Talks at GS Sep 21, 2026 19m 6m saved
With Ryan Serhant, founder and CEO of SERHANT
SERHANT does just over a billion dollars a month in transactions across 17 states, and Ryan Serhant says it has never bought a single real estate agent or a single lead.
Every other brokerage buys both. Serhant's argument is that an in-house production studio putting out more real estate content than anyone else is a cheaper funnel than advertising, and that it takes his customer acquisition cost to zero.
"82% of all newly licensed agents in the United States quit in the first two years."
Serhant got his real estate license the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, spent ten years on Million Dollar Listing New York, and left in 2018 to build the brokerage, education, production and software business that carries his name. Tucker York interviewed him at Goldman Sachs.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 19 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
82% of newly licensed US agents quit within two years, which is why the survivors of a bad market compound He started the week Lehman filed, and says people leaving the business was the opening
Customer acquisition cost is zero, because the in-house studio generates the leads other firms buy Four businesses: the brokerage, Sellit.com, Studios and S.MPLE
The brokerage runs in 17 states and expects about 25 by year end, doing just over $1B a month in transactions
He never bought an agent, and says people leave money on the table elsewhere to join
Optimism is run as an operational discipline, not as a personality trait
Real estate moved from searchable to discoverable, which is the thesis behind leaving television in 2018
The software bet is a $400T total addressable market and collapsing 129 steps into one transaction He says the technology to do it did not exist until about nine months ago
The housing market is split between cash buyers and everyone else, after four years without cheap mortgages
He calls it a supply issue rather than a crisis, and is converting derelict offices into residential
Hire people who make you a little afraid they will take your job
1. Broke, In New York, In 2006
Serhant's route into real estate started with the wrong career. He grew up outside Boston, went to Hamilton College into a family that works in finance, and moved to New York in 2006 to act.
What he says he was always good at
I was always a storyteller. If you ask my parents what my superpower is, they'll say that Ryan could tell stories.
Ryan Serhant
The acting did not pay. He ran out of money quickly, got a soap opera part and was written out of it, and worked as a hand model to cover rent. The real estate license was the path of least resistance rather than a plan.
Why he got licensed at all
I got my real estate license only because I didn't have to go to one spot every day. I didn't want to wait tables or bartend. I didn't really want to go back to school. And I definitely, definitely did not want to move home with my parents.
Ryan Serhant
York put it back to him that the two businesses share a structure, since auditions and listings both run on rejection, and asked whether he had wanted to act or simply wanted money. Serhant's answer was two words: pay rent.
He credits the city itself with the rest.
The place as a filter
New York City is an incredibly intellectually curious ecosystem. And it enables you to shoot for the stars. But it will also provide you the opportunity to bury yourself in the pavement.
Ryan Serhant
2. Quit Only On Your Best Day
The one rule he says he has never forgotten came from his father, and it is a rule about when you are allowed to leave rather than whether you should.
The permission and its condition
You can quit whenever you want at anything you do, but you're only allowed to quit on your best day.
Ryan Serhant
The mechanism he attaches to it is a daily audit: at the end of each day, decide whether it was a bad day, a good day or a great day. Skip that, he said, and a decade disappears.
What he says the alternative costs
And you're going to wake up in a life that you worked really, really hard to get to, that you actually resent.
Ryan Serhant
3. The Week Lehman Failed
York noted the timing, which Serhant did not dress up: getting into real estate at the start of the global financial crisis was, looking back, the worst possible moment. His own bar at the time was low.
The entire business plan
All I had to do was make $2,000 a month, and I didn't have to move home.
Ryan Serhant
The start date
The day I got my license and started, it just so happened to be the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
Ryan Serhant
Clients kept getting fired a month after he met them, and the ones who stayed employed could not get mortgages. What he says saved him was not judgment but the absence of it, combined with everyone else leaving.
His formulation of why inexperience helped
because I was so ignorant, and ignorance in motion wins all the time over intelligence at rest, I just moved as fast as I could
Ryan Serhant
The industry statistic he uses to explain why survivors do well is the attrition rate.
Most licensed agents never make it two years
82% of all newly licensed agents in the United States quit in the first two years. They try it and they bail because it's too hard. There's no salary. There are no benefits.
Ryan Serhant
4. Craigslist And Saks
Asked whether relentless cold calling was what made him, Serhant said not at first — what made him was having already been rejected professionally for years.
The transferable skill from auditions
The acting business teaches you the art of rejection. And you have to be able to take 52 punches right in the nose and say, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"
Ryan Serhant
He also had a physical advantage he found funny: an older man's head of hair on a young face, so clients asked how long he had been in the business rather than how old he was.
His answer, and his verdict on it
And I would just say, "A while." And "a while" is great marketing.
Ryan Serhant
The prospecting itself was two channels. The first was Craigslist listings, meeting strangers cold with apartment keys in his pocket. The second was the sidewalk outside Saks Fifth Avenue, a block from his office at 20 East 49th Street.
The qualification criterion
If you had more than two shopping bags, you could probably afford a new apartment.
Ryan Serhant
He handed out paper business cards with a single line on the approach. Some of those people, and their families, are still clients.
5. 3,000 Agents, Four Seats
The television break was an open casting call in Times Square in March 2010 for Million Dollar Listing New York. Three thousand agents turned up. The producers narrowed it to four over nine months, shot the first season with all four, and told them at the outset that only three would make the final cut.
How he thinks about obstacles
I treat every obstacle like a speed bump.
Ryan Serhant
What he says he brought was not talent but a policy, and it is the line that has since become company doctrine rather than a slogan about attitude.
Optimism as a management practice
Even in our company today, optimism is not a personality trait. It is an operational discipline.
Ryan Serhant
Why he thinks that matters commercially
Selling is a transfer of enthusiasm in whatever it is you're selling.
Ryan Serhant
The show ran for ten years.
6. Why He Left In 2018
York asked whether ending the television run and starting a company was greed or fear. Serhant's answer was neither. By 2018 he had what he describes as the number one residential selling team in New York City history, four television shows and a first book in progress, and no answer to what came next.
The strategic reason was a change in how property gets found.
The shift he built the company on
I saw that real estate was moving from being something that was searchable to something that was discoverable.
Ryan Serhant
He had been running property tours on Instagram and YouTube since 2013 and 2014, and never used the brokerage he worked for as a distribution channel.
The arithmetic that gave him
I could generate more qualified eyeballs for a singular property in ten minutes than any other firm could ever pay for combined.
Ryan Serhant
He also described the order in which he built the business as deliberately inverted. Most founders, he said, start from profit and work backward through product and people. He started from purpose, hired to it, and treated the product and the profit as downstream.
The sequence
I have a clear purpose. I'm going to align that with the right people. If you believe in what I'm doing, great. If you don't, you don't have to work for me. We can then sell any product to make all the profit.
Ryan Serhant
7. Four Businesses, Zero CAC
Asked to describe the company beyond the brokerage, Serhant laid out four units. The brokerage runs predominantly in the cloud, operates in 17 states and expects about 25 by the end of the year. Sellit.com is the education business. Studios is the in-house production arm, which he calls the top-of-funnel lead generator. S.MPLE is the software.
The volume the brokerage is running
We do about right now just over a billion dollars a month in transactions.
Ryan Serhant
Why the studio exists
we create more content for real estate than any other firm on earth combined per month, and we use that to generate organic lead flow. So, our customer acquisition cost is zero.
Ryan Serhant
York asked what the same line costs everyone else. Serhant's answer was that competitors spend millions advertising for clients and then spend again recruiting agents, because agents have to be incentivized to move.
What he says his firm has never done
We buy zero people. We've never bought a single real estate agent ever.
Ryan Serhant
His stated ambition is the one he said he took from his host.
Best rather than biggest
My interest is not in being the biggest. It is just in being the best.
Ryan Serhant
8. The $400T Platform Bet
S.MPLE is the piece with the largest number attached to it. Serhant described it as Uber for the home transaction, with technology that empowers the agent rather than replacing them.
The market he is aiming the platform at
My goal is to build a transaction platform that is consumer-facing that grabs that $400 trillion total addressable market, right? In the only AI vertical way that you've ever been able to create.
Ryan Serhant
The specific problem is process complexity rather than matching buyers to homes.
The 129 steps
how do I take 129 steps and put it in one thing to get a home sold? And you just could never do it until, like, nine months ago
Ryan Serhant
York asked whether relationships still matter in a people-intensive business. Serhant said the technology does not replace trust, and used his largest deal as the evidence.
The buyer was an AI buyer, and he was interested in the selling
I sold a house, a series of houses, last year for $308 million. The most expensive residential transaction in all of 2025 in the United States to somebody very much in the AI space. And he was very, very interested in sales as a skill set that is irreplaceably human.
Ryan Serhant
What he wants the technology to do instead
how do you superpower human skill so that you can do what you do best and you can actually have more time to build those relationships and build that trust with your clients
Ryan Serhant
9. A Bifurcated Market
York put it to him that real estate people always say it is the best time to buy and the best time to sell. Serhant agreed without hesitation, then gave a more specific reading.
His description of the split
But you have people who can pay cash and you have everybody else.
Ryan Serhant
The two used to have rough parity, because cash buyers existed but mortgages were easy and cheap enough that everyone else could compete. That has not held for four years. Inventory has hit record lows year after year, though he said it is starting to wake up as people make life changes and adjust to a new normal. Transaction volume is high, the super-luxury market is very high, and first-time buyers are being funded by their parents.
He objects to the standard vocabulary for all of this.
Obstacle course, not market
I hardly ever actually use the phrase "housing market" because I really do think we have a housing obstacle course in this country with how difficult and kind of friction the process is.
Ryan Serhant
And his diagnosis
We don't have a housing crisis. We have a housing supply issue.
Ryan Serhant
His prescription is more supply and tax credits. The company now does commercial work as well, and he pointed at municipalities releasing derelict office buildings for conversion into residential space as a piece of the answer his firm is working on.
10. Hire People Who Scare You
York noted that Goldman has a long mentorship culture and that Serhant had nothing of the kind. Serhant confirmed it, and with some relish.
The advice he ignored three times
Everyone told me not to get into real estate. Everyone told me not to do Million Dollar Listing. Everyone for sure told me not to start my own company.
Ryan Serhant
He has successful clients he can call for advice, but describes the accountability as entirely his own: if it goes well it is everyone else's doing, and if it goes badly it is his.
How he frames his own ambition now
Because if you knew how many other people really win when I win, you'd understand that it's not for Ryan. It's for everybody else.
Ryan Serhant
On hiring, he gave a two-part test that he addressed directly to the room.
The people worth hiring
you want to hire people that, one, make you a little bit afraid because they're so good and they're going to take your job. Otherwise, why work with them? And two, that you're going to be able to really, really learn from.
Ryan Serhant
Asked for the lesson of twenty years, he answered with the work rather than the outcome. Being outcome-focused is fine, he said, but stacking targets makes people lose sight of why they are doing the job.
His actual rule
My go-to is always to take care of the work. And if you take care of the work, the work will take care of you.
Ryan Serhant
The two conditions he attached were speed, which he called speed to lead and said is a real thing especially now, and taking calculated risks by asking what the worst outcome would actually be.
Bonus Insights
The line about luck, which is not the usual one
Luck is what happens when opportunity meets hard work. And hard work trumps luck when luck doesn't work hard.
Ryan Serhant
The moment he stopped complaining
Serhant closed on an exchange with his father, from the period when he had holes in his shoes and was complaining about early mornings. His father, a career finance man who was at State Street in 1993, asked him a question he had never considered.
Do you think that I wanted to go to work every day?
Ryan Serhant
That, he said, is when he decided not to complain again.
What his brother noticed
At Thanksgiving in 2008, after months of showing rental apartments in the Bronx and Harlem, Serhant looked up at a table of five siblings staring at him. His younger brother told him he had changed, and that he now talked too fast. Serhant's reply was that New York had deals to do.
Serhant's bottom line is that the brokerage business rewards whoever is still standing after the hard years, and that the way to be still standing is to own your own distribution: content instead of advertising, agents who came without being paid to, and a daily decision that the day is going to be a good one.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
SERHANT (His company: a cloud-based brokerage in 17 states heading to about 25 by year end, doing just over $1B a month in transactions, plus education, production and software)
Sellit.com (The education business, one of the four units)
S.MPLE (The software arm, described as Uber for the home transaction; the platform aimed at what he calls a $400 trillion total addressable market and at collapsing 129 steps into one)
Million Dollar Listing New York (The open casting call in Times Square in March 2010 that 3,000 agents attended; the show ran for ten years)
Craigslist (One of his two original prospecting channels, used to meet rental clients cold)
Saks Fifth Avenue (The other one: he stood outside it and approached anyone carrying more than two shopping bags)
Lehman Brothers (Filed for bankruptcy the day he started in real estate)
Goldman Sachs (The host, and the company he cites for the best-rather-than-biggest ambition)
State Street (Where his father worked in 1993, and the source of the story that ended his complaining)
Instagram and YouTube (Where he began running property tours in 2013 and 2014, which is the origin of the zero-cost lead engine)
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