Ryan Serhant is an American real estate broker, entrepreneur, producer and author who turned a career in property sales into a wider business built around real estate, media, technology and education. He is the founder and CEO of SERHANT., the brokerage and media company he launched in 2020 after more than a decade selling luxury real estate in New York.

His career is especially relevant to Famousi because several distinct entities now sit around his name. SERHANT. is the central company, while Sell It extends his sales methods into education, S.MPLE brings artificial intelligence into the brokerage’s operating model, and Owning Manhattan turns the growth of the business itself into a Netflix series.

Profile Snapshot

Name: Ryan Serhant

Profession: Real Estate Broker / Entrepreneur / CEO / Producer / Author

Founder & CEO: SERHANT.

Education: Hamilton College — English Literature & Theatre

Entered Real Estate: 2008

Known For: SERHANT., Million Dollar Listing New York, Owning Manhattan and sales education

Education Platform: Sell It

Books: Sell It Like Serhant, Big Money Energy and Brand It Like Serhant

Major Industry Recognition: SERHANT. — 2025 Inman Most Innovative Brokerage

Before Real Estate: Theatre, Acting and an Uncertain Start in New York

Serhant’s route into real estate was not planned from the beginning.

He graduated from Hamilton College in 2006 after studying English literature and theatre, then moved to New York to pursue acting. His early work included a role on the soap opera As the World Turns, alongside modeling and other jobs as he tried to establish himself in entertainment.

By 2008, acting had not developed into a stable career. Serhant entered real estate at a particularly difficult moment: the United States was moving into a major financial and housing crisis.

That decision became the turning point in his professional life. He joined Nest Seekers International and began building a sales career in New York, eventually moving from individual brokerage work into team leadership and luxury property sales.

The contrast between those two periods became an important part of Serhant’s later public story. Rather than entering real estate with an established business background, he brought experience from theatre, performance and self-presentation into an industry where trust, communication and salesmanship are central.

Million Dollar Listing New York Changed the Scale of His Career

Television brought a second dimension to Serhant’s real estate career.

In 2012, he joined Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, which followed brokers competing for luxury listings and clients in one of the world’s most demanding property markets.

The show gave viewers access to negotiations, listings, client relationships and the personalities behind high-value property sales. For Serhant, it also created something increasingly important to his business: an audience.

He remained part of Million Dollar Listing New York through its nine-season run and later fronted the Bravo series Sell It Like Serhant, where he worked with struggling salespeople outside traditional luxury real estate.

Television did not replace his brokerage career. Instead, media became part of how he generated recognition around it — an approach that would later become much more deliberate when he launched a company of his own.

Launching SERHANT.

In September 2020, Serhant founded SERHANT., leaving the traditional brokerage structure to build a company under his own name.

From the beginning, SERHANT. was designed around more than property transactions. The company combined brokerage with media production, branding, education and technology, treating content as part of the infrastructure used to market agents and properties.

That distinction is important to Serhant’s Famousi profile. SERHANT. is not simply the team he works for; it is the central company he founded and leads as CEO.

The company has since expanded beyond its original New York base. In an October 2026 company announcement marking its entry into the Chicago market, SERHANT. said it was operating across 20 markets and approaching 2,500 agents. The same announcement described the business as an AI-native real estate technology and media company.

The company’s growth has also received industry recognition. Inman named SERHANT. the Most Innovative Brokerage in its 2025 Innovator Awards, while Serhant himself was included among that year’s Innovator of the Year honorees.

Why Media Became Part of the Brokerage Model

One of the more distinctive elements of SERHANT. is that media is built into the company rather than treated only as outside advertising.

SERHANT. Studios operates as the company’s in-house content production division, creating property and brand media. Other parts of the company support branding, marketing and new-development projects.

This makes Serhant’s earlier television and performance experience more relevant to his later business story. His career did not simply move from entertainment to real estate and leave entertainment behind. Media eventually became part of the operating model of the brokerage itself.

The idea is visible in the way SERHANT. markets both properties and agents: the property transaction remains the commercial objective, while content helps create attention and distribution around it.

Owning Manhattan Turns the Company Into the Story

Serhant returned to real-estate television with Netflix’s Owning Manhattan, but the premise was different from the earlier Bravo years.

Rather than following Serhant primarily as one broker competing for listings, the Netflix series centers on him as the CEO building SERHANT. while managing agents, luxury properties and the pressures of expanding the company.

The first season premiered in June 2024. A second season followed in December 2025, with Netflix documenting the brokerage’s expansion and the growth of its agent network.

Serhant is both the star and a producer of the series.

This creates an unusually direct relationship between media and business: Owning Manhattan is entertainment, but the company being documented is also Serhant’s real operating business. The show therefore functions as both a television property and a window into SERHANT. as a growing company.

From Sales Advice to Sell It

Serhant has also turned his sales methods into a separate education business.

His first major sales book, Sell It Like Serhant, developed ideas drawn from his transition into real estate and the systems he used to build his sales career. He later published Big Money Energy and Brand It Like Serhant, expanding his focus from sales into confidence, business building and personal branding.

The education business that grew around those ideas is now known as Sell It.

Sell It describes itself as Ryan Serhant’s real-estate training and education platform, offering courses, workshops, coaching and a referral community for agents. The platform says its community extends across 130 countries.

Within Serhant’s wider business network, Sell It performs a different function from SERHANT. The brokerage sells and markets real estate; Sell It packages his sales and business systems as education for professionals who do not necessarily work for his brokerage.

S.MPLE and the Technology Side of SERHANT.

Technology has become another increasingly visible part of the company.

S.MPLE is SERHANT.’s AI-powered support platform for its agents. The service combines proprietary artificial intelligence with human advisors to assist with operational, marketing and transaction work.

The significance of S.MPLE is not that Serhant has launched a separate consumer AI company. It sits inside the SERHANT. ecosystem and supports the brokerage’s agents.

That distinction helps clarify the entity structure: Ryan Serhant founded SERHANT.; SERHANT. operates the brokerage and related divisions; S.MPLE is a technology layer developed within that wider company.

By 2026, SERHANT. was increasingly presenting this combination of brokerage, media and proprietary technology as part of its national expansion strategy.

From Broker to Business Builder

Serhant’s career is now easier to understand as a connected business system than as a sequence of unrelated jobs.

Real estate created the underlying expertise and revenue engine. Million Dollar Listing New York expanded his public profile. SERHANT. turned that visibility and sales experience into an owned company. Sell It converted his methodology into education, while S.MPLE added technology to the brokerage’s operating model. Owning Manhattan then made the expansion of that company the subject of a television series.

His current official biography reports more than $15 billion in career real-estate sales, but the larger change in his career is structural: Serhant moved from selling properties inside someone else’s brokerage to building a company in which brokerage, content, technology and education reinforce one another.

Ryan Serhant on Famousi

Ryan Serhant’s Famousi profile brings together the main entities behind that evolution: SERHANT., Sell It, S.MPLE, Million Dollar Listing New York and Owning Manhattan.

Famousi also currently has a published analysis of his business and career growth in Ryan Serhant Net Worth 2026: How He Built His Empire. That story provides a deeper look at the financial and business-building side of his career, while this profile serves as the central reference for Serhant himself and the entities connected to him.

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