Ryan Serhant's Sales and Productivity Tactics

Ryan Serhant opens this conversation by handing his host a watch and announcing a new rule: no podcast should start without a gift. It is a small stunt, but stunts are how Serhant, the broker who became the face of Bravo's Million Dollar Listing and later built his own agency, Serhant Media Group, built a career. The real rule sits underneath the joke. "If you're willing to embarrass yourself, you make more money every time," he says (00:08). That line is the thesis of everything that follows: sales, time, and attention all reward the person willing to look foolish first.

Serhant does not call this fake it till you make it. He finds that phrase dishonest, since it implies lying, and lying, he argues, is the one unforgivable sin for anyone who has to sell something to someone else. Instead he calls it being "future me." The idea is simple: decide who you will be in twelve to twenty four months, then act like that person today, not the person you used to be (02:35). It is not pretending. It is rehearsal for a self he believes he will actually become.

He tested the idea in 2010, eighteen months into a real estate career he started only to cover rent after getting his license the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy (03:22). His original goal was modest: two thousand dollars a month (03:39). When Bravo opened a casting call for a New York version of Million Dollar Listing, three thousand agents showed up. Serhant made it into the final sixteen, who would each be filmed for half a day. He knew that showing a Bravo crew his real life, a studio apartment and the subway, would end his shot. So he staged the life of the agent he intended to become: a borrowed Range Rover, a 5 a.m. call time timed to exhaust an LA-based crew still running on West Coast hours (04:40), and a friend posing as a wealthy client. When a real showing forced him to cut the day short, he improvised an exit modeled on a bad date he once had, walking out mid-scene instead of explaining himself (07:05). It worked. He got a callback, then a decade on the show, three spinoffs, and eventually a Netflix series.

The Bank of a Thousand Minutes

Independent contractors have no boss and no structure handed to them, which Serhant says is the hardest problem to solve when starting out. His fix was to treat time like cash. A day holds 1,440 minutes (12:34), but Serhant figures a working person realistically has about 1,000 productive ones (13:01). He asks people to spend those minutes the way they would spend a thousand dollars in their pocket, not the way most people spend time, letting a bad five-minute phone call bleed into the rest of the day.

"You have to treat those 1,000 minutes like money. It's the only way you won't waste it." Ryan Serhant, [13:01]

The practical result, he says, was turning hour-long meetings into fifteen-minute ones, not by cutting out small talk but by cutting out talk that goes nowhere (14:52). He credits that discipline, more than connections or talent, for a 2018 season in which his team closed 800 million dollars in New York sales (15:48), outselling the next-highest team by roughly 350 million dollars (15:48), almost a million dollars a day.

That same discipline shapes how he sells. He describes a closing method he calls CODO, short for close on day one, built around what he calls the two Cs: find something genuinely in common with a client, and give an honest compliment, both aimed at making the other person comfortable before any pitch begins (16:07). The rule underneath it is to never ask a question someone can easily answer no to, and to let the other person talk, because, in his words, people hate being sold but love shopping. He also insists on selling the feeling before the object: "A lot of people who are terrible at sales are trying to sell me the bed... you sell the dream first, bed second" (17:58).

The Long Game

Where Serhant gets most specific is persistence. He frames follow-up around what he calls the three Fs: follow up, follow through, and follow back. Follow up never stops, he says, until people buy, die, or decide they do not want to work with him (20:36). Follow through means doing everything promised. Follow back means closing the loop once someone commits. He describes sending one client a personal note every other week, built around real market news rather than a sales pitch, for five straight years before the man responded at the end of 2017 (21:19). The relationship eventually produced three sales, worth sixteen million, seventy three million, and thirty three million dollars (22:10).

The strangest version of that persistence involves an 8.3 million dollar apartment sale on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 2011 (23:58). A buyer offered to pay cash over the phone, with no in-person meeting and no qualifying questions, then vanished. Months later, a lawyer called to say an 830,000 dollar wire had arrived from an account tied to a country flagged for scrutiny. Industry contacts told Serhant he had likely been used in a laundering scheme, where a buyer runs money through a real deal's escrow account and lets it sit before collecting it back if the sale collapses. Rather than drop it, Serhant tracked the buyer to a property record in Paris, flew there on a hunch, and eventually closed the deal in New York after the buyer turned out to be real, worth roughly a billion dollars a year, and simply slow. "One night I was drunk and I was on the internet, and then you didn't leave me alone, and I just felt bad for you," the buyer told him (28:40). Serhant notes the sale would equal roughly 100 million dollars in today's money by comparison (24:25).

Serhant is just as direct about what kills deals: ego. "Ego kills more deals than anything. Ego kills more careers... more relationships," he says (31:17), arguing that most negotiations, unlike a basketball final, only work if both sides can claim a win. His approach to a room full of large egos, buyers, sellers, and agents, is to over-communicate, flatter everyone involved, and let the other side feel like the winner, since in most deals that means he wins too.

That same instinct for other people's attention explains why Serhant calls distribution, not the product itself, the most valuable asset any business owns (41:15). He traces this back to realizing, after Million Dollar Listing aired, that fame alone generated no phone calls, but content did. He built a personal following on early Instagram and YouTube years before competitors took either platform seriously, eventually writing clauses into listing agreements that let him post video tours of properties in exchange for exclusive access. The company that grew out of that content operation now trains salespeople through a platform called sellit.com, which Serhant says reaches more than 60,000 people across 133 countries (44:53). The relationship framework he teaches there he calls hook, help, ask: find something genuinely in common with a stranger, help them with something unrelated to any sale, and only then make a request (44:53).

By 2019, working purely as an agent, Serhant's team had crossed one billion dollars in annual sales, earning him about 22 million dollars in commission that year (48:50). Rather than stay there, he started a company from scratch in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, while building a house with a nine month old at home, against his own parents' advice to wait. The decision to walk away from a proven ceiling, he says, came from the same place as everything else in the conversation: a refusal to let comfort or past hardship set the terms. "Your past explains you, but it does not excuse you," he says of his own chubby, picked-last-for-teams childhood (51:25), a line he applies equally to rude clients and to himself. Success, in his final accounting, is not ambition at all. It is what he calls pure, brutal responsibility to the people who win when he wins (53:52).