When Ryan Serhant takes the stage as a keynote speaker at NAR NXT this November in New Orleans, he’ll bring a business perspective shaped by some of the most challenging moments in modern real estate history.
The founder and CEO of SERHANT. + Sell It by Serhant launched his real estate career in 2008, the same day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and helped trigger the Great Recession. More than a decade later, he started his own brokerage during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those experiences taught him a lesson he believes every real estate professional needs to understand: Success comes from committing to a direction and staying disciplined long enough to see results.
In the latest episode of the “NAR REALTOR® News Change Agents” podcast, Serhant reflects on the decisions that transformed him from a struggling rental agent into one of the industry’s most recognizable entrepreneurs.
“I got into this business to pay my rent,” Serhant says. “But I fell in love with this business because of the opportunity it provided not just me but other entrepreneurs around me to really build.”
Starting during one of the worst housing downturns in history wasn’t easy, but looking back, Serhant says it gave him an invaluable foundation.
“I’m actually very thankful that I got into the business when it was that hard,” he says. “My foundational layer of understanding of how to create a client, create a relationship, put a deal together, sell anything comes from the fire and brimstone of the worst market most people in this industry have ever known.”
Pick a Direction and Go All In
For agents looking to grow their businesses, Serhant believes one of the biggest mistakes is failing to define what makes them different. As independent contractors, real estate professionals have to decide every day where they will focus their time and energy.
“You have to make a decision: Which direction are you going to go all in on?” he says.
For Serhant, that decision was real estate and media. Long before personal branding became a common industry strategy, he realized that recognition itself was becoming an asset. “Attention is an economy now,” he says.
That decision helped him build a platform that eventually expanded into television, publishing, education and technology. But Serhant is quick to point out that results didn’t happen overnight.
“You’ve got to go all in every day for the next two to three years,” he says. “It’s not two to three weeks, two to three days, two to three months.”
His advice to agents is straightforward: Determine what differentiates you and commit to it.
“You are real estate and what?” he says. “You can’t build a brand if you don’t know who you are.”
And patience, he adds, is often the hardest part.
“If someone somewhere is sitting under the shade of a tree, planted a long time ago,” Serhant says, “you might be under the sun of stress right now wishing you had this awesome success tree, but it’s not going to come unless you plant it.”
Building for the Future
The decision to launch SERHANT. reflected the same mindset that guided his career from the beginning: Identify where the industry is headed and hit the ground running. The lessons Serhant learned while building his personal brand ultimately shaped his vision for a brokerage that operates coast to coast. SERHANT. has expanded its luxury real estate offices to Arizona, California, the Carolinas, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
After spending years evaluating other firms, he concluded that many lacked a clear vision for the future or weren’t structured around helping agents succeed. He wanted to create a company that prepares real estate professionals to be ahead one step ahead of the trends.
His people-first mindset continues to shape SERHANT.’s company approach today, particularly as artificial intelligence and automation reshape the industry. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for agents, Serhant sees it as a tool that can eliminate friction and strengthen client relationships.
“I look at it not as a replacer but as an empowerer,” he says. “You just want to get on the phone and talk to somebody.”
Technology can streamline administrative tasks and improve efficiency, but Serhant believes trust, accountability and human judgment remain central to the transaction.
Underlying all of it is a belief that success depends less on motivation and more on discipline.
“No one tells you that courage actually feels like fear,” Serhant says. “Discipline feels really, really, really hard.”
One of the frameworks he uses to stay focused is what he calls the “thousand-minute rule.” While each day contains 1,440 minutes, he encourages professionals to think of roughly 1,000 productive minutes as a valuable resource that shouldn’t be wasted.
“If someone stole $5 out of your pocket, you wouldn’t say, ‘Here’s the other $995 you didn’t know I was carrying,’” he says. “But we do that with our time all the time.”
For agents, he recommends focusing on three priorities each day: finding business, keeping business and doing business. And when the inevitable setbacks arrive, Serhant returns to a simple principle that has guided him since the beginning of his career: “Take care of the work and the work will take care of you.”
