Ryan Serhant, star of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan, launched his namesake real estate firm just five years ago. But the business is already operating in 14 states. And on the eve of a new year, he’s making what may be his boldest market prediction yet. With lower interest rates coming, he says, we’re going to see an influx of inventory—though not for the reasons you might expect. “As rates start to come down,” Serhant explains, “you’re going to see an increasing rate of divorce as people say, ‘I’m leaving his ass. And I’m getting my own place that I can afford with a lower rate’.” Does Ryan Serhant’s big 2026 real estate prediction really hinge on break-ups?
Serhant has made a career out of unlikely bets. Back when reality TV was still considered a career killer, he signed on to Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing: New York, expertly using nine seasons to build his personal brand. Then, at the height of the pandemic, he started his own firm just as people were fleeing Manhattan in droves. That gamble paid off. He’s now got 1,300 agents on the roster. Season one of his latest docuseries, Owning Manhattan, hit Netflix’s top 10 in 40 countries in 2024. And he’s expanded into technology, raising $45 million from the venture firms Camber Creek and Left Lane Capital to develop an app called S.MPLE, which he described as “Instacart for salespeople.”
But as the 41-year-old entrepreneur shares here—in the season four premiere of our interview series, Cereal Entrepreneur—success was far from assured. He got started in real estate only after his acting career stalled, earning his license the same week that Lehman Brothers collapsed. In advance of Owning Manhattan’s Dec. 5 return, Serhant talks about his early days in New York, how AI is changing the game, and the big 2026 real estate opportunity we should all be paying attention to.
Mickey Rapkin: Ryan, you launched your own firm at the height of the pandemic when people were fleeing New York. How did you decide that was the moment to leap?
Ryan Serhant: I didn’t think, “Hey, COVID’s a good time to do this.” I spent the beginning of 2020 putting all the pieces together under the cover of darkness—because I was still working in another firm. Going off and starting my own thing was gonna be a brutal legal process. Then everyone started getting sick in China, and then they were banging pots in Italy, then the whole world shut down. I had one day of saying to myself, “Oh, I can’t do this now.” Then the next day, I woke up and said, “Oh, wait a minute. This is the greatest time ever to start a company.” I started Googling all the companies that got started during recessions or pandemics. Isaac Newton discovered gravity because there was a pandemic and he was stuck at home.
Eric Ryan: There’s so much to unpack there. Out of any sort of failure or tragedy comes gifts. I’ve started a lot of my companies during recessions. It’s like vacationing off-season. Everything’s on sale, it’s easier to get access to talent. If you can make it work during a recessionary environment, you’re so much better set up as the economy roars back. It’s like that Warren Buffett quote, “You don’t know who’s not wearing a bathing suit until the tide goes back out.”
A (Reality) Star Is Born
Rapkin: Ryan, in some ways, your career is defined by doing things other people said you shouldn’t—like going on TV. When you started filming Million Dollar Listing in 2010, people didn’t know how buyers would react. When did you realize the show was going to be a marketing opportunity?
Serhant’s current Manhattan listings include a 35-foot-wide mansion on East 65th Street with six bedrooms and 3,500 square feet of private outdoor space. The listing price is $45.5 million.
Eytan Stern
Serhant: It took a couple years. New York is the finance capital of the world. No one wants people to know where they live. Every deal we would do on the sales side was in an LLC—for security purposes. It’s not like L.A., where there’s this idea that everybody wants everybody to know where you live. Oh, you’re in the Bird Streets. Oh, you’re in The Hills. When that first casting call happened, I was a little over a year and change into the business. I had nothing to lose. What was the worst that was gonna happen? I would just start from scratch, where I already was? My back was up against a wall. I had to make things work.
Ryan: What was the reaction when the show premiered?
Serhant: I sat there waiting for my phone to ring. And no one called. The only interaction I had from those first couple of episodes of season one was, like, a girl coming up to me on the subway and saying, “Oh my gosh, are you on a Bravo TV show about real estate?” I was like, Finally, someone recognizes me. I’m like, “Yeah, I am!” She looks at me and she goes, “Right, you’re a dick.” And she walked away.
Rapkin: Wow.
Serhant: But I did get one call from a woman in New Jersey saying she saw the show, thought it was great, and if I actually do this—meaning if you actually do real estate—she’d love to buy a place from me. I’d never had a lead come to me like that. It happened slowly but surely. They gave us a second season and then I started selling property directly from the show. But where things really, really made a change was the early, early, early days of YouTube and the ability to create property tours and put them on YouTube. I could find my audience within 24 hours instead of waiting a year for the television show [to air].
Ryan: Years ago, I was asked to audition for a business show. The producer sat me down. He’s like, “Look, to be successful in reality entertainment, you either gotta [expletive] or fight.” How do you walk that balance between putting out really good entertainment while also protecting your brand and your business?
Serhant: The best piece of advice I got before Million Dollar Listing started—and it’s the same advice I gave to my entire cast on Owning Manhattan—was broken down into two parts. Part one was, Go hard. If the camera’s in front of you, be the 200% version of yourself. They’ll find the happy medium in the edit. The second piece of advice I got was, What’s your call to action? You want people to watch this and want to work with you. Filming season one of Million Dollar Listing, [I was doing] rentals in Koreatown, the Bronx, Harlem. I was running around with keys in my pocket. But who do you want people to see when they watch the show? The person that sells penthouses or sells studio apartments where the keys don’t work? So, start acting like the guy that you want to be. I forced my way into that world and then the world caught up with me.
Ryan: I always tell my team, “Possibility versus feasibility.” You put it out there, the possibility of who we’re gonna be in the future. What I love is you weren’t just talent on the show. You spoke like a director.
Serhant: I made, like, 400 little movies when I was a little kid. I am still a 10-year-old boy with a camcorder. Except now it’s an iPhone and I have a lot of people who do it for me. On season 1 of Owning Manhattan, you kind of set an improv. You set a place you think you’re gonna get to. And then let’s see what happens, right? Yes and. It was ten people in the cast—one was a guy full of tattoos, one was a girl who was brand new to New York City. The best thing about this show is we’re gonna watch people go from zero to hero.
The Netflix Effect
Rapkin: Owning Manhattan was in the top 10 in 40 countries. No shade to Bravo, but when did you realize how global the Netflix reach really was?
Ryan Serhant and Genesis Suero in a scene from season two of “Owning Manhattan,” which streams on Netflix starting December 5th.
© 2025 Netflix, Inc.
Serhant: My life changed when Million Dollar Listing came out. Then it changed again last June when the [new] show came out. I mean, it broke our website. It was complete insanity. That first week, we were adding 100,000 followers a day [to social media]—organically from people watching the show.
Rapkin: Wait, does someone get fired when your website goes down?
Serhant: Not fired… He’s still here. To his credit, we were a little unprepared. But what I’ve learned, more than anything, is you can have all the exposure in the world. But it’s what you do with it.
Rapkin: I don’t know if we’re going to see this on season two or not, but you recently sold a property for $200 million. What’s the key to closing a deal like that?
Serhant: First and foremost, you need to have a marketplace that allows for $200 million transactions to go through. I meet a lot of people that want to do the biggest deal of all time in whatever their industry is. I always ask them, “What is the percentage of transactions in your industry that happen at the level that you want them to happen?” And they usually say, “Oh, I don’t know, I read about it that one time.” That probably means it’s very, very, very small. There happened to be, post-COVID, a large percentage of nine-figure transactions in the residential space. It is a wild, wild world to be in. What I tell people is, you want to become “the one who.” The one who does what? You want to become the go-to in your marketplace and own the niche. Riches in niches.
Rapkin: Smart.
Serhant: To show you how that [particular] deal came together, COVID hit in 2020. I just made up a high-net-worth private client division called Serhant Signature. I like things with S’s. There was a press piece. [Writer’s note: Serhant mimics a phone call.] “I’d like to talk to your high-net-worth division.” I said, “No problem, hold on one second.” [beat] “Hi, this is Ryan with our Serhant Signature high-net-worth division, how are you?” And she said, “I have a client who, because of COVID, needs to move. He doesn’t know what’s gonna happen to New York, he just wants a rental.” I started saying, “Why are you renting a place in New York City? There’s no one here. It’s just me. You should buy if you’re gonna be in New York.” Because at the end of 2020, New York City was 50% off. He said, “Well, I don’t want to do that, but I’m open to buying something.” And I said, “What about Florida?” And he said, “Do you do Florida?” I said, “I do now.”
Ryan: There’s such a golden little gem in there. Of course I sell in Florida!
Serhant: We sold [him a place] at the beginning of ‘21 for $133 million. At the time, that was—next to Jeff Bezos—the second most expensive single-family residence sale in United States history. I promoted that [sale] to associate my brand with the one who sells homes for over $100 million. We then listed the penthouse of Central Park Tower here in the city for $250 million. A couple of years later, someone reached out to me and said, “We’re looking in Florida.” We bought the Estée Lauder lot in Palm Beach and then picked off properties all around it to increase the size, and put that together for just over $300 million actually.
Ryan: You commit, and then you figure it out. That’s a leap so many people cannot make.
Serhant: Listen, you build the plane and you fly it at the same time, right? The classic entrepreneurial conundrum. But, also, I really credit my improv days.
Yes And…
Ryan: I heard you say “yes and” in there…
Serhant: Other than drugs or anything that would send me to jail, my whole life is yes and. I’d rather regret the things I did than the things I never tried. Back to your first question, in 2020, everyone said not to start my own company. Everyone said not to do the TV show, There’s definitely things a lot of people told me not to do that I did and should not have done.
Rapkin: Is there one you’ll mention?
Serhant: I don’t mean this with any offense to everyone who helped me with it. I had Million Dollar Listing: New York, I had my sales team, and my life was fine. But I have an insatiable thirst for more. I have a disease, like most of us. I’d written my first book, Sell It Like Serhant, and Bravo came to me said, “Let’s do a TV show called Sell It Like Serhant.” Everyone around me said, “No one cares. No one’s gonna watch someone learn to sell a bottle of wine for 15 cents more. Also, it’s gonna hurt your business, because you’re gonna take so much time.” I said, “You guys don’t know what you’re talking about. I should do all the shows!” I think seven people watched it. It took seven months of my life, I lost half my sales team at that time. I was also getting married. I should have just said, “You know what? I’m OK.”
Rapkin: What’s your earliest memory of being competitive?
Serhant: Dude, I have three sisters and two brothers. They’re all athletes. And they all do math. My dad is an economist—a certified genius. My brothers both work at banks. My sister retired early at 50. My two other sisters are super, super smart. And Ry-Ry likes theater. I was overweight, I had rash acne until I was 24—[while] trying to do soap operas in New York City. I was my own worst critic. I think I just had something to prove. In theater, you’re auditioning. You’re competing all day, every day. That’s the only way to make money. There’s no job, there’s no salary, there’s no benefits, you know? And then I got into real estate and it was the same thing. Except in real estate, no one said, “Ryan, I’m not taking that apartment because of your skin.”
The AI Boom
Rapkin: We should talk about AI. You recently raised $45 million to—in part—develop this app called S.MPLE, which you described as “Instacart for salespeople.” In what way is AI changing your business?
For years, Ryan Serhant’s tagline has been “expansion always, in all ways.”
Courtesy of SERHANT
Serhant: In so many ways. People know the company I started, Serhant. Predominantly, it’s a large real estate brokerage. What I really started was a holding corp called Serhant Technologies that owns a cloud-based luxury real estate brokerage. We have a production company, we have a Netflix show, we do all top-of-funnel content. We’re the most followed and subscribed-to real estate brand in the world. That is our niche. It also owns Sellit.com, which is B2B and direct-to-consumer sales training. And then it owns S.MPLE, an agent orchestration platform that uses artificial intelligence to complete administrative tasks for salespeople. A salesperson who spends 80% of their day doing admin tasks and 20% of their day selling? S.MPLE flips it, so you spend 80% of your day being able to do what only you can do.
Rapkin: This is not your first app, we should say.
Serhant: I built two things prior to S.MPLE that did not work. I was all in on the Metaverse. I thought it would be super fun to ride animals to my meetings. The other was an app that enabled a salesperson to edit in real time and take property tour videos that would immediately be uploaded to the MLS. No one cares. People just want it done for them. And that statement is what pushed me to say: What else do they just want done for them?
Ryan: That’s what we need to do as entrepreneurs—create something bigger than yourself. Your whole job is to make yourself obsolete.
Serhant: A thousand percent. I try to do that even in our hiring process, right? How can I hire people who scare me? They’re so good, they could take my job.
Ryan: I think entrepreneurs get that wrong. So many entrepreneurs intentionally create companies that are dependent on them. And then you just watch them burn out because they built a machine that can’t run without them. The really successful entrepreneurs take their ego out of it. And they learn how to build a machine bigger than themselves.
Serhant: When you come [to my office] there are photos of my face. But I do try to use the brand equity and the audience—and the size of community that we’ve created, and that I’ve created over 17 years—to empower everybody else who’s here. It’s been interesting to walk the line between technology company, traditional brokerage company, creator-enabled commerce business, and so on—while trying to make it scalable outside of just my face.
Ryan Serhant’s Big 2026 Real Estate Prediction
Rapkin: What’s the real estate opportunity in 2026 that everyone is missing?
Serhant: The real estate opportunity in 2026 is going to be attached to declining interest rates. It just is. I can sit here and I can tell you it’s all about data warehouses, and data centers, and AI chips and all that stuff all day long. And that’s fine, that’s out there. But I think, along with a reduction in interest rates, you’re gonna see a significant amount of inventory hit the market. Because—and this is my controversial take—what we’ve seen a lot because of rising interest rates is a declining rate of divorce.
Rapkin: People felt locked into their homes.
Serhant: In a high interest rate environment, when they and their current spouse have a sub-3 or sub-3.5% interest rate? As rates start to come down, you’re going to see an increasing rate of divorce as people say, “I’m leaving his ass, and I’m getting my own place that I can afford with a lower rate.” The opportunity out there right now is with divorce attorneys. And all of the newlywed homes that were bought between 2015 and 2020 that people got stuck into with low rates.
Rapkin: (laughing) Ryan, you’re doubling down the other way. Your wife just came to work at Serhant.
Serhant: Yeah, you could also do that.
Ryan: Last question. If you really had to distill it down, what is the one word that really defines your leadership style?
Serhant: (thinking) Momentum-ous. Momentumous.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. If you liked this story about Ryan Serhant’s big 2026 real estate prediction, click here for more episodes of Cereal Entrepreneur.