What happens to shows like Million Dollar Listing when the real-estate industry takes a turn?
"I guess you could say you've got to kill or be killed."
by Ellen Gamerman, The Wall Street Journal
The last time a new season of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles aired on Bravo, the show was its usual unbridled celebration of infinity pools, imported marble and luxury amenities that historians will cite if they ever have to explain the collapse of civilization (bathtub by the balcony, anyone?).
"To be honest, I'm having a hell of a year," real-estate agent Tracy Tutor told the cameras in the early-2023 finale, which only glanced at market troubles. "So I don't want to be cocky, but I might just be entering the humblebrag era."
Bah, humblebrag. In the new season premiering next month, Tutor is stressed out. "This is an incredibly frustrating market," she says to a group of agents before the show cuts to an edit of dismal real estate news. "Listings were coming last year that were super easy. It ain't that market anymore."
Perhaps no profession has been more glamorized by reality TV than real estate. The shows don't just create drama but offer their own aspirational version of the industry, selling audiences on a view of homeownership that is escapist and full of vicarious thrills.
Now the genre faces a new challenge: walking the line between celebrating the sales that still happen and acknowledging the drop-off in deals that has upended the business. All while some viewers are struggling to find houses to buy or grappling with real estate careers they can't sustain.
Real estate shows have ruled reality TV for years thanks to eight-figure properties and celebrity agents. Now the genre has a new star: the overpriced mansion nobody's buying.
High-end home inventory is down in choice markets. Mortgage rates remain higher than 2022 levels. Recent legal battles have agents warning of diminished commissions. And real estate professionals, some of whom only joined the business because of what they saw on TV, are feeling the strain.
The market angst pops up across these shows, though it might be most palpable on Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles, a granddaddy of the genre. The Los Angeles market is particularly challenging now due to a new "mansion tax" on sales of high-end properties.
"It's a hell of a lot more of a fight for your commission than it's ever been," says one of the show's stars, Josh Altman, referring to his dealings with wealthy buyers who are trying harder than ever to cut costs. "Deals are getting done a lot skinnier than they used to."
Producers for the show had to prepare network executives for what was once unthinkable: episodes of only failed deals. The series recorded just one closing in the first four months of shooting its 15th season, a producer said.
That's compared with sale after sale for years in seasons past. That scarcity has amped up the cutthroat behaviour, says Altman. "I guess you could say you've got to kill or be killed," he says. "You've got to have that mentality in this market." The upside for the networks is that bad behaviour makes for good TV.
Ryan Serhant, a former Million Dollar Listing New York agent who once jumped in a pool in his underwear to sabotage a rival's open house, sees the challenging conditions adding to the narrative tension on screen. "Many sellers can't afford to sell, many buyers can't afford to buy," he says, "but where there's volatility, there's opportunity".
In Serhant's new show, Owning Manhattan, which premieres on Netflix in late June, the hustle is on from the first episode, when the agent shows a client what he calls the world's most expensive penthouse at $250 million.
The address is on Billionaires' Row, the skyscraper swath of New York City where several properties have struggled to find buyers. "You'll see helicopters fly beneath us," Serhant tells the representative for a family in Asia looking for a gathering spot in the United States.
In full sales mode, he tells a story that includes this nugget: A ping-pong table in this New York City apartment would be the highest ping-pong table on the planet.
Serhant, chief executive of his eponymous real-estate company and other related businesses, tries to package the property as a steal, saying the apartment is priced at $6 000 less a square foot than another neighbouring penthouse. The client turns him down.
The shows, which flash commission figures on screen with each property, lured many newcomers to the profession, often with unrealistic ideas about what the job is actually like.
"There's a lot of people that think that, oh, they're going to join in year one, they're going to make a couple hundred grand and, you know, it’s amazing," says Mauricio Umansky, the real estate mogul who stars in Buying Beverly Hills and rose to fame on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. "They realise that, you know, 12 months into the job, they haven't made a cent."
The agents became TV personalities whose career paths, roller-coaster friendships and gossipy love lives made the whole enterprise look like one long rich-people party.
"So many girls come up to me and say, 'You're my inspiration. I just got my real estate licence because of you," says former Selling Sunset real-estate agent Christine Quinn, who still works in the industry. "I say, 'Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. But don't quit your day job.
"The latest season of Selling Sunset, which follows real-estate company the Oppenheim Group, gets into industry problems, including when characters bemoan the mansion tax. "That makes me nauseous even thinking about, one agent says while touring a $26 million home in an episode titled "The Real Estate Apocalypse".
For some real-estate veterans, the job is hard enough without TV-inspired newcomers descending on open houses, teetering up floating staircases in stilettos and touring the bathrooms in designer suits.
"These jokers that are driving these $200 000 cars, they've done three deals in their life - we all laugh at them, we all roll our eyes," says Eric Lavey, a real estate adviser with Sotheby's in Beverly Hills, California, "They're diluting the value of true real estate professionals".
The sales are at the core of the genre, though not everything viewers are seeing is real, says former Selling Sunset agent Quinn. "I had a lot of fake phone calls where I wasn't talking to anyone at all," she says. "I'm going to take this call outside.' That’s how we'd usually do it."
Pictures of what looks like Selling Sunset cast members talking to a home screen or an open camera screen rather than using the phone app have circulated online.
Netflix and the Oppenheim Group didn't respond to requests for comment.
Umansky argues that the shows have enlarged the talent pool, drawing professionals who might not have thought about the job otherwise.
"I'm going back to the day where real-estate agents were just a hair above a used-car salesman," says Umansky, who is founder and chief executive of the real-estate company The Agency. "I don't think people feel like that about us anymore."
Selling Sunset helped jump-start the career of Gia Aldisert, 22, who was a college student working at a steakhouse in Malibu when she discovered the show.
"It inspired me in a way, seeing how amazing and powerful the women on TV were," says Aldisert, now a Los Angeles agent with no plans to quit.
"I know people in the industry are deciding to maybe take a step back from real estate or maybe getting defeated," she says. "I say they have to stick it out."
Andy Klaric, a 25-year-old New Yorker who shows luxury homes to his nearly 270 000 followers on social media, was entranced as a kid by the picture of real estate on Million Dollar Listing New York.
After posting a 2022 viral video where he pretended to bark and meow a conversation about real estate, his career picked up speed.
The agent at Serhant's company who builds his personal brand by carrying a quaint green briefcase wherever he goes - including while selling a $9.6 million property just the other day - says he eats, breathes and sleeps real estate, regardless of what the market is doing.
"Sometimes I wake up thinking I transacted something and it wasn't real," he says. "I had to wake up and get a glass of water to be fully awake to realise it was just a dream."
