare poorly with digital distribution. He notes that newspapers have largely disappeared from his own daily life and argues that marketers must follow where audiences have moved.

Serhant still considers billboards powerful but emphasizes their cost. He estimated that the billboard above the building where the interview took place cost approximately $45,000 per month, while some prominent billboard campaigns can reach much higher amounts.

He rejects the argument that wealthy buyers are absent from social media. Even where the ultimate buyer is not personally consuming a particular piece of content, family members, children and people around that buyer can see it and introduce the property.

He described a Chelsea property offered around the $15 million level where social media generated the initial buyer connection. A 13-year-old girl saw a vertically edited property tour, showed it to her mother, and persuaded her to inspect a home despite the mother previously preferring the East Side and not wanting either the West Side or a townhouse.

The Chelsea example illustrates Serhant’s distinction between lead generation and transaction execution. The property was not legally purchased through a social-media direct message; attorneys, paperwork and the normal transaction process remained necessary, but social media created the crucial first contact that traditional competitors might never have generated.

Serhant also cited the launch of Mercedes-Benz branded residences in Miami as evidence of digital distribution at scale. He described the project as the first Mercedes-Benz branded residences in the Western Hemisphere and said approximately 100 apartments were sold in the first four days.

According to Serhant, those first Mercedes-Benz residence sales came through social and digital awareness without the project having yet purchased conventional advertising. He characterized the early campaign as organic rather than driven by paid traditional media.

He explicitly acknowledges that his enormous existing audience gives his firm an advantage that many competitors do not possess. That following is both a marketing asset for listings and, in his view, a reason agents and clients choose to work with his company.

For someone beginning in real estate today, Serhant’s first recommendation is relentless learning. He says he studies every day because methods for closing, meeting clients, building pipeline, generating leads, advertising and developing a personal brand continually change.

He believes professional salespeople spend far too little time practicing compared with elite athletes. His analogy is that top athletes may spend roughly 95% of their time practicing and 5% competing, whereas many salespeople spend about 95% “in the game” and only 5% training.

Serhant recommends that new agents align themselves with a strong brand, partner or mentor rather than trying to optimize immediate earnings. He views the first three years of a real-estate career as the equivalent of graduate school: the primary objective should be learning, with significant early income treated as a bonus rather than the main measure of progress.

He warns new agents against becoming “swipe happy”—continually jumping elsewhere before they have absorbed the lessons available where they are. His broader point is that sustained apprenticeship and proximity to strong operators can matter more than short-term opportunities.

Serhant does not think a successful agent must be passionate about architectural details or houses themselves. He says the more important requirement is being passionate about the process of commerce: making deals, working the transaction and wanting the kind of life that success in the profession can make possible.