How Did Ryan Serhant Turn YouTube Tours Into Building Deals?

Ryan Serhant says the most valuable asset in any business is distribution. You can have the greatest product of all time, and if no one knows about it and no one buys it, you have an unknown product that does not sell, and that is a bankrupt business. He says he got super lucky on the back of early Instagram and early YouTube, building a real estate brand on personality that ran from content to community to commerce.

He doubled down on YouTube to be first to market, capture consumer mindshare, and turn the brand into a business. By 2015, 16, and 17, every seller and every developer he worked with was writing addendums into standard old school exclusive listing agreements. The clients included billionaires and some of the biggest developers in New York and other markets. The addendum said Ryan will post property tours of the building on his personal YouTube, and they will give the building deal.

Buying advertising pushes a message onto people, and you have to repeat it over and over before they pay attention. Social and the power of PR is pull. Serhant pulled people into the stories day in and day out. The same real estate distribution funnel still runs, now at a much more massive scale, and you could not buy it because it is a concentrated audience.