There are plenty of real estate shows on TV, but none toss you into the deep end quite like Owning Manhattan. Netflix’s breakout series follows Ryan Serhant and his team through real negotiations, real failures, and real pressure, often in the exact moment it happens.
With Season 2 premiering Dec. 4, Serhant talked exclusively with Parade to discuss the show’s authenticity, the chaos behind the deals, and the emotional cost of building one of the fastest-growing brokerages in the country.?SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news& celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox?
When Owning Manhattan launched, what was the biggest thing you wanted viewers to understand about your world that you felt no other real estate show had ever captured?I wanted to see the gutter as much as you see the glitz, because I think you appreciate it more. I think so much of, especially this generation of entertainment and social media, is produced. It's not real, and people know that now. And so I really wanted to see everything in between. Even the structure of the show. It's not like every episode, you get a listing, you sell a listing. A lot of it is just the messy middle and the failure, and how you keep going in the face of defeat.
How does following actual brokers with real careers and commissions on the line add to the realism of the show?Everyone in the show is an actual agent. Some are newer, some are very seasoned. They all do deals. It's their life. The show features no one who is fake in any way, shape, or form. Which also means you don't get all of the glitz and the glam that people are used to. You get to follow real-time deals. There is a deal this season that I still have not watched because it's so uncomfortable for me, because it's a $60 million transaction.When we shot it, it was the most expensive condominium sale in downtown Manhattan history. The deal happens in real time, cameras capture it in real time, and it's a total disaster. And I don't want to go into everything, but it's incredibly stressful to watch that amount of money move in such a short period of time with so many stakes on the line. And how the deal does or doesn't get done, I think, is unlike anything I've seen on TV before, including Season 1 of our show.
How do you maintain authenticity while protecting your clients’ privacy? What parts of the job can the cameras show that other real estate shows can’t or don’t?The promise that I made to Netflix and to myself and to my family was I can't do this unless I'm 1,000% open. I can't do this unless I'm incredibly vulnerable and I give the audience everything and anything and let them make their own decisions. I don't want to hold any punches. And everyone who signs up for the show has to do the same thing, so the core cast.Clients are the opposite. You do not have to do the show if you don't want to. You don't have to sign that appearance release if you don't want to. So you see actual clients who are on the show, you see a lot of deals that get done, and there's no client involved because they don't want to be on TV. And it's totally fine. We tell everybody if the property's going to be featured, people can dig, they can Google, they can look up property data. And if you've been public about your home or your building, that might be able to be out there and that's okay. But sometimes the exposure outweighs any risk.
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In the final episode of Season 1, there was an apartment building or condo you were selling. You're going back and forth to the guy who's trying to buy it, and the developer's right there next to you, pointing up, like, "Get them higher." How does that work in real time?Thank you for bringing that up. That was such a fun negotiation. I can't believe we actually caught that all on camera. I remember that because I kept putting the broker on mute. We're in the middle of the moment here. Time kills deals. So you have to move when the momentum is there. And that's also, I think, what makes the show so exciting. It's all, again, warts and all, incredibly real, and happens in real time.There's a negotiation this season where I did what's called a "flash sale," which is where you adjust the price low and you then push people to bring in higher offers. It's an auction but without doing an auction. And I'd never done one of those on camera before. It's the most stressed I've been on TV ever, because you get to see how to sell a $12,000,000 home by cutting the price in half. The world gets to watch how a deal like that would get done.When it came time to doing the negotiation, we were filming in my house, just me as I was getting ready. I think I was actually in the shower to start. And the phone call with the seller comes through and she never calls me. Her business manager only calls. And so I picked it up. And between being in the shower, I think shampooing my hair to when I got out of the shower and got fully dressed, we did the whole negotiation in real time. It's nuts. Season 2 is just bigger, better, wilder, far more emotional. And you start to see, even me personally, the cracks that come from entrepreneurship and just pushing for more. How much is enough?
(L to R) Ryan Serhant and Emilia Bechrakis on 'Owning Manhattan'C
Do you have the same set of people that you're going to feature this season? And how do you determine which broker is going to be on TV and who's not?The show starts with familiar faces. And we have a couple of new faces as well, a few new sharks in the pond, so to speak. Listen, it is a deal show. And at the end of the day, the show is about the company and the comings and goings and the highs and the lows of building the greatest real estate company in the history of the world. The show actually captured us crossing 1,000 agents and captures us opening up different markets. Season 1 was very confined. Season 2 starts to really open the world. We open up South Florida.But we give everybody the opportunity, "Hey, if you have an incredible deal you're working on or something going on in your life that you think is worthy of its own Netflix show, don't hold back if you want to do it." I think that makes for a very competitive working environment because it also shows the people who are "cast," you're only as good as your last deal in real life and on this TV show.
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Your brokers are competitive, not just with their actual job, but also they come to you saying, "Hey, I'd like to get featured because I have a really great building." I assume it does nothing but help their own business.The exposure's insane. I'll never forget when Million Dollar Listing premiered on Bravo in March of 2012, and I'll also never forget when Owning Manhattan premiered on Netflix last summer. It was just gasoline for the car that we've been building. Website traffic went up well over 2000%. We gained a million followers and subscribers across accounts in a week.So, yes, a lot of the agents here would love to be a part of it, and a lot of them are in different ways. They bring the buyer to this deal, or they're in that open house, or one of their listings is featured. Or this season, Jessica Markowski, who had a rough Season 1 because she got caught on a podcast talking poorly about other people, and it was a big issue. This season kind of takes a step back, and she joins a team. That team is not officially cast, but they're in the show because now Jessica's on their team. There's a lot of that kind of intermingling that you get to see, which is very real-life. You can look at the cake from the outside, or you can cut it right down the middle to see what it's made of, and the latter is this show.
What part of you on the show is the most authentically you: Ryan the CEO or the TV guy?I think, for better or for worse, I'm only one guy. The same guy you see on Owning Manhattan is the same guy you see in the boardroom. It's the same guy you see on a showing for a $100 million listing in Palm Beach, same guy you see doing a deal in New York City. All people say to me all the time when they meet me, especially for the first time, is "You're just like you are on TV, just so much taller." I'm like, "I know. I know. " "Your hair is so much grayer." "I know. On TV, it gets dulled down a little bit."
In a recent YouTube video you talked about how running SERHANT. can also feel incredibly challenging. Are you at the point yet where you own your business, or does it own you? I ask myself that every day. Do I wake up to feel important, or do I wake up to feel happy? And do I need to be important to be happy, and do I also need to be happy to be important? I don't think so. I'm slowly, and this is just me being totally honest with you, for the past couple years, I think, and a lot during the filming of Season 2, which was until May of this year, I was under the weight of a business that really owned me. I follow my calendar. I do what everyone tells me. I don't want to let anybody down. This weight of almost unbearable creation at times. But recently, I feel like I've started to crawl out from underneath that, in a weird way, because we've gotten bigger.If you started with me in 2012 and you're still here to this day, you've watched the entirety of my life, from the birth of my daughter to my proposal to everything. Season 9 of Million Dollar Listing saw me go from agent to starting my own company, and we filmed in this building I'm in right now while it was under construction because we just launched. It was crazy. If I could go back in time, I don't know if I would've done this because it just takes such a personal toll on you, because you're not big enough to take a step back ever, and you're then not small enough where you can also take a step back ever. It's just the messy middle. And we just opened our 14th state.So only just recently do I feel like, "Ah, you know what? Season 2 is going to come out, and I'm actually going to enjoy it." Because I can take a half a step back, maybe not a full step, but a half a step, because I'm surrounded by great people who are now building this machine with me instead of on top of me.
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