Ryan Serhant, the star of the Netflix show “Owning Manhattan,” launched his namesake brokerage Serhant across California last week, with several high-profile hires and $2 billion in active listings, including $1 billion in L.A. alone.

The company is starting with offices in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco and Tahoe. The new Beverly Hills office has three founding agents: Ben Belack, Courtney Poulos and Patrick Michael.

“California was inevitable,” Serhant said. “There’s no better marketplace that truly understands the integration of media, technology and real estate than California. It wasn’t a matter of if Serhant would come to California but when.”

Belack, who joined from Beverly Hills-based The Agency, was tapped as Serhant’s executive vice president. He brought his team – including seven of his agents – with him. He is also known for starring on Netflix’s “Buying Beverly Hills.”

“I’ve been following Ryan for a very long time, and I really admire the way with which he approaches business and his way with the media, and I feel that we have a very similar approach,” Belack said. “They were looking for a Ryan of the West Coast to defend some of the brand standards and also amplify them out here.”

Large-scale opening

Serhant is one of the largest U.S. brokerage or company openings in California ever, according to the group. Founded in 2020, the firm has spent the last four years expanding on the East Coast, and it has also opened outposts in Arizona and Nevada.

Today, Serhant is in 16 states and has more than 2,000 agents, producing $7.1 billion in sales volume last year and growing more than 100% every year. Since the California launch announcement, Belack said he has seen a huge amount of interest in the firm from both agents and potential clients.

“On the ground, it’s been crazy. I have never been inundated with so many direct messages on Instagram,” Belack said. “It was wild, it was truly wild.”

Serhant said he had more outreach from agents in the first 24 hours of the new Beverly Hills office launch than for any previous location.

There have been several other noteworthy real estate brokerages to open in L.A. in recent years, many founded by star brokers of other agencies.

In 2022, Drew Fenton departed Hilton & Hyland to establish the Beverly Hills-based brokerage Carolwood, accompanied by several high-profile agents. The firm reported $5 billion in sales for 2025, maintaining an active inventory of $3.5 billion.

Similarly, fellow former Hilton & Hyland brokers Branden and Rayni Williams launched The Beverly Hills Estates in 2021, which closed $3 billion in sales last year. Also in 2021, Kofi Nartey left Compass to found his own Beverly Hills-based firm, Globl RED.

‘Three hours back of their day’

Serhant decided to start the company when other brokerage models “didn’t make any sense to me,” he said, adding that other brokerages had dated processes and weren’t consumer centric. “There was no encouragement to create a better experience.

“I knew there was something bigger and better at another firm…none of them operate the way I operate and none of them thought about the business the way I think about the business,” Serhant said of his decision to strike out on his own.

And his stardom on hit television shows on Bravo and Netflix has also gained him widespread recognition. He got his start on the hit Bravo show “Million Dollar Listing New York,” and he noted that many young brokers grew up watching him.

“They’ve been waiting until today to have the opportunity to come and work with us,” he said.

Today, he has more than 10 million followers on social media platforms.

His brokerage refers to itself as an “(artificial intelligence)-native real estate and media company.”

Its AI platform, known as S.MPLE, is aimed at making things easier for agents. Serhant said the average agent who uses the product sees their business and sales grow 144% in the first 12 months.

“I don’t think any other real estate brokerage is even close” to doing what S.MPLE does, Serhant said.

The system helps with tasks that used to take six or seven systems to complete.

“We want to give agents three hours back of their day,” Belack said.

The agency also produces original content for social and streaming platforms through its own studio called Serhant. Studios while SellIt.com serves as its digital education hub with roughly 40,000 members globally.

Serhant noted that the brokerage’s agents, who are typically 20 years younger than competitors, leverage media and even social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to build their businesses.

“There’s no other firm that truly understands that integration between using media to generate and AI to operate the greatest real estate business,” he said. “That’s what we do.”

Looking ahead

Serhant is looking at “curated growth” through a company-owned model, not franchising.

“I have a hard time understanding the franchise model in a service-based industry,” Serhant said, adding that he didn’t want to use the model just to fund growth and he would instead focus on being not just bigger but better.

Belack added that his goal is to “amplify and defend their brand and its standards” when he thinks about growth.

Still, he likes working with agents who “need help getting over the hump” to get their average sales price up, as well as veteran agents needing help with new tools, he said. “I want to help them build this company and also, if it makes sense, people can come alongside and work with me more closely.”