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The bitter cold snap that hit Manhattan this week couldn’t cool off the fired-up real estate professionals at the New York Hilton Midtown who had come to see superstars like Ryan Serhant speak at Inman Connect New York on Thursday.
“It’s six degrees outside, but it’s 1,000 degrees in this room,” the SERHANT. founder said while revving up the crowd.
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Moderator and Special Projects Editor at Inman Jim Dalrymple II noted that the room had been heating up even earlier that morning as The Agency founder and CEO Mauricio Umansky and NextHome CEO James Dwiggins debated the merits and pitfalls of the National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy, which has been contentiously debated for the last several months.
Ryan Serhant | Credit: SERHANT. Studios
The thing that Serhant said he was surprised the two CEOs didn’t discuss more was the question of liability revolving around CCP.
“The reason it’s being talked about now is it’s the next class action lawsuit,” Serhant said.
Serhant said it’s not hard to see why, generally, smaller brokerages are in favor of the policy (to get access to more listings) and larger brokerages would prefer it be abolished (because they can keep more listings in-house), but at the end of the day, “you need to be able to find the best buyer anywhere in the world.” That means that publicly listing a property will typically get a seller the best deal.
At the very high end of the luxury market in which Serhant typically operates himself, he said “it depends” on the seller, as to whether or not they want to sell off-market. Many brokers in favor of abolishing CCP often cite high-end sellers wanting more privacy as a reason that the policy should be abolished.
“I think the adage is true if you want to keep your home off-market, you’re not a real seller,” Serhant said.
“The exposure we drive to listings, the ability we have to put homes in front of more buyers than anyone else is what drives sales.”
Dalrymple said another topic that seemed to come into play in the CCP debate between Umansky and Dwiggins was the idea of whether agents are fundamentally good or bad.
“‘Meh,” Serhant said with a shrug. “There’s good people and there’s bad people. My focus, honestly — I’m not a lobbyist. I’m not trying to put myself into positions I don’t want to be in.”
With the recent changes in the wake of the commission lawsuits settlement, Serhant said he thought the industry was in a better position (as he had predicted) — one that’s more transparent for consumers.
“And the bad actors will get pushed out or put in jail.”
The industry emerged with more paperwork and disclosures, but Serhant said he thought it was for the better.
And if individuals were having a hard time adapting to the new industry landscape, Serhant suggested that maybe real estate wasn’t for them.
Dalrymple wondered, what kinds of agents and companies would thrive in this new landscape?
Around 2017 when Serhant was shopping around new brokerages, before he thought to launch his own in 2020, he identified two basic models: the low-cost, low-support model and the high-cost, high-support model (typically the one that generates superstar brokers).
He said that he sees success in the future for companies that offer “all choice” to their agents, ones that offer a solid brand, support, technology and a community — something he likened to what he’s built at SERHANT.
Serhant said his brokerage is an option “right down the middle” between the low-cost, low-support and high-cost, high-support brokerage models, “to the betterment of the human race.”
Dalrymple said it seemed like the opposing low- and high-cost models Serhant was referring to were akin to companies like eXp Realty and Compass, respectively. So, how do other companies model something like SERHANT.?
“You’ve got to figure out how to disrupt [the] economics,” Serhant said, which, he explained, meant analyzing a firm’s cost structure, what agents are paying for, and all the hidden costs involved.
“So there’s a lot of hidden fees in this business that I also didn’t really like,” he added. “It pushed me to try to create something that was simple.”
When asked by Dalrymple if there was anything he saw while shopping around at other firms that he wanted to implement at SERHANT., the luxury broker seemed to try and wrack his brain for an answer but couldn’t come up with one.
“I play nice in the sand box,” Serhant finally said, adding that he cares about real estate agents and the relationships within the agent community “probably more than anything on Earth.”
“The models that I interviewed with just didn’t match the value proposition that I wanted to see for the next 20 years,” Serhant said, adding that he envisions a future where agents operate in a “screenless” manner that boosts productivity.
“One year ago today, I was on the stage by myself, which is terrifying,” Serhant told Dalrymple, “talking about an idea that I had to remove administrative work for sales people because I did an audit of my own time and realized, as an agent, 80 percent of my time was doing task work.”
That idea turned into S.MPLE, the brokerage’s workflow platform and a Large Action Model (LAM) that can understand and execute human requests in real time.
“For the agents that use it, I think some are even here, it’s completely changed the behavior of what it means to buy and sell homes,” Serhant said. With the idea of going “screenless” in the future, Serhant seemed to suggest that agents may ultimately end up working with a few support staff who are in turn supported by products like S.MPLE — helping agents to eliminate the use of screens themselves entirely.
That future may still be about two years away though, Serhant said, adding, “I don’t have a lot of time man, I gotta move.”
In closing, Serhant spread a message of love to all real estate professionals in the room, offering support to those who might need it.
“We are all 1,000 percent in this together, every single day,” he said.
Email Lillian Dickerson
