Ryan Serhant doesn’t know selling real estate without a television show. After a short-lived career as an actor, and just months into his foray in real estate, he was cast in Bravo’s reality series “Million Dollar Listing New York,” a spinoff of its L.A.
-based predecessor. The series gave viewers tours inside multimillion-dollar luxury properties while showing the drama among arrogant and wily agents who often competed for listings or sales. It premiered in 2012 and ran for nine seasons — and it helped establish a winning format of high-end real estate voyeurism mashed up with reality TV drama.
From the start, Serhant sought to stand out with an over-the-top, hot-shot salesman style — dressing like Aslan, the lion from “The Chronicles of Narnia,” and jumping into a swimming pool during an open house were among his exploits. Ever the dealmaker, he brokered a number of specials and spinoffs for Bravo, most recently “Ryan’s Renovation” (2021), which chronicled the remodel of the Brooklyn townhouse he shares with his wife and daughter. In 2020, he started his own real estate brokerage — Serhant.
— and once again invited cameras along, but this time for Netflix, which has doubled down on real-estate reality programming with such shows as “Selling Sunset” and “Buying Beverly Hills.” With “Owning Manhattan,” now streaming, cameras follow Serhant and his team of agents as they compete — sometimes with each other — for some of New York’s mos.
