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The New York City-based agent recounted his meteoric rise, from struggling rent roll agent to a $5 billion sales agent synonymous with American real estate, to AREC 2023.
In the “city that never sleeps”, there may be no more formidable or recognisable face in the real estate industry than the Million Dollar Listing New York star, Ryan Serhant. However, this wasn’t always the case, with Mr Serhant revealing in front of a packed crowd on AREC day one, how, at the dawn of 2010s, he was “basically a sad, depressed, kind of sad sack”.
“I lived in this tiny, tiny little apartment in Koreatown, which was on 32nd street. I shared a bathroom with 17 people, and I lived commission check to commission check, doing mostly small rentals — $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month — and my commission checks were $500, $750, $1,000, if I was lucky,” he explained.
Walking around New York in the single suit he owned, Mr Serhant admitted that 13 years ago, a “cloud of misery [hung] over my head”.
“I just felt like I shouldn’t be here. I’m not from New York. I shouldn’t be in real estate whatsoever. I don’t know anybody; I don’t have a network. I don’t know the difference between a single-family home [and] a condominium.”
Having begun the last decade shrouded in uncertainty, insecurity, and grappling with imposter syndrome, his current success seems a far cry from any perceived possibilities during that tumultuous period. And yet, 13 years later, Mr Serhant stood in front of an audience of 4,000 of Australia and New Zealand’s finest agents and revealed it wasn’t his skill set which accelerated his climb, it was his mindset.
Mr Serhant said he slowly began realising a person’s “number one value is your ability to be confident”.
“The people who win are the ones who own every group they walk into. They’re the ones who speak with ease. They’re the ones who communicate their ideas with conviction, whether they’re right or wrong.”
“They have conviction and experience, therefore, [they have] success again and again,” he declared.
He used this mantra when he walked into his audition for Million Dollar Listing New York. With a line of over 3,000 agents all vying for the same prize, a role on what would become an Emmy-nominated show, Mr Serhant explained, “I decided in that moment ‘I am the greatest real estate broker in the history of the known universe'.”
Through shifting his mindset, the reality TV star not only facilitated his arrival on the show which catapulted him to stardom, but also sent himself on the successful real estate path which has led him to where he is today.
For agents, this mindset of becoming “the future you who is more successful tomorrow than you are today” is not exclusively for budding reality TV stars, but applicable to all real estate agents, regardless of whether the market is soaring or plummeting.
“You’re not going to get the listing if you walk in that door acting like you don’t have the listing,” he said, before continuing, “You’re not going to win the offer if you talk to your buyer like you’ve already lost the offer.”
And while a strong, confident mindset has been a key player driving Mr Serhant from struggling rental agent living out of a shoebox in Koreatown to his current position as one of New York’s leading sales agents, it has not been isolated in guiding his real estate success.
Skill has still been a key element.
As any real estate agent knows, being able to facilitate multiple deals at once is an important part of the job. Mr Serhant, noting this, revealed to the AREC crowd his two tactics for handling multiple deals at once.
The first of these is the concept — push, pull, persist — which looks to inspire clients off the “couch of indecision” and into a transaction.
“Inaction is the enemy of all sales,” he said, explaining his belief that a core component of the transaction process can be found within Christopher Nolan’s hit film, Inception, whereby an agent must plant an idea into a client’s head, so they feel they’ve come up with it themselves.
He finds this strategy far more effective for properties on the higher end of the price spectrum but regardless of price, the principle remains the same: “Direct the client to something better so they will actually commit.”
During each transaction he enters, he delivers a simple message to his clients.
“Life is short, make decisions, move on, write the cheque; Lets create new memories.”
The second sales tactic Mr Serhant religiously subscribes to is “the three acts”: follow up, follow through, and follow back.
“I live and die by those three acts,” he declared, concluding he would “follow up with someone until they buy or die”.
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