Ryan Serhant’s Shocking Prediction For Housing Prices, Mamdani Victory, & ‘Freeze The Rent!’

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  We are in one of the most delusional real estate markets I've ever seen. And I love it.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  So we're in Mondani's win has sparked a wealth panic.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  There's Mondani's rent freeze. Mondani's policies are going to be very destructive for the city. First, everyone needs to stay calm and carry on. Fear fuels markets. New York City has gotten through global recessions, global pandemics, way worse than a 33 year old TikTok mayor. Rent is high. Regular necessities are all too high. So I get it. Like if you're angry and someone comes out and says, I know why you're angry and I'm going to fix it. You vote for that guy.

• 1:05Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think are the biggest opportunities going forward today?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  I have a lot of clients through real estate who just have become extremely wealthy in so many different ways. And they all keep saying that something really big is coming. It's AI, but not really in the way you'd expect. So if you do those four things, you will be wildly successful.

• 1:22Graham Stephan?

  How would you change the housing market if you were mayor?

• 1:28Graham Stephan?

  Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour. Really appreciate it. Our last episode did incredible and I'm really excited to talk to you again today. Cause a lot of people now argue that we're in a housing bubble.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:39Graham Stephan?

  That housing is very unaffordable for a lot of people, especially New York City of all places.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:44Graham Stephan?

  What do you have to say about that?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I look at a bubble as something that can be explained, but is about to pop. I don't think what we're in is about to pop. I think it can easily be explained. I think we have an unaffordability crisis. I think there's an income gap, obviously, but I think rates are incredibly high. I think there's very, very, very little inventory. We're on Year three of like three decade lows in terms of housing transactions throughout the United States. And that's that's worldwide, but just so we can focus the conversation here. It doesn't feel like a bubble to me. What it feels like is an unaffordability crisis more than anything.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  And it's pushing people into rents, but rents are also incredibly, incredibly high. And so something has to give. And so what will probably happen is you'll have an American debt crisis. With all of the debt that people have racked up from buy now, pay later tacos to student debt, to auto loan debt, to just general credit card debt. I feel like there's a new credit card that gets invented every other day. That sells you a bag of rewards, but actually is preying on people's lack of income to be able to afford what it means to actually live in the United States these days. That seems like a bubble to me versus housing. Anyone who has, anyone who's bought a home since 2008 or 2009, let's say after Dodd-Frank, right? You've either paid in cash or you financed.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  If you finance, you have a 30 year fix or a 15 year fix, and that's a hefty monthly payment. Or you've got an ARM, a 501, a 701 or a 101 ARM. In order to get an adjustable rate mortgage, you have to be approved at the 30 year fixed monthly. So maybe you've lost your job, et cetera. That'll always happen. But I think the rate of delinquencies is not nearly where it would need to be to cause, quote unquote, a bubble.

• 3:35Graham Stephan?

  A lot of the charts seem to show the housing prices outpacing income by like five times.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:40Graham Stephan?

  But what do you think is causing that specifically? Do you think it's more so land scarcity or do you think it's government policy?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  I think there's policy and tax code that has both hurt and helped the American home buyer and home seller. If you think about like the capital gains write off, right? If you think like the joint, married filing jointly, right? Up to $500,000, that made a big difference in the 90s. You know, if you had a house for $500,000 in the 90s and you sold it, like that's, that's an expensive house. Today, that is barely the starter price for a home in middle America, right? 277 cities in the United States right now say a starter home is $1 million and above. Over almost 600 cities have a luxury market that's 1.4 million above.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Like that is crazy, but there's no write offs for that, right? Like you, what are you going to do? And so there's a lot of equity that people have built up in their homes and they're just not. They're just not, they're just not moving. And so asset prices continue to go up. You have boomers that don't want to sell. Where are they supposed to go? Anyone who has a two and a half percent loan that they've gotten at some point in time since 2009 to 2022, where are you, where are you supposed to, where are you supposed to go? So it's the lack of inventory that I think is pushing pricing on top of a very, very slow job growth market.

• 5:01Jack Selby?

  So how are people able to afford living in New York City? Cause I love New York. I go there as often as I can.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  They can't.

• 5:07Jack Selby?

  Well, you, but they're living there.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  They are, they are living there.

• 5:11Jack Selby?

  They're not just sitting vacant. You have plenty of people, you walk around Manhattan, you see plenty of people walking in, going to their apartment complex.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  A lot of it's sacrifice, you know, I don't know what the debt to income ratio is in, let's say like greater Las Vegas, but most people live paycheck to paycheck in New York City, even at the luxury level, like they save very, very little because the quality of living is so, so, so high. And the cost of living is so, so, so high.

• 5:36Jack Selby?

  At the luxury level, why would they not just go down a notch to be at like the sub luxury level to be able to save a little bit of money? Or is this just like a carrot?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Because life is short. We're talking like three, four million dollar condos? Yeah, people will live like, we have clients who, when, you know, they have a budget, right? So they have $700,000 that they've saved already from renting that they want to put down on a down payment. And then we have to sit there and talk to them and like, okay, so after the 700 goes into the down payment, because you're going to put 20, 25% down, let's say, what do you have left? Cause we have to have reserves to get your loan. You're going to have your monthly payment over and over. What if there's, what if something happens, anything? And they're like, oh, well, it's fine. I'll just make more money. Like there's, there's this idea that it's fine. I'll make more money. Or you can have alternative streams of income that it, that is, that I think is new, right? That's like a, that's a new feeling that people have, not just at the 500 to 800,000 dollar level,

• 6:28Speaker 01

  but at, like you said, the three, four and five million dollar level. It's okay. I'll figure it out. I can always just make more money. And people don't want to live below their means. No, not everybody's this guy, right? People, it's not, but it's not fun.

• 6:41Jack Selby?

  Below your means?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  I don't know if I live, I mean, I could, I could definitely spend a lot more, but I, I spend a lot of money to survive and to live in New York City. I've had this for a long time. I don't look at this as an expense. I look at this as an investment. Every watch I've ever bought, which is not that many, is worth way more now than what I paid for it. Right? So I do look at certain things like as investments that way. But I'm not insane with expenses. I grew up in the Great Recession of 08 and 09. Like, I know what it was like back then to not have money and to watch people be totally, totally, totally hurt. And I will never go back to that.

• 7:20Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I listened to your podcast that you did a while ago with Erica Colberg. Back then, you said that you stretched yourself to buy a $3.5 million condo when you really couldn't afford it. That your budget was like one and a half. And you saw this, and it pushed you to work harder and make even more money. You still follow that trajectory?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, unfortunately, I have a problem.

• 7:40Graham Stephan?

  But it's working.

• 7:41Jack Selby?

  So how are you applying that today?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  I started my own company five years ago. You know, like, I try not to, I don't push myself into situations where I could file for bankruptcy tomorrow. But I think you have to push yourself into situations where you put your back up against the wall a little bit, that if you're in a career where you could be incentivized to make more money. And I don't give this advice to like, my little brother. My little brother has a W2 job, who works nine to five. I guess he could do some nighttime investing. He could do what some of my other friends do. He could be crypto trading. Like, he could have a weekend job, sure, to always make more money. But then his quality of life and his focus would be incredibly fractionalized, both from like a mental health point of view and actually like a physical labor standpoint. So I don't do that. I think when you're

• 8:27Speaker 01

  in sales, your fate is what you make of it, right? You just have to make 10 extra phone calls. You can make 10 extra appointments. I could work seven days a week. And so I pushed myself to buy that apartment. It was 3.7. And then a year later, I was like, I could have gone bigger. Because I just made more. Then I bought my first, you know, big house, and it was 7.6. And that was terrifying. And then I gut renovated it. And then when I was done, I was like, maybe it could have gone bigger. And then started my own company in 2020, just completely bootstrapped for the first four years, and then raised money for the first time in December. To have strategic partnerships, I wasn't doing this 100% by myself.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  And I look at like what our expenses are now and it's just mind boggling to where I was stressed about just a couple of years ago. But we just keep pushing the envelope and keep pushing ourselves to the point where we look back a year before and we say, oh, okay, that wasn't so bad. You know, and it's worked so well for me anyway.

• 9:25Graham Stephan?

  So how has the market changed for you since 2020?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  There's a far bigger.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I'd say emphasis on thinking globally than thinking hyper locally. Like pre 2020, when I was just in New York, like I would have no need to sell anywhere else. All right, like you have billions of dollars of real estate to trade in a three block radius. You don't have to, you don't have to go anywhere else. You never have to get in a car. You never have to travel, but since 2020, the market has become globally influenced. And if you match that with hyper local excellence, you can actually do so much more in so many places. Like I'm in Vegas today because we're, we're opening our first Vegas location, like literally today. It's my 14th state. I don't, in 2020, if you had told me one day you'd be coming to Vegas, not just to do

• 10:46Speaker 01

  your awesome podcast, but to open a market, I would have said, really? Like, what does that even mean? Why would we do that? And so that's one way the market has changed. And then also what is money anymore? Like the amount of trades we've done now on the residential side for over a hundred million dollars is crazy town. Like the amount of people now that are buying at the 75, 80, 95 million dollar mark for a secondary home. It's just, it's hard to, hard to fathom. The amount of wealth creation that's happened over the past five years since 2020 is completely insane and people put a lot of it back into real estate. So, life has also changed that way.

• 11:24Jack Selby?

  A lot of people speculate that the cost of housing is going up in places like New York City because foreign buyers are buying up like luxury condos or even buildings and just letting them sit vacant in New York. A lot of people think that. Would you say that that is fact or it's, that's just like a made up story?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Categorically false.

• 11:41Jack Selby?

  So that is not true.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  During the Obama years, completely true.

• 11:46Jack Selby?

  Like, why, why was that happening then and not now?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  A much cheaper dollar, for sure. Right? You had a much cheaper dollar. So it made a lot of sense for Canadians, French, Japanese, Chinese, South Africans, South Americans to come into the United States and buy cheap real estate. For, for a lot of reasons, okay? And so, once Obama left office, the dollar started getting stronger. And so if you follow currency exchange, it stopped making as much sense. So then you had a lot of foreigners who bought during the Obama administration, right? For eight years, who then started to sell because then they were making, you know, even if they were selling at, let's say, a break even in the United States, depending on the currency, you were making anywhere from 20 to 30 to 40, 50%. Depending on how you, you play the tax game here.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Foreigners in New York City, for example, New York City residential real estate is about 70% of the, of the asset class. The majority of New York City is rent. Most of those buildings you see are rental buildings owned by major landlords, okay? 30% of that is then for sale. So people can, you know, buy, sell condos, co-ops and townhouses. Most of that is all primary residence for New Yorkers. Most of New York City is bought and sold by people who actually live there. A lot of the big trades that we've done recently, like on the second season of, of Owning Manhattan, which comes out December 5th, are all just wealthy, wealthy, wealthy New Yorkers. The kids go to school there and they want to have a great home. There's very little foreign investment, even though there's, there's a lot of it. It just gets talked about a lot.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And then it's the domestic. US purchasers and New Yorkers who also just have other homes who leave them vacant or who keep the lights off at night. But there was a period of time where there was a lot of foreign investment. Like I remember a 30 Rock episode back with Tina Fey back in the day. You know, in like 2006 or something where like one of the cold opens is her and I don't even know. One of her boyfriend on the show or something looking at an apartment and like, yeah, we're thinking, I don't know. And then like a Saudi guy walks in and he's like, I would also take this for my motorcycles and slams the door. And like, damn it, we lost another one. Those days are are are long gone.

• 13:52Jack Selby?

  So then what would you say is are the top like two or three things causing the rents to be so expensive?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Inventory, lack of inventory and the lack of incentive to build. So you talk about New York City today and what happened yesterday with the election. Right. It is very, very easy to make promises on on the ideology of taking. Right. Like you're hurting, I'm going to take from him, I'm going to give to you. Versus you're hurting, I'm going to incentivize him to make more and create more for you. That just doesn't sound as great because when you're angry, you want people to be punished. It's so much easier to talk about punishing success than it is to incentivize it. And that's one of the biggest problems you have in predominantly blue states,

• 14:40Speaker 01

  which is why you've seen so much movement to Nevada and Florida, Arizona, where we opened a couple of months ago.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  And so, you know, you, you, you, you just need people to be incentivized to create. It is so burdensome to build new homes, even if they're affordable in most markets now. That people just don't do it. Like there's other places to make money. You don't need to do it. So there is a real lack of inventory and then rates are high. Rates are high, so the cost of ownership is incredibly expensive. So what does it do to available inventory? It makes it more expensive.

• 15:15Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I screwed up majorly. I mentioned this in the Jason Oppenheimer podcast and it gets worse. Jack, you're not going to believe this. I was building out a two bedroom, 720 square foot addition on a duplex that I own. And the whole process was supposed to take four months.

• 15:31Jack Selby?

  And how much was it supposed to cost?

• 15:32Graham Stephan?

  $200,000. So we finish it. So the permit, that takes about three months to get approved. We build the thing in another three months and I'm thinking, oh, this is super easy, no issues. Final inspection comes, fails because of an AC condenser line.

• 15:49Graham Stephan?

  We fix it. Next inspector comes back, different person, requests more things.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:54Graham Stephan?

  Never mentioned by the first guy.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:55Graham Stephan?

  Fix it all.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Disaster.

• 15:57Graham Stephan?

  Third time they come back, the guy says, okay, it looks great, but what about the sewer line? Do a sewer line inspection now. There's a one inch crack when the sewer line meets the city sewer. $22,000 to fix a sewer line.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:09Graham Stephan?

  22 grand. And so we go back and forth for a month, saying, is there any way we could just permit the ADU without doing the sewer line? It'll do the sewer line later. No. So I go pull the permit for the sewer line. Then they say, no, you have to wait 60 days, sorry, 75 days to pull the permit because you have to give your tenants 75 days advance notice because they're rent controlled. Doesn't impact them whatsoever. And it doesn't impact the ADU. So we say, okay, whatever, let's try to go around this. So we get someone from the city to come back to see if we could qualify for the exemption for the 75 days. That person says, you also have to replace 22 feet of the sidewalk.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 16:49Graham Stephan?

  Because the city owned tree is causing the sidewalk to kind of gap up a little bit.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  That's to make you want to own a home?

• 16:55Graham Stephan?

  That's a tripping hazard.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:57Graham Stephan?

  But guess what? That requires a urban forestry permit to trim the city owned tree roots. That requires 60 days. So I have to wait 60 days to fix 22 feet of the sidewalk, to wait 75 days to fix the sewer line, to permit the ADU. And the ADU is unmovable until you go and pull all these things. It's a nightmare.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Disaster.

• 17:21Graham Stephan?

  So like I'm over like 40 grand.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Graham Stephan?

  Just from these people going, oh, you gotta do this, you gotta, and there's no end in sight.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  It's horrible. It makes you, it just makes you want to buy real estate, doesn't it?

• 17:29Graham Stephan?

  I want to sell it. I want to sell every, so I'm selling everything in Los Angeles. I just sold one.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:34Graham Stephan?

  So I'm gonna sell them all.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:35Graham Stephan?

  It's awful. I'll never do that again.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  It's a, it is a, it's a, it's a process, you know? What I hear most is like what happened to me when I bought my house, um, uh, is like homeownership is just a consistent battle against water. It's always just water. There's a leak here, there's a leak there, there's a flood here, something's happening, global war, this, that, the other. It's, it's incredibly, incredibly expensive. It is still historically an amazing. Way to preserve wealth, right? Like, if you have a long enough period of time on your spectrum, owning real estate in the United States is relatively pretty safe and relatively not volatile. And so people do do it and you have to live somewhere. But to invest in properties like that where you're a landlord

• 18:22Speaker 01

  and going through that entire process is just a, is just a total headache. And LA and New York City are equally as difficult. How do we make it as difficult as possible for you to be a great landlord here? Yeah. Right? And create housing for people. And that's what pushes up prices.

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• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And well, right now, for sure. There's fear in the marketplace. You use it to your advantage. Buy great property. The best deals that have been done in New York City when buying an investment property, and it's sad to say, in the last 25 years were the fall of nine 11, right? The fall of 2008. The fall of Hurricane Sandy, when a lot of New York City was underwater, and the majority of 2020, because even New Yorkers were saying that New York is over. And every single time, the market has come back stronger. And every single time, the people that were courageous enough to go in and invest in what is,

• 20:37Speaker 01

  if you're buying Manhattan, an island of rock during those times, took advantage of fear. Like when COVID hit, right? We were starting our company. I'd made that decision in 2019. And then I could, I was like, my train was moving too fast. I couldn't, I couldn't stop. So I was like, I guess we'll just do this. We just, it took us a couple of extra months to, to launch. I sold a, an apartment on 57th Street in Billionaires Row. The guy was in it for, I think, $32 million. We sold it for 17. But the buyer, in May of 2020, there were bodies in Central Park. The Red Cross ship hadn't gotten there yet. Cuomo, killing senior citizens all day long, right?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Like, it was a dark time, and 17 million in that time was insane. He was an idiot. Except he wasn't. He was the opposite. And he bought, and it's now probably, it's like worth $35 million today, right? Same thing. We sold a penthouse in Soho that fall. It had been asking $40 million. We got it for 22 and a half. And that was a ton of money. Big discount, but discount to pre-COVID pricing, which every seller knew was over and done with. That apartment today is $50 million, even under the current political climate. So like, there's, you, I think you always negotiate with fear as a fundamental in good markets and in bad markets.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And I think anyone who's smart and who has cash today is looking at a market like New York City and saying, where can I get a great deal?

• 22:07Jack Selby?

  Jason Oppenheimer was saying the exact same thing with Los Angeles. It's like if you can put up with the headache and make real estate more active in terms of like active income than it usually is, you've just got to grind away at it. Then there is a lot of opportunity because people are just scared and they don't want to deal with the stuff that Graham's dealing with.

• 22:24Graham Stephan?

  That's very true. Santa Monica, it's crazy, is selling for 2014 prices for multifamily.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 22:30Graham Stephan?

  In more than 10 years, it's not gone up a dollar, selling for less.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 22:34Graham Stephan?

  So imagine owning real estate 11 years and taking a loss on it.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:38Graham Stephan?

  But nobody wants to do it, but it could be a good time.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, you always just have to make the right decision based on what makes sense for you. If you're buying to fix and flip, you're not holding it for 11 years, right? If you're buying to actually live in it and you're going to break even and you just had your carry costs, like you have to live somewhere anyway. And rents are incredible. There's parts of New York City now in a way that I've never seen before where it's more expensive to rent than it is to own. And it just hasn't been that way for a long, long time. So as long as rates come down and as long as there's some sort of government intervention on, on, you know, kind of on taxes in some way, shape or form for real estate, I think you could see a really, really big boom.

• 23:16Jack Selby?

  How do you think Zoran Mamdani's policies are going to affect prices in New York?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  It remains to be seen. Listen, worst case scenario is New York City goes on a hold. Covid was six years ago, right? Like it was a long time ago now, even though it doesn't feel that way. And so New York City could go on pause, right? Which just means that not a whole lot changes. Prices don't go up, prices don't really go down. There are always panicked sellers. Like there's during tariffs, when Trump announced tariffs for the first time earlier this year, the stock market fell, right? It was a disaster that whole weekend. He's playing golf, everyone's panicking. We had sellers agree to deals in New York City that were just purely based on panic. 10% lower than what they could got, what they could have sold for 22 days later.

• 24:02Jack Selby?

  Oof.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  But sellers just panic, right? Like fear fuels markets. So if you just stay calm and you just breathe, New York City has gotten through terrorist attacks, global recessions, global pandemics, climate change, this, that, the other.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Way worse than a 33 year old TikTok mayor. So like, the worst that can happen is it slows down. I think what probably happens is you have a big pause on development, which means that anything under construction now, anything new, anything luxury today, just gets more valuable because it goes right back to supply and demand. What draws prices down, which is what he should do, is incentivize building, rezoning, create more housing, make a ton of it more affordable. The more housing you have coming to the market, the more pressure you're going to have on pricing. And then the more you're going to have to incentivize everybody else to lower prices, do this, do that, like Giuliani post 9 11.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Created a 421A and 421G tax abatement in New York City. And everyone was up in arms. And all it did is said, if you are willing to develop real estate in New York City so that people will live here and feel safe, you can defer all real estate taxes for 10 to 25 years, depending on the asset, right? Depending on if you're going to build some public infrastructure, if it's a conversion building, this, that, the other. And it boomed New York because there was incentive to come back. It created new housing. New York City bounced back post the greatest terrorist attack on US soil in history, right? So if he creates incentives, instead of taking away the opportunity to build, I think pricing could go through the roof.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  But if he just holds firm and pushes on a lot of his other policies, then New York City will probably just stay on pause for a second. Great, real estate will still sell. Other real estate will just sit tight and everyone will just wait out what happens. Does that also apply to freeze the rent? Yeah, he's talking about rent freeze and rent stabilized and rent controlled apartments. I mean, all that does, and I get it, like, I understand why he won. I totally understand. It is unbelievably unaffordable. Not just for the, like, I mean, there are 350,000 people in New York City that are homeless. Like, I wear one of these bracelets on my wrist. Every dollar we sell from this one goes to the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City. And I push that as much as possible. Rent is high.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Food is too high. Regular necessities are all too high. Healthcare is too high, even with Obamacare or how you use it. Right? So I get it. Like if you're angry and someone comes out and says, I know why you're angry and I'm gonna fix it. That guy. You vote for that guy. Whether you know how he's going to do that or not, it doesn't matter. It's just someone who's aligning with your anger. Like, I totally, totally, totally get it. Mirroring anger is probably the greatest way to the office ever. We saw Trump do it on the same side. Mamdani is the left's version of Trump. Right? It just took the hard left position and a lot of people said, yeah. But if you talk to people right now as to, great, awesome, how is this gonna happen? No one has any idea.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And nor do they, nor do they really, really care.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  But I think if he focuses on creating instead of taking, we could have a great, great city. And I, I hope he does, man. Like, there's only one New York.

• 27:26Graham Stephan?

  How would a rent freeze in New York City affect the prices?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  I don't know, because it's, I don't think it's possible. So like, there's, I don't think there's a real case study. In the US anyway, definitely in New York. What a rent freeze will do is disincentivize anyone who actually owns set apartments to fix them. And so you go back to like New York City of the 60s and 70s, where you have these derelict buildings with apartments that are falling apart, hallways that are crap, light bulbs that are out, trash that's not picked up. And that then affects the sidewalk, which then affects the next building, that then affects the next building. And then developers come and say, well, I can't build on this block. These buildings are all disaster. That then affects the next building. And then these buildings go underwater because the rents are frozen. But you're not freezing interest rates.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  You freeze rent, that's fine. But you're not freezing the rates. You're not freezing markets. You're not freezing time. And so who's gonna fix all these apartments with what money? Like, with what, with what profit? You're not, you're just not gonna do it. And that's what happens.

• 28:28Graham Stephan?

  You know what I never understood is why rent control still applies to people who make several hundred thousand dollars a year? I thought it would be a great principle, at least better than the current system, is if you're making above a certain amount, you're not rent controlled. Because otherwise you have people that are making 200,000 a year that just happened to be in a rent controlled spot because they happened to sign a lease in 2010.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard to get tenants out of apartments who are making more money. It does happen. Rent control was not set up for people who can afford free market apartments. It is what it is. How would you change the housing market if you were mayor? The number one problem is lack of affordable inventory. That is it. So your number one goal should be to incentivize building. You do that through rezoning and developer build and tax credits. It's not bad. It's good. And you also look at in New York City, the number of New York State and New York City owned buildings.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  One of the things that Trump talked about this last time was the amount of federally owned land in the United States and, and nothing's being done with it. So what, what could you do with that to create incentives to get builders to come and build 10,000 houses? But you have to do a school and a grocery store and free fare buses. Sure, why not? To have the right to go build 10,000 houses? Well, sure. Right? You want to create incentive, but it's not just the housing. Who's going to live in these houses? So then you have to follow some of the Bloomberg policies where he said, we are going to create incentives for businesses to come here to create jobs. Right? We're not going to disincentivize Amazon to bring 10,000 W two workers here,

• 30:14Speaker 01

  which is exactly what New York City did and said, hey, you can afford to pay taxes. And they say, we're going to pay taxes. We're going to bring 10,000 jobs here. And then he went to another state, right? You would create incentives for companies to come from all over the country to say, New York City is the absolute greatest place to innovate. You create innovation awards. You want New York City to be on a pedestal where people say, I couldn't start my, my career anywhere else because all the major employers are actually in New York City. They're incentivized to be there. They have tax credits because they created 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100,000 new jobs every single year. Right? There's 125,000 babies born in New York City every single year. We should be creating through government incentives that many new jobs on top of what

• 30:58Speaker 01

  the private markets are already creating. Like, why would you not do that? Why is creating opportunities seen as such a bad thing? Who else is going to pay for everything? Fifty percent of the tax revenue in New York City is paid for by the 1% of the taxpayers. What do you do if that 1% goes to another state? Every state is its own company, right? New York is a company with a CEO, a COO, a board, right? California, Nevada, it's its own company. All of your residents are employees. That's what they are. And you have to incentivize your C-suite, the same way you have to incentivize your interns to want to be there. You should all be focused on making the greatest Yelp scores, right?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Glass door reviews should be the absolute best. But they don't, they don't do that, right? Where are the bloated budgets? Where can you cut it down, create inefficiencies and just create incentive to build? That will lower prices, that'll create more housing. And if you, if you combine that with more jobs, like you would have not just the healthiest housing market, but you'd have one of the healthiest markets in the US.

• 32:02Jack Selby?

  I feel like if I was the owner of some commercial property in New York, that I would just be better off converting it into a bunch of tiny apartments.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Jack Selby?

  Because then you don't have to actually pay for labor. Or is there like some sort of like permitting and restrictions for that?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's cost.

• 32:17Jack Selby?

  To actually just like put up the walls and all of that?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's, but it's also zoning. Like there's a lot that's good at zoning. There's, there's, I don't want to go into all zoning, but New York City is zoned in different ways to stop from like a thousand foot tower coming up on every block. Okay. So there's process and I appreciate that. Most commercial buildings are in commercially zoned districts and blocks and neighborhoods. Where you'd have to go through a rezoning process to be able to convert it to residential, to break it up into 100, 200 different residential tax lots. And then you have to understand, most of these commercial buildings are no longer built to code because they're older and they have office footprints. So like it's a hundred by 200 feet with a center core.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  What that means is to turn that into residential, you're going to have like 2,000 square foot railroad apartments with one window. And so a lot of these commercial buildings would be awesome to turn into residential apartments, but they weren't built to be. Residential, they were built for trading floors. They were built for cubicles. They were built for inner conference rooms or whatever they would do there. And it just becomes really, really, really hard to, to make those make sense. A lot of that did happen in 2002 to 2007. Some of those buildings worked out. Some of those didn't really work out.

• 33:32Jack Selby?

  Would you support micro apartments being made? Super, super high density, like, like apartments that are the size of, of this room right here. Yeah. And that's it. This room, for the record, guys, is, is pretty tiny. Like, it's small. Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would. The market doesn't really like them, though.

• 33:49Jack Selby?

  Really?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  They've existed. They've existed. There's micro hotels. Like, if you stayed at an Arlo hotel, you want those Arlo rooms? You walk in, you put your bag down. It's like sink, toilet, shower, fall forward, you're in a bed. The problem is, people will just pay more to have a hotel room.

• 34:03Jack Selby?

  So people can somewhat afford it in New York City?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  For sure. They can afford it in, in a lot of markets. And there are just cheaper but larger options. Like, to create brand new micro apartments today is still incredibly expensive and will cost more per room than a kind of crappier, older, but larger with more room hotel room. So people will just end up choosing the older, bigger option than the brand new option. One of the things I appreciate about the Vegas market so much, and why I'm excited to be here, is if you think about luxury, let's say, like 5 million plus. The average $5 million home in Las Vegas is 7,800 square feet. The average $5 million home in the United States is like 5,500 square feet.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  It's like a 40% vig on size of space, which is great. Like, people, especially post-COVID, want more room, right? They want to grow. They have 15 Halloween trees, you know, and 12 new cats. Like, they need their space, you know, to grow through.

• 35:01Jack Selby?

  Way to call me out, man.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I love it. It's great. It's awesome. Um, there's like 12 Teslas in the front yard. It's great. People want their space in Vegas, which I just think is super, super cool. Like, especially coming, you know, as a, as a New Yorker myself, to come into a really, really cool, growing market that has tons of incentive to be here, to then also just be able to breathe in space, I think is just, is awesome. So more people are gonna...

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• 36:25Graham Stephan?

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• 36:32Jack Selby?

  Tax.

• 36:34Jack Selby?

  I mean, people-

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• 37:34Speaker 01

  Make decisions based on tax. Yeah. There's tax incentives, there's corporate incentives, right? Vegas incentivizes businesses to want to be here, to grow and to build, which then incentivizes employees to want to be here because they get to keep more of their income, which then incentivizes people to want to go to school here, have babies here, et cetera. And a lot of our other markets, we are seeing a lot of money and people moving into Vegas. So it just, it just made the most sense for us to be here. Do you think you're going to see another wave of people move to Vegas after the recent election? Vegas is far from New York. I think our second, my biggest market is New York. Yeah. My second biggest market is the entirety of the state of Florida. Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  It is just a beast and it has not slowed down. And we are already inundated with calls and we have been since he won the primary. And it's, and it's fine, right? Markets come, markets go. A lot of people will, will go to, will go to Florida or they'll go to Westchester, they go to Greenwich, they go to Long Island, or they stay because New York City is awesome and it's the greatest city ever. And there's, listen, we've had eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. We've had 12 years of ineffective mayors anyway. Two terms of de Blasio, is this whatever? Adams who passed garbage cans to all look the same. That's at least one thing I know that he did. So nothing else has really happened and New York's still there.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  People are buying record numbers of homes, restaurants are packed, you can't get reservations. It's insane. It's still the coolest place to be. It doesn't go away. And so I'm incredibly bullish on New York. And what I think people just need to understand is everyone wants lower prices, always. New York's too expensive, right? They just don't want what comes with lower prices. Sometimes it's a pandemic, sometimes it's a recession, sometimes it's a hurricane, sometimes it's an election. So you can't take the good and not deal with the bad. You get better prices, it comes with something else you might not like. Guess what? You lock in the price, you lock in that value. Everything else is temporary.

• 39:42Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Politicians come and go. Cities are built by people, not politicians.

• 39:45Graham Stephan?

  There is a cool vibe to New York that when you arrive there, like everyone's doing something.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:50Graham Stephan?

  Everyone, like you, you go down to the

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Oh, they're definitely doing it.

• 39:53Graham Stephan?

  To the sidewalk, but everyone's just like out and about.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:56Graham Stephan?

  And there's a certain energy about New York that I don't think is replicated anywhere else that I've seen.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  No, I tell my, my wife all the time too, cause I travel a lot, right? We're opening all these markets. As much as I love every other market that we go to, I am incredibly lonely everywhere else. Like you're just all in cars or in destinations. There's never any sense of belonging just from being like, you know, I'm not, I've yet to like take a walk down the sidewalk here.

• 40:27Graham Stephan?

  Now, there's nothing here.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  You know?

• 40:29Graham Stephan?

  There's no point to going to walk.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Even, even in LA, like you can.

• 40:33Graham Stephan?

  Certain cities.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Certain cities, but like even then you have your home, you have your car, you have your place of work. And then everything else is a destination. New York City is the destination, which just as lonely as they say it is, at any given point in time, you can meet a hundred people you've never met before that could change your life. And I think there is something like very comforting about that.

• 40:56Graham Stephan?

  So what are you seeing for the future of the Vegas market? Like, why open up here specifically?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Our clients asked us to, you know, like we, we listen to where we have customer demand. I have certain criteria that we hit to open a marketplace. So we hit that criteria here really, really quickly. And both the buyers, the sellers, the developers, there's a lot of money in the East Coast that's coming to develop here. And the agents really, really, really wanted us to be here. And so we're, we're here. I think the market just gets stronger. I understand that when markets are bad in a market like Vegas, it's real bad. And when it's great, it's really, really good. But markets, again, they don't last forever. And in our business, we trade on the way up and we trade on the way, on the way down. So I'm excited. We have a huge, huge presence in Arizona. A lot of their market

• 41:43Speaker 01

  share comes out of Vegas and kind of the Pacific Northwest as we start to go further northwest. And I just think it's a great place to have an amazing operation and to be able to do great business and to refer people left and right. And I'm excited. And there's no one here that really does things the way we do them, which is just nice and weird.

• 42:02Jack Selby?

  Yeah. How much success in real estate comes down to timing versus strategy?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  I like to think it's strategy because I like to think that I can't control the timing. Like in hindsight, it's all in the timing. Like we started the business in the depths of COVID. Great timing. At the time, worst timing of all time. But looking back, oh, wow, that was like really, really great timing. You get in at the bottom, there's no fanfare and you get to just ride the market, especially the COVID housing market all the way up. I try not to focus on timing at all. I don't think you can time the market. I think people who try to time the market are people who also like, don't buy convertibles because, oh, my God, it could rain. That's not a great way to live life. So I think if you just have the right strategy and you just move forward slowly but surely, you'll hit

• 42:50Speaker 01

  good markets, you'll hit bad markets, but at the end of the day, you'll come out on top.

• 42:53Jack Selby?

  What does your current portfolio look like now?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  I own real estate in New York. We buy and we sell real estate as we see good deals. A lot of my life has gone into building this company over the past five years, even though we raised money last year. I have a wealth advisor that tracks a lot of stuff. I have a separate guy that does all my crypto stuff. I stay pretty asset light for the most part.

• 43:17Jack Selby?

  Do you think that you would have been better off just holding all of your real estate as opposed to buying and selling?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  No, not really. I'm not like a serial real estate investor either. I'm like too in the business. You know, I'm on the brokerage side. When you do it all day long, you see good deals and you want to jump on them. But at the same time, like, I like investing in other stuff that's not real estate, just because I spend so much of my life in the real estate business.

• 43:44Jack Selby?

  What's your craziest investment that you've made?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Craziest investment? Say the most random investment I made, where I've already sold like 50% of my position is probably, outside of like all the crypto stuff and all that, into Major League Pickleball when it was first formed, went into a team with Drew Brees, LA Mad Drops, and that was just such a random. Kind of like, really?

• 44:11Graham Stephan?

  How do you pick that?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Uh, I just ended up knowing people like I just know I have a lot of clients through real estate who just do lots of different things and it just seemed like a good early opportunity. I feel like we all miss early opportunities all the time because you're just like, I don't know, I don't know. And I didn't really want to miss another early opportunity and it's worked out so far. Yeah.

• 44:32Jack Selby?

  How does it work out investing in buying a pickleball team?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Just two sports teams people buy, they buy and trade into shares of said teams or said league all the time. Like you don't actually see it all the time, but every NFL, NBA, MLB team, NHL team, like very rarely are, are the teams just sold to a new billionaire. A lot of times I'll say you 10% for a billion. A lot of this, that, the other. I have a friend who works at a major, major private equity firm and they're doing a $3 billion financing of one of the major teams right now and you'll probably never read about it. And so it's, it's tax efficient and, um, uh, people buy into it like, hey, I want to buy 50% of that team. I'll keep everybody whole, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.

• 45:14Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, that's what Patrick Bedavid did.

• 45:16Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Graham Stephan?

  And there's a huge tax incentive. My understanding is that you could bonus depreciate quite a bit of a sports team. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but basically almost your entire investment could be written off and then deferred quite a bit.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  You guys should buy a sports team.

• 45:32Graham Stephan?

  What's the minimum?

• 45:33Jack Selby?

  What sports team should we buy? And yeah, what, how much do you need?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  You should go into like, uh, intramural soccer, like maybe volleyball.

• 45:38Jack Selby?

  I actually have an indoor soccer team. We would take investment.

• 45:41Graham Stephan?

  Indoor soccer?

• 45:41Jack Selby?

  I do. Yeah. There's a game tonight, actually.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Are you on the team?

• 45:45Jack Selby?

  I'm on the team.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Should we invest in you? Is that basically what you're asking for?

• 45:47Jack Selby?

  Well, if you want to throw money at me, you know, maybe I'll get a goal, maybe I won't, probably won't, but probably not. We're not very good.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  We only invest in winners over here, man.

• 45:57Jack Selby?

  This is our second season. I think we've won one game.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Really?

• 45:59Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Keep it up there, buddy. It's gonna be.

• 46:01Jack Selby?

  Thanks, man.

• 46:02Graham Stephan?

  Any day now.

• 46:03Jack Selby?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  It's like me playing sports when I was in school. Like one day, Ryan will.

• 46:08Jack Selby?

  So how much, how much do you need then to buy a pickleball?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  I mean, everybody, you know, at that time, um, uh, it was cheap, man. It was, I mean, those teams were a million, something like that. Today they're far, far more expensive as the leagues have just grown. But at the same time, I mean, everything's a sport. Like everything can be, can be traded. Maybe I mean, the craziest is like I, there is a meme of me for million dollar listing years ago. And I think this was 2013. And a guy said, I'll buy it for you. Please present my offer $9 million in Bitcoin in 2013. And the seller said, are you crazy? Never present that type of offer. That's monopoly money. Never do it. I think it's like $2 billion today, something like that, right? Um, so.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Do you still talk to that? The seller? Yeah. Uh, yes, I do still talk to that seller here and there. But you have to understand where the world was at that time, like in 2013. And it wasn't so much him saying no to Bitcoin. It was, he has a mortgage. And he had like a $5 million loan with JP Morgan, who was never going to take Bitcoin as a payoff. So what do you do? Like, you can't actually do anything. Um, anyway, we sold it using, you know, real money at the time. Um, uh, and then I had a friend who is a big crypto trader who I always thought was crazy. And he convinced me to go heavy into Bitcoin when it was at 3,000. And then again, when it was at 16,000. Um, and those will probably forever be my greatest investments of all time. And those will just

• 47:40Speaker 01

  be held on a cold wallet. And I'll bury them in a treasure chest and Morgan Freeman will find them.

• 47:45Graham Stephan?

  What are those crypto people saying now? Do they ever give you tips and say like, hey, now's a good time to sell?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  No, not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Um, uh, I don't spend a whole lot of time on it now. Um, but nothing recently that like jumps out to me now.

• 48:02Graham Stephan?

  Are there any other tips, though, that you get? Just being around such wealthy people? That maybe you're on a private jet with a billionaire who's saying, hey, by the way, we're going to be going heavy in this area. Here's just a tip.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I think that there's a term for that. I don't know what it is.

• 48:15Graham Stephan?

  No, it's not insider trading to say, hey, we're planning a development here. Or just like, you know, I like this. I'm going heavy in oil this month.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I hear some of that stuff here and there. A lot of our clients are private equity and they end up controlling the markets. Like, you know, we, we sit buy and sell homes for lots of, lots of those guys. And they, they, they're market movers, right? With what they can do. Um, I remember distinctly being with a couple people who, uh, when it was called machine learning. AI was a major investment and this is pre chat GPT rollout three years ago. And talking about a little company that was a nonprofit called OpenAI. I remember that conversation distinctly. I mean, that was, that was a bit over my head at the time. And they were really, really kind of bullish on what was going to happen. Also into Google, you know, like, also with like self-driving cars, like Waymo is just Google.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Those are just Google cars, right? Just branded as Waymo. I remember those conversations too. Listen, I think the, the future is in probably generative AI applications across the board.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Amongst, amongst other things.

• 49:22Jack Selby?

  How has the average type of rich person changed over the past 10 years? I imagine with AI now becoming a thing, you have a lot of people doing these like vibe coding startups, buying million dollar penthouses in New York.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:34Jack Selby?

  I guess not million dollars.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, way more than a million, way more than a million.

• 49:36Jack Selby?

  Million dollar penthouses, yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  I'd say the wealthy have gotten younger and the opportunity to make that kind of money has become somewhat. I used to think it was like a gamble, but now feels somewhat more like a meritocracy. If you're incredibly smart and you find it there, there, there are incredible paths towards, towards wealth, right? As you just said, like there's, you know, you just, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to make a better one. Like that, I think is what gives me a lot of comfort in whatever we're building and what other, other people are building. Like you don't have to go and invent something new. You just have to, you just have to make a better new.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  And I think young people see friction and they also have less to lose, right? It's not like they're giving up their jobs and they've got a wife and three kids and tuition payments. They're like, I'm 26 years old. Why not try and go swing for the fences? It'd be way cooler if I could have something that does an X and a Y. I would say the, the consistency with, with incredibly wealthy people though, is their, their value of time. They just text. The amount of, the size of deals I do that are.

• 50:42Jack Selby?

  Do they take calls often?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 50:45Jack Selby?

  Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting. I keep, keep talking, expand on that one a little bit more.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I just sold, I just sold something. I, I, I just sold, I just sold a place in Florida. I guess when the deal is all said and done, so it's like $210 million all over text. And I literally could go on my phone and I have a note to him. I'm like. You know, it would be easier if you could just give me a call and I could walk you through. And he wrote back, don't take it personally. Time is the greatest asset. I was like, I get it, but like, okay.

• 51:16Jack Selby?

  Seems like a smart guy.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Oh, but clearly has clearly figured it out. But like, they don't, and part of it too is for liability. Everything I say is now in text.

• 51:25Jack Selby?

  Wow.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  So I can't just get on the phone and be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Everything is in writing when you do things by text. So I think you're protected that way. And contracts are still done through DocuSign and email and lawyers and, and anything that's really, really important, they'll do over the phone with legal. But as far as I'm concerned, everything stays in writing and it stays in text because it's just quicker and to the point. And it's, it's harder to BS. You know, like if someone sends you an essay of a text, you're like, dude, you're full of shit. If they just tell you what the facts are, you're like, I get it. On the phone though, that could be phrased is, let me, let me podcast you for a bit as to why you should buy this. And you're like, okay, don't convince me, just give me the facts.

• 52:04Graham Stephan?

  How often do you get fake buyers who pretend to want to buy like a $20 million place?

• 52:08Speaker 01

  All the time, all the time. It's a flex. It's always the guy who then brings a girl and he's looking at something for $40 million. And yeah, I'm going to wire you this. There's so much wire fraud, bank fraud, like it's just gross. It's so annoying. We just had it, we've had it multiple times this year. You know, I think we've become much, much more adept of trying to smell things out. But con artists have become very, very capable, like very, especially with AI now. Like the bank statements are amazing. They can get bankers on the phone, but it's just AI. Like fake everything and you just don't know. And then the money never hits and it's just all bullshit.

• 52:45Graham Stephan?

  What's the point of doing that and like getting to the very end and then the money?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  To feel cool. Sometimes what I used to think it was, especially when it's foreigners, is they take a contract and they sell it overseas. So they'll say, listen, I've got this $20 million place for $12 million. Give me 10,000, come in on it with me. And they'll use that contract to sell, to sell people and they'll steal money from other unsuspecting individuals. A lot of times though, it's just someone who's crazy and, and they like to feel important. And so a real estate agent, if everything checks out, the bank state, they call the banker, it's fake, you know, there's wild stories. They take you, you go to dinner, I'll send you a car. Yeah, no problem. I'll put you up in my hotel. No problem. Oh, your budget's 50 million. Oh, absolutely. Oh, your girlfriend's so beautiful. Yeah, I'm happy to give you my discount at the

• 53:33Speaker 01

  store. And they do that for a week and then they just ghost. And they just do that city after city after city.

• 53:38Jack Selby?

  How do you, how do you vet that?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  So they're a career fake buyer? There's career con artists, there's career assholes, there's career dirtbags.

• 53:45Jack Selby?

  Yeah, of course. So are you good at then reading these people out?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  You try. I mean,

• 53:50Jack Selby?

  What are the signs you look for?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Um, uh, name dropping, they talk too much. Most of the time, they talk too much, obviously. So that's, that's one. That's early on in a phone call. Okay. They also talk on the phone. Two, ungooglable. Like if you're buying something, you're saying you have a budget of over $10 million and I can't find you anywhere. If your social's sketchy, if you're, if you're not really googleable, if the money comes from your mom or your grandmother, or it came from this, or a settlement here or there, like eh, right? And then you'll get a bank statement. Sometimes you want to check a proof of funds and instead of calling the number on the fake bank statement, you just call the bank, right? On your own phone number and you call and say, hey, does this person work here? And you try to talk to them and oftentimes they don't exist. So those are,

• 54:36Speaker 01

  those are some of the, the pretty easy ways to double check. But it does, it does still happen. Like we just had a case, someone, a known guy in a town that we sell in, in Florida, like goes to the gym with our agents, been around, uh, seemed totally, totally normal. Said he wanted to buy a vacation property to rent out, right? He wants, he's getting into the hotel and hospitality business. $90 million. Has a banker, has everything. The money's there, no problem. Gets his attorney to put on attorney letterhead that money is in escrow for the down payment, which I think at that point it was, it was 5%. So it was like four and a half million dollars. Just telling the attorney, hey, I'm going to wire to you tomorrow. I want

• 55:20Speaker 01

  to lock up the deal. Can you just let them know that it's here? It's going to be here. And the attorney was like, yeah, sure. So we have this attorney letter, four and a half million dollars in escrow. We go to our sellers and say, hey, this deal is legit. Attorney letter, let's move forward. The guy's normal. We see him around town all the time. And slowly but surely, we're like, hey, when are you going to release the, oh, another issue with the contract? Okay, no, but let's work through it like we're holding the property off market. Okay, what about that? Oh, I need to do another revision here, there, here, there. 30 days. Money never was ever in escrow and never ever came through. He stopped checking his phone, started calling us under a different phone number, started dodging, meeting in town, even though he was there. And the whole thing was, was fake. Even he never sent Fed

• 56:03Speaker 01

  reference numbers, which is wire fraud. But he was sending emails like, no, I told my attorney to wire the funds. I'm going to fire that attorney. Let me get back to you. Buys, that buys 48 hours, right? Because we're like, oh, see, okay. And then you sit there, and you wait, and you call, and the number's been disconnected. Oh, yeah, dude, my, my wife, she never remembers to pay the T-Mobile bill. And what do you do? Especially if it's a normal person you see in town all the time, you're like, ah, I get it, but this is starting to get weird. I don't know. And then he shows up, and he's in a Mercedes, and he's like, yeah, let's go do the inspection. Is it cool? You go to dinner, and he's your client. So you're like, I guess I pay for it, but this is weird. Yep. Yeah, that just happened. $90 million. Completely fake.

• 56:45Jack Selby?

  Is there going to be like a lawsuit or anything?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 56:47Jack Selby?

  What would the lawsuit be over? Fraud or something? I don't know.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  But he never sent a Fed reference number. You can't do that. And they're very, very, very smart about it. If you send a fake Fed reference number, you can be indicted for wire fraud. If you just are talking about, hey, yeah, I sent the money, I'm gonna send it. Even if you send a dollar, like, what are you gonna do? Sit in court for three years to talk about a guy that was just a dick? Like, sell it to somebody else. It is, it is buyer and seller beware at the end of the day.

• 57:13Jack Selby?

  What's the biggest scam you've seen in real estate recently?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Scam?

• 57:22Jack Selby?

  Like, one thing that we used to, we'd talk, spoke about quite extensively was like the squatter issue that California is facing, where it's like a, a civil case. And so you can't get the police involved. You could just forge a fake lease document, and then live there, and then file bankruptcy, and extend your stay, and, you know, play your cards to get like a place for free for a year.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  I fortunately try to stay as far away from scams and cons as I possibly can. And I don't read about them as much. And I've never really been caught up in one, other than like what we were just talking about. So I, so I, so I don't know.

• 57:55Graham Stephan?

  Common ones, though, wire fraud, that someone will pretend to be an escrow company. They find the buyer's info, will send them wire instructions.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it's wild.

• 58:04Graham Stephan?

  And then the buyer wires the money to the fake account.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:07Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. And then escrow calls, hey, we never got the money.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:10Graham Stephan?

  The buyer's, I sent $2 million yesterday.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:12Graham Stephan?

  What do you mean you didn't get it?

• 58:13Speaker 01

  And they don't do the voice verification.

• 58:15Graham Stephan?

  Right.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  That happened to one of our clients. The attorney's email was hacked. No one knew. An email came into the attorney's email from who they thought was the seller, because it had almost an identical email address. It's like people who send at Microsoft emails, but it's at R N I, et cetera. So it looks like an M when you look at it really, really closely. And it had, it had all the numbers. The numbers were all correct and the bank and information, wire. And he just had a paralegal who sent out the money, gone forever.

• 58:45Graham Stephan?

  They never got it?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  No, completely gone forever. There's nothing you can do. Just gone. And so, and if you don't call to double check, that's why you always have to call. Wire fraud is real. All emails can be hacked, right? It's messed up. So that happens a lot, unfortunately.

• 59:00Graham Stephan?

  Gosh, the big one that's happening now in California is the legal claims against landlords.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 59:06Graham Stephan?

  Where they say the unit's uninhabitable, strike it with a habitability lawsuit and then try to settle it.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Disaster.

• 59:14Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  People are the worst. I don't know what to tell you. You know, people are the worst. Difficult, difficult, difficult.

• 59:21Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think are the biggest opportunities going forward today? Like, where do you see them? It could be in real estate. It could be just overall. It could be different areas that you see, just different opportunities. If someone either has money or they want to get into something, what are you seeing from your perspective?

• 59:37Speaker 01

  I still think real estate is an amazing, amazing opportunity, especially in what we do. I think getting into brokerage is great now compared to where it used to be, because you can sell anywhere, to anyone, on any device, and it's all just about what you know. It used to be incredibly expensive to be a successful real estate agent. Like, you just had, you had to take out ads, right? You'd have to be there in person, this side of the stuff. Like, it just, it was a real investment and you don't know if you're ever going to get paid. Today, because it is so digital and you be, you can be licensed in so many different states, and all you have to do is build a community and you can do that through content and collaboration. Like, you can have an incredible life and an incredible career, so. I think that's one for sure.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Other great opportunities for money that are that are outside of the real estate world. I don't know, I'm probably the wrong guy to. What do you think?

• 1:00:30Graham Stephan?

  Well, you see a lot of wealthy people.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:00:32Graham Stephan?

  So I imagine you kind of have a good finger on the pulse of like, what's generating money right now?

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Right now, it's, we just had a conversation about this before, like, the two main drivers are AI and the data lake underneath AI. So not just a wrapper or an application, right? So anything that's actually going to create efficiencies in some way, shape or form. And then anything that is heavy, heavy, heavy on in real life service. So like what we do is kind of in real life service. You're giving absolutely great, high support. It's high cost, but it's high support. AI can create really, really low cost, right? Low support, but it's low cost and can hit mass market. Everything in between, I really, I really don't know. But those two territories seem like they're, they're pretty strong over the next five years.

• 1:01:21Graham Stephan?

  From my perspective, you ask me, I think YouTube advertising for businesses.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Graham Stephan?

  We had so many great ideas that we could implement that'll cut down marketing by like 95% for businesses. Like this podcast, as an example, is probably going to bring you at minimum a few clients that will end up buying because they see that, oh, he's licensed in Vegas.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Graham Stephan?

  Let's go to Serhant because that's where I want to buy or sell.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:44Graham Stephan?

  I guarantee it'll be a few, but imagine now focusing in on just that and creating now a podcast designed around the Vegas market.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:52Graham Stephan?

  And then implementing YouTube because it's free reach. You could get so many clients by doing that and then apply that to any other business that you could operate at scale.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Graham Stephan?

  With people. Huge opportunity. And the thing is, all these established businesses, they've been doing their old way for like 30 years. They don't have any idea how YouTube works.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Graham Stephan?

  But I think YouTube is the future and it's free distribution. If you just do it well, you get so much organic reach where people come to you. You don't have to advertise anymore.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Even you think even over the next five years, YouTube long form versus short form?

• 1:02:22Graham Stephan?

  Yes, yeah, especially the short form. Because what's great about long form is that you could turn every long form episode into like 20 short form.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Graham Stephan?

  So this episode might get 300,000 views long form, but we could get 30 million views short form. And then on clips, we could probably get another three million views on like eight to 10 minute clips.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  I think we should all just become streamers.

• 1:02:43Graham Stephan?

  That would be the easiest.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  They make a lot of money. Dude, they made so much money.

• 1:02:45Graham Stephan?

  Streamers who then gamble.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Oh, you met I Show Speed? I would, so I am 41, so I Show Speed is not my demographic. Did not, I mean, knew of him, but didn't really know that, what, what that was all about. I have never experienced that, the streamer world, or anything along that line of popularity in my life. Shut down entire streets of New York City, just as he walked. It's insane. Kids watching the live stream all over Manhattan, knowing where he is, live, which is a thing, which is like a little bit scary, looking out the buildings in New York City, seeing him running downstairs, flooding out of buildings to get to him as he's moving through New York City.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  You're chaos, wild community, just like live, right? With 50, 100, 150,000 people just watching live right now and tracking your movements, and you're making money on that? If I could go back in time, I would, I would stream. I think I might stream.

• 1:03:48Graham Stephan?

  I don't get, how is that not a security issue?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  It is. That's why they walk around with massive, massive, massive security.

• 1:03:54Graham Stephan?

  Understand, but still, you, when you're walking down buildings everywhere and someone could say, oh, he's here, and I could go up to a 20th story or what? I'm just saying.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's terribly scary. And they don't, you don't want anyone to know where they live.

• 1:04:07Graham Stephan?

  Who's a nutcase?

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  We had that with I Show Speed. Someone came, we were showing him a $40 million penthouse during his 30-day livestream, where he just was streaming for 30 days and sleeping on a bus, I guess. Comes in, comes out, some kid who knew he was there, because it's live, comes from around the corner, runs up, past his security, jumps up, grabs him in the head, rips his hat off to steal his hat. Just wanted his hat, sprints up Amsterdam Avenue. His security goes after him, but he just got away, stole his hat. But like, could you imagine if it wasn't just to get his hat? Like, it is, it was a little bit of a scary, scary situation, but um, but it's his career, man, it's, it's nuts.

• 1:04:49Graham Stephan?

  I think he's gotta be safer. I see that, and I just think, I just think, risk, it's too risky.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  You should start streaming 24/7. No. Come on, man.

• 1:04:58Jack Selby?

  I hate that. Start streaming 24/7.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  I saw that and I went back to the office to everyone in studios. I'm like, to studio guys, no, I'm going to stream now. Everyone put on a battery pack backpack, okay? And you're just going to follow me around all the time. Don't tell my wife, we won't tell anyone else. It's just going to be happening. Just streaming, I'm going to stream in the bathroom. I'm going to stream at home. Slowly but surely, people are just going to watch and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll make $600 million a year. It's totally fine. You would make a killing doing a sleep stream. Dude, that's insane. Yeah. And just while you sleep. Terrible. It's brain, brain rot awfulness. But I don't get who's, who's actually watching this. Kids, man, because they don't have cable. They can't afford any of the networks, right? You have, we talked about the unaffordability crisis. They're incredibly alone.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  They're incredibly, incredibly angry and they have streamers to watch for free, mostly, right? 24 hours a day that they're directly connected to and that's their friend and they're with them all day, every day. There is a connection there that no celebrity or musician or athlete has ever been able to create until this moment in time right now. You can say it's incredibly messed up, right? But I think a lot of these streamers feel like a deep connection to their audience in a way that like, that our generation doesn't, or my generation doesn't, right? We have, we have audiences.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Streamers have deep communities and it's been pretty insane to, to watch, but you have to be willing to sign up your entire life.

• 1:06:28Jack Selby?

  Did anything surprise you about iShowSpeed?

• 1:06:30Graham Stephan?

  Although really quick, I just want to say that every hour you're dealing with payroll and benefits is an hour that you're not growing your business. That is why our sponsor Gusto is a lifesaver because they can handle the boring stuff while you could get back to the money-making stuff.

• 1:06:43Jack Selby?

  So I've actually used Gusto long before they even sponsored the podcast. In fact, it was when I first started making money online, like back in 2025 years ago. That's crazy. It was when I first created my S corp, Gusto was there to help. And guys, I literally had no idea what I was doing from tax filings to deadlines. It was extremely overwhelming, but Gusto was there. They walked me through step by step, the entire process, and I've been using them ever since. Gusto is an online payroll and benefits. Software built for small businesses. It's all in one, remote friendly and easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere.

• 1:07:14Graham Stephan?

  They've got automatic payroll tax filing, direct deposit, health benefits, workers comp, commuter benefits, even 401k options. Everything that you would need without the headache. And they've got options for practically every budget.

• 1:07:26Jack Selby?

  You also get unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. There are no hidden fees and no surprises. Plus, they have certified HR experts you can reach out to if anything tricky comes up.

• 1:07:35Graham Stephan?

  It's quick and simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data and you could get up and running fast. Plus, you don't pay anything until you run your first payroll.

• 1:07:43Jack Selby?

  So try Gusto today at gusto.com/iced and you get three months for free when you run your first payroll. Once again, that is gusto.com/iced with the link down below in the description.

• 1:07:53Graham Stephan?

  That's gusto.com/iced. Again, gusto.com/iced with the link down below in the description. Thanks to Gusto again for sponsoring this episode. And when Jack and I started the Iced Coffee Hour over six years ago, we had to figure out everything ourselves, from the best cameras to use, the best editing equipment, how to get guests. Every day was a brand new challenge. That's why if you're starting or growing your own business, you know how valuable today's sponsor is, and that would be Shopify.

• 1:08:18Jack Selby?

  Shopify is basically your all in one business partner. They power millions of businesses worldwide, from major brands like Mattel and Jimm Shark to entrepreneurs just getting started. And fun fact, if you've shopped online in the US, which you probably have, there's a really good chance it was through Shopify because they power about 10% of all American e-commerce.

• 1:08:35Graham Stephan?

  What's great about Shopify is that they give you access to a complete design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful online store that perfectly matches your brand. There's no coding needed and their AI tools will help you write product descriptions and enhance your product photos.

• 1:08:50Jack Selby?

  Shopify also makes marketing extremely easy with simple email and social campaigns to reach customers wherever they're scrolling. Plus, they handle everything from inventory to shipping to returns. Basically, all of the complicated stuff you do not want to deal with.

• 1:09:03Graham Stephan?

  So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business ideas into

• 1:09:08Jack Selby?

  So sign up for a $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/ICH. Guys, it is literally $1 to try it out for a month. A lot of the guests we've had on this podcast have made a lot of money through Shopify. I've had a Shopify store. Graham's Coffee Company was ran off of Shopify and it's $1 to try it out for a month. Couldn't recommend it more. Shopify.com/ICH or the link down below in the description. Thanks again to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Did anything surprise you about IShowSpeed?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  He's super fast. I saw that happen in real life. I would say the, how nonchalant the entire operation was, and it's an operation because you never go down. And the battery backpacks.

• 1:09:48Jack Selby?

  So how many people did he have around himself?

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  10. 10? Because you have the creators, you have him, you have all the, you have his producers, you have the different follow vans that are following him around that just have things for him and stuff. The entire security team who are humongous men, you know, just protecting him because people are completely insane. You know, his brother's with him, he's got fans, like it's just, the operation was just insane. And because the operation is so large, it creates more chaos. Like if I walked down New York City, even just as me, right? Like by myself, people will recognize me, but no one cares because I'm just going to work. If I decided I'm going to have seven people plus four security guards walk with me, just

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  that, that operation will create people being like, well, I need to, what's happening? And it just creates more chaos. It was nuts to watch.

• 1:10:41Jack Selby?

  How much do you think IShowSpeed makes?

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  $50 million a year.

• 1:10:45Jack Selby?

  I think it's more than that. I think it's more than that, too. Yeah. My guess is probably $100 million. That's what I was going to say.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:10:53Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Why are we not streaming? Like, what are we doing with jobs?

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

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• 1:12:01Jack Selby?

  Oh, you could say the same thing of like, like, why did I not create Palantir? You know, it's like, well.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, why did you not do that, man?

• 1:12:07Jack Selby?

  I don't know.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Well, why are you playing soccer on a losing team? You could be a multi-trillionaire.

• 1:12:12Jack Selby?

  There's only one I show speed and there's only one Palantir.

• 1:12:17Jack Selby?

  Maybe if you said like, well, I should stream because, you know, this like 50th streamer. That I could do.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  You could.

• 1:12:25Jack Selby?

  I don't know if people would want to see.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Why would anyone have a job anymore? If you can just go on your phone and make money.

• 1:12:31Jack Selby?

  It seems like you want to do anything but sell real estate.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  No, I'm uniquely. I'm uniquely, dude, I have a wife. I am uniquely, so I'm so interested in how other people have carved paths. Like, that's, that's it. Like, how do other people build businesses? How do other people creating, creating different entities? Like, wow, what even is a streamer? And how long can you do that? Like, the rest of your life? Are you going to stream your wedding? Like, is that possible? And then what changes? Like, as the next generation grows up, is my daughter, who's six years old, is she going to watch streamers? Like, what is, what is she going to watch?

• 1:13:09Jack Selby?

  What's the weirdest way you've ever seen someone get rich?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  That? What, everything we're talking about right now? Streaming, OnlyFans?

• 1:13:15Graham Stephan?

  It's got to be like a unique business that you're like, I can't believe they made money with that.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Oh, but it's always the most random things. Uh, we had this billionaire family out of Ohio who like made the straws. Straws, like they're the company that just made straws. Another guy, we dealt with him, had a massive, massive company. He was the guy that created all of the bedding for like every brand you know. Ralph Lauren bed sheets, Calvin Klein bed sheets, Tommy Hilfiger bed sheets, pillowcases. At the end of the day, it's always one dude in Asia, you know? And like that, it's just like, really? Really? It was all just you? But another guy who created the interior, so not the thing your foot hits and not the rubber, but that inner piece in every sneaker.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  And his son is named Nick and he flips properties left and right just with the foot sole money or whatever that was called. I can't remember exactly, but it was like, really? Like, yeah, we just invented that little layer. I'm like, how much money did you make? And they were like, all the money.

• 1:14:19Graham Stephan?

  So I got a unique one. So I started a group called the Index where we have business owners and entrepreneurs who join.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:14:26Graham Stephan?

  And we get some really interesting applications and people in the group. And one of them, you know, when you go to the gas stations around 4th of July or holidays, you see the fireworks stands.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Graham Stephan?

  You make seven figures a year running the fireworks stand operations when you go into a gas station.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:14:43Graham Stephan?

  And it's just a few weeks to a month out of the year.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Graham Stephan?

  And of course, they're hustling beforehand and to make sure they sell the inventory. But that alone is a million dollar business.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like the umbrella guys in New York City. Like they just sit there and they wait, they see the weather report and like, we making money this week, baby. They just get excited with their terrible umbrellas. It's a big thing. Everything is, is a business. There's always a there, there. You just do it a little bit better than the last guy and you can make moves through social now, like you can do big things.

• 1:15:14Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. So I'm curious in terms of starting and running a company. What are your tips for hiring someone and making sure someone is good?

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Oh God.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Make sure that I only hire people, um, one who are incredibly smart, but two, who are uniquely qualified to do exactly what I need them to do. The biggest issue with hiring people I've found is, is unspoken expectations. Trying to hire people who are going to do exactly what you think you want them to do, without actually telling them what to do. So I hire people who are uniquely qualified. And as long as they're intelligent, um, you give them enough runway to just go and build. Right. I then, uh, have a four, kind of a four step process in their 30, 60, 90. And you say like, follow this, especially like for your team or for anyone else. Step one is you have to establish credibility while you're here immediately. Why are you here? Why'd you get this job? Otherwise, no one, no one's going to want to work with you. Right?

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Step two is you have to earn respect. You just have to earn respect in whatever way you're going to do that in your own department. Step number three is you have to gain trust. Trust and respect are not created equally. Right. And step number four is you have to perform a magic trick. If you want to be successful with this company, you have to do something that everybody else around you didn't know was possible. That could be as simple as an Excel formula. Today, a lot of times it's like, oh, we have this, I, I found this AI tool. That's going to save you half an hour a day, an hour a day. That's a magic trick. Or the ability to pick up a phone and call somebody that the rest of the team has been trying to reach out to, but you happen to know them because your daughter's this, that, or the other. Like you do those four things, you will be wildly successful.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Um, and if you make my life easier by removing things off of my plate, game over from there.

• 1:16:59Graham Stephan?

  How many people do you currently have working with you?

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Staff is like 190.

• 1:17:03Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Agents are like 1500, I think at this point.

• 1:17:07Graham Stephan?

  How much of a mental drain is that to have so many people to think about? Or to manage or different touching points throughout the day?

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  I don't think about all of them all day long. Like, I don't know, I mean, to be honest, right? Like, I have, um, kind of like anything else. Like, you, you build out your sports team. I have my executive team and I do my absolute best to have great leadership. That's probably was my hardest learning lesson because I was very involved with absolutely everybody and I didn't have the right leadership in certain spots. I was like, why are there cracks over here? How come that function isn't functioning? I don't, I think I don't, I just don't get it. And people just need direction. They want to be inspired. They want to know why they're waking up every day. They want to be paid fairly. They want to have good culture and they do need direction. No matter what, if someone has a job, they do want to be told what to do. And then know where they're going, right? Otherwise they'll slowly kind of phase out or quiet quit. So you got to have the right leadership and push forward.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  And then I let the leadership around me across all of the functions within the business, you know, report up to me and let me know what I need to know and do little things like, hey, Ryan, just we have like a weekly meeting for leadership and we don't just go through numbers, we go through like company wins. So that way the whole leadership team knows like, oh, the brand new graphic designer crushed it on something because she got it done before anyone else said it was supposed to get done. And the whole leadership team just can bombard them with love and awesomeness. Like, thank you so much for showing up better than you needed to. That is awesome. That's, that's like a really, really cool kind of talent culture. Like, oh, if I work really hard and I try, the company respects that, that's awesome. And we try to do that as much as we can. And how important is it?

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  And what difference does it make to do this in person versus virtually? Um, I'd say 50% of our employees are virtual. Obviously, when COVID started, it was like 80%, but it's, it's a lot more in person today. Some of the jobs that we have just happen to have great people who just don't work in New York or in any of our markets. We have great people in our finance team in Arkansas. You know, we have great people in customer service in California, like, you know, those types of roles. But my executive team, I keep as close to me in New York as possible. And I'm kind of done with zooming with, with higher level talent. Like, if you're not willing to be next to me, then you should just go find a company to work with in your town. When you're in person, you have become the destination.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  When you're not in person, everything is getting to the destination. And that makes it far less fun and far less, uh, productive, right? She's like, hey, let's talk only when we have something to talk about. I will FaceTime you when I have, when we have a meeting, let's make sure we have an agenda. And it removes all of the moments in between, which is usually where the magic is. Cause you're in an elevator or you're by the car and you're like, oh dude, you know what that just reminded? And then you can have that conversation and not have to text it or no, no, I'll tell you in our Zoom tomorrow at nine AM. Right? The magic's then gone. And I think you move a lot faster when you're in person. Not for every role, like we have engineers who are all over the place and that's fine. I actually don't want them in person because they'll be too distracted.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Work, just sit there and work. But for a lot of roles, I think people, people need people and people lift up people. And what's something about running a business that no one's taught you? You have to have the right lawyers. In the United States specifically, I don't think I was fully prepared. That law fair is a strategy for a lot of companies. I thought like, if I just do great work and a good person, like we'll do great business. Didn't realize I also had to be on the defense while also being on the offense. And I think that I've learned the hard way. That great legal is inexpensive.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Bad legal costs you a fortune. And I think that goes for, for our company too, like what we do, providing service. We'll tell clients all the time, like, hey, can you lower your fee? Like, absolutely. Let me introduce you to someone who's willing to do that. Like, well, what do you mean? Don't you want the business? But yeah, but

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  great service is expensive. If you want discount service, it'll cost you a fortune because you will sell for less or not sell at all. And then you're going to call me back and I'm going to have to lower the price because your listing will be stale and da, da, da, da, da. Like, um, I had not the best legal at the beginning. And then we started expanding and people don't know what to do when they have competition. So they sue here and because you have to defend yourself, no matter what, whether you have insurance or not, you just come out of pocket. You know, which is fine. Like we do it, but I, I, I, I, I think you need to have an offensive and defensive strategy. If you really want to go out there and build something big. For a defensive strategy, what do you recommend specifically?

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  To have great legal and great insurance and be fully prepared for worst case scenario.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Copyright infringement, the stupidest shit, especially dude, there are, there are vulture companies out there. They're like, hey, our client actually has a patent on blue.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  $50,000 and, or we're going to take you to court and it's not real, but they are incentivized to take you to court and it'll be three years of legal, and so you have to negotiate, you negotiate down to $6,000 or something stupid. That's still $6,000, right? If someone wants to. So great legal, great insurance and not being penny wise and pound foolish. Instead of hiring the cheap person, hiring 10 of them because they're cheap, hire one or two people that are incredibly expensive and incredibly smart and they will get you so much further. It is the classic quality versus quantity conversation. And when you're brand new and you're an entrepreneur, you're starting your own business, a lot of these things just feel

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  like, no, I don't need it, or it's too expensive, or this will never happen to me. If you build and you win, it will all happen to you. It is just what happens to successful people and successful businesses.

• 1:23:14Graham Stephan?

  It was crazy. We were talking to someone about this about a year ago, who said that they just bake that into the cost of doing business and they just know they take 5% of what they make and they're like, that's what I spend on my legal, whether that be lawyers or lawsuits, because it just happens.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yep. It just happens. Except for me, people who sue me and we've won all of them thus far, it is my moral code that I will shame you across the internet when we win, you know, and make it really, really difficult on your kids and on your families for what you've done to me mentally. And I look forward to those moments.

• 1:23:51Jack Selby?

  I agree with that because there's no recourse for filing a bad lawsuit.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:23:57Graham Stephan?

  That's what I never understood.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  So in the UK and other parts in Europe, it is, right? If you do that, you have to pay it.

• 1:24:04Graham Stephan?

  Reminds me similar, not to that extent, though, but a buddy got sued for having someone else on his channel who spoke negatively about another person.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:24:13Graham Stephan?

  He sued for defamation. He spent three years and $350,000, which to him, every dollar he had to his name fighting this lawsuit.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:21Graham Stephan?

  Won the lawsuit.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:24:22Graham Stephan?

  But he's out 350 grand. So he goes and files a counterclaim to get the money back. He wins that. So he spends another 50 grand, wins it. So he's in about $400,000. Can't collect on it now.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Graham Stephan?

  Because the guy's saying, I don't have any money.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:24:35Graham Stephan?

  So he's out $400,000.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:36Graham Stephan?

  Just to defend himself, which doesn't make any sense to me.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  That doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't go after people that don't have the money.

• 1:24:44Graham Stephan?

  Oh, the guy has the money.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:45Graham Stephan?

  The guy has a very wealthy guy, but it's structured in such a way where he doesn't have the money.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:24:50Graham Stephan?

  I'm broke.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Graham Stephan?

  I don't got anything. It's not in my name.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, usually you can go after entities that way. I mean, the courts are pretty smart now. It's much, much harder to hide assets and different entities. Like, they all route up to a base entity that way. But yeah, I would say as advice, like, be protected on legal, be protected on insurance, know what you're getting into, and be prepared to go to battle. Like, that's just, again, it's a part of doing business today.

• 1:25:18Graham Stephan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Graham Stephan?

  Is there a rule about money that you wish you knew earlier?

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  A rule about money? I mean, I'm pretty, I don't want to say tight or cheap with money. I made a rule for us when we were building the business, because, again, I was bootstrapping for the first four years. Or I said, you know, we could grow really, really fast, but we'd have to burn cash. You know, just the classic, be unprofitable, but you're growing revenue, which is fine. But I don't ever want to be in a tough position. What if markets collapse? Who knows what's going to happen? So I made a rule early on, where I say, we don't buy revenue, we don't lose revenue, we just earn it. If we haven't earned the right to have that customer, that agent, be in that market, then let's not force it. Like, let's not force it. Cac of zero as much as I possibly can.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  And that has proved to be a really, really strong winning strategy because now every customer we have, everyone we work with is here for the absolute right reasons because they want to be, or they're here for the opportunity that they see. And our retention is incredibly high because of it, because no one's here for the cash or because of that, that incentive. I didn't give them a pizza if they sign by nine PM, you know, kind of thing like you, you see salespeople do all the time.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  And so that's been a firm rule with money. You know, and then I have people who help me personally and make sure I don't do anything stupid.

• 1:26:44Jack Selby?

  How much money do you need to have and how much money do you need to make in order to get started at like an entry level purchase in Manhattan?

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  An entry level purchase depends on what you want to buy, but let's say you're trying to buy something for a million dollars, right? If you're going to pay cash, you need to have a million dollars. If you're going to get a loan, typically you'd want to put down at least 300 grand, right? If you can, right? So you're borrowing 70% of that purchase price. So that way you don't have to pay any type of private mortgage insurance, right? You want to be able to cover the monthlies. It's the monthlies that get you. It's not the purchase. You live in the monthly payment or you invest into the monthly payment. If you're going to have rentals that cover the cost, right? That's great. If you can make a return, you know, that's great. But I think now the baseline, it's a little bit insane, especially for two people.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  I think you have to be earning somewhere around $250,000 to buy a million dollar apartment in Manhattan. And if that's where you want to live.

• 1:27:43Jack Selby?

  Yeah, especially considering the HOA.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, the HOA, which you know, you're saying they're called common charges, plus the real estate taxes, plus everything else. Like you just said, there's always something that comes up. The refrigerator breaks, it's 10 grand for a new refrigerator. If you want a nice one, it's nuts.

• 1:27:58Jack Selby?

  Yeah, I was speaking to a friend of mine. He is renting a place in Manhattan and he wants to buy it from the seller.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:28:04Jack Selby?

  And the problem is that he needs to like get approved, not only like the financial getting approved from a lender, but also he has to get approved by like the local board.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the building.

• 1:28:15Jack Selby?

  That manages, yeah, the building.

• 1:28:16Graham Stephan?

  I had no idea that was a thing.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:28:18Graham Stephan?

  No.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  Every residential building that you buy into, other than a townhouse, because you're buying the house in New York City, if it's a condo, you have a condo board. And if it's a co-op, you have a co-op board. The co-op board can turn you down for anything. They don't have to tell you why. They don't like the color of your eyes. You could have a hundred million dollars in the bank. We don't want you in our building. And they'll give you your money back. And the seller can no longer sell to you. That's a co-op board. A condo board can't do that. They have the right of first refusal. So if they turn down a purchaser who's verified and qualified, they don't have to sell to you, but then they do have to buy the apartment from the owner at the same exact price, which has happened like a couple of times in history. But you do have to fill out a massive condo application. Oftentimes, it's two years' tax returns.

• 1:29:00Graham Stephan?

  Whoa.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  It's reference letters, both professional and personal, who's going to be there, their animals, whether kids, it's a lot.

• 1:29:06Graham Stephan?

  Now, is that because that one person could affect negatively the value for everyone else? Like if they're throwing parties with like 20 people in there all the time?

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:29:16Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  In part two, it's also, it's another form of checks and balances. Except remember, it's New York City, right? And everyone shares the same front door.

• 1:29:25Graham Stephan?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  You all have your own individual doors, but you all share the same front door. And so there's background checks, there's credit checks, and it doesn't often mean that the person's not going to be able to buy it, but it does create a barrier of entry that for someone who probably shouldn't be in the building, or probably shouldn't buy it, they're not going to want to do that board package. So they just don't. In new construction, where you're buying from the developer, that's the one time you can buy an apartment building where you don't have to do that application process, but you do have to have the money.

• 1:29:54Jack Selby?

  The problem is that his is a co-op and he and the seller, their hopeful seller, bought it during like 2020 when rates were really low. And so I told my friend, I was like, dude, you should just try to do this sub two, or you should try to do it like a seller finance. And then the seller was like all down for that. But then the co-op, yeah, they just don't allow it.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you can't, unfortunately, what would totally change the game is if you could assign residential interest rates, the same way you can in commercial. In commercial, you can assign the rates. In residential, you can't. So that would be, that would change the game.

• 1:30:29Jack Selby?

  I always thought that you should be able to take your mortgage with you.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't.

• 1:30:33Jack Selby?

  You buy something else.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  No, no, they want that mortgage recording tax.

• 1:30:36Jack Selby?

  Of course.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  Like in two, in New York City, the mortgage recording tax is 2% of the loan.

• 1:30:40Jack Selby?

  It's 2%?

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  2% of the loan amount, 1.925% of the loan amount. So the right to get a loan in New York City, if you get a loan of a million dollars, right, it's 20 grand at the closing table just to, what do you mean? It's New York City. Everything's taxed. Look, it's just, and their old taxes are only going higher, man. Yeah. The mansion tax goes up to 4% in New York City now. In LA, it's, it's intense too, right? You've got that luxury tax that I think over $5 million is 6%. Yeah, man, great politics.

• 1:31:11Jack Selby?

  Who pays the transfer tax?

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  It depends. Typically, the standard rule of thumb is it's the seller. It's also just over 2%.

• 1:31:19Jack Selby?

  So the seller would pay like 5% in commission, commissions or whatever, 5, 6%.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  And then they pay 2% in transfer.

• 1:31:24Jack Selby?

  Yes. And then potentially the mansion.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  No, mansion's paid by the buyer.

• 1:31:27Jack Selby?

  Okay.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Now, those are all.

• 1:31:30Jack Selby?

  But it's still taken out of the same pool of money that's being transacted.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Correct. But the, the oftentimes, sometimes, especially in tough markets, people will pay different parts of closing costs. Like if you buy new construction and the developer really wants to sell, they'll say, all right, so this price, I'll pay the tran, I'll pay the transfer taxes at the developer, I'll pay your mansion tax, I'll do this, I'll do that, I'll give you six months of common charges, because it's all about the net price. And the buyer wants the absolute best deal possible. So sometimes, but because it's all about the net, the buyer is paying all the fees anyway. It's their money that they're giving in exchange for the apartment, right, or the home, that is then being used to pay all those fees. So it's just net, net.

• 1:32:09Graham Stephan?

  Is that, is that cost gonna come down over time, do you think, with like ChatGPT and AI maybe taking over some of the real estate agent commission work? That maybe it's whittled down from 5% down to 2? Or like you have an AI agent of some sort that like does a deal on blockchain?

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  If you can find me a qualified person who even with efficient work will do it for 2% by all means. And they've tried it. Every firm is coming to the United States to try to create discount brokerage. Redfin collapsed, Purple Bricks collapsed, left the city. Like there's so many people have tried it and it's absolutely possible. You can do it. The service is okay. But the best people work for the biggest incentives. And if there are marketplaces where sellers are willing to pay 5% or 6% or more to get the best people, that's where they're gonna go. Compass was Urban Compass. They set out, they raised their first initial set of funding to break the brokerage system

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  because they had neighborhood experts who were fee-based people, right? To create lower commission incentives on sellers, right? It was all fee-based. It was great.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  I don't, I'm not gonna work for an hourly wage, right? I'd rather work for free with bigger opportunity. And consumers would rather pay nothing until the end.

• 1:33:33Graham Stephan?

  So how often do you see it where a Zillow agent brings in a buyer to like a luxury?

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  A lot. That's why Zillow makes all of their money. You know, it's an agent at any other firm, but they're part of a Zillow program that's enabling them to get lead flow. Right? And so we hustle to get listings all day long. Those listings syndicate out to Zillow. Zillow then takes those listings and sells the leads to those listings to other agents.

• 1:33:55Graham Stephan?

  You know what I don't like is that on Zillow?

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  And that's what their class action lawsuit is about right now.

• 1:33:58Graham Stephan?

  That, that's what I thought was ridiculous is that on Zillow, it's like contact this property. But then the listing agent information is buried in a sea of text. And I remember recently a buddy was looking at a place in Vegas and says, hey, could you come with me and see this house? And so we pull up to this house and this dude shows up. And I'm thinking, is this the listing agent? This is a little weird. The guy just seemed a bit out of it. Nice guy, just out of it, a little bit. Anyway, he shows us through the house. And then at the very end, I say, is this the listing agent? She's like, no, I just, I reached out on Zillow. I thought he was the listing agent.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:32Graham Stephan?

  I said, no, that dude was just a random guy that you reached out on Zillow.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  And that's how they make their money.

• 1:34:37Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  And if that deal goes through, Zillow tracks everything. It will find you in your coffin and they'll take somewhere between 35 and 40%.

• 1:34:44Graham Stephan?

  Which I thought was crazy.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:34:45Graham Stephan?

  I just reached out to the listing agent. And if you're gonna be reaching out like that.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you gotta know to do that. So the same way there was the commission's class action lawsuit, where all the big box brokerages had to fork over. It was a multi-billion dollar settlement. At the end of the day, what it was really about was the unspoken standard, where do you have to use an agent? No. But if the standard and all the training guides and the materials from all the huge firms are, make sure the seller knows that the commission should be five or six percent and that the buyers can be represented by our own agents, even if they want to come direct, they should get three or two and a half percent. The standard was such that the consumer had to be so overly educated about the process that they typically weren't and it was costing them money. Right? And so the court sided in favor of the consumers,

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  which is what they'll typically do. Same thing for Zillow. You can find the listing agent, they're there, but it's not the standard operating procedure, right? You go on a website, you see a thing, you click on it. It says setup showing, I set up showing. I don't know that I'm going with somebody that doesn't represent the listing. That agent then goes there and they're the ones who are causing it to be a multiple fee situation. If you're just going directly to the listing agent, the listing agent say, oh, I've got a direct deal. Oh, you want to make an offer? Great, I'll go to my seller. Let me see, oh, we have to bridge a gap. You know what? We're doing this, I'm a good person. And all of a sudden, you've got a deal done for less. So it's not necessarily the brokerages. A lot of it is from the aggregators who make tons and tons of money on listing commissions too.

• 1:36:16Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, that's what Jack did. Can I say that?

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Graham Stephan?

  On your warehouse? When Jack sent me this warehouse, I said the first thing, if you're serious about it, go to the listing agent.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  No, you didn't say that. Oh, hot dog!

• 1:36:28Graham Stephan?

  Why did I say that?

• 1:36:30Jack Selby?

  Because that's what I did for my, the past house that I bought.

• 1:36:33Graham Stephan?

  Because I told you to do that.

• 1:36:34Jack Selby?

  Yeah, you told me to do it five years ago and then I like have since been doing that. When I find a property I'm interested, I reach out to the, yeah, the listing agent.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Are you a serial, are you a serial flipper? What's going on over here?

• 1:36:45Jack Selby?

  No, I'm not, I'm not a serial, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not a serial flipper. Okay.

• 1:36:47Graham Stephan?

  He's a serial buy and holder.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  Ah, gotcha.

• 1:36:50Jack Selby?

  Yeah, I'm a serial entrepreneur. Okay. I look for deals and I try to, I try to get a good deal.

• 1:36:54Graham Stephan?

  But got a, but got a great deal because you went to the listing agent. Now, I'm not saying in every situation you should always go to the listing agent, but when you're an experienced buyer and you know what you want.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can do it by yourself. That's fine.

• 1:37:06Jack Selby?

  And it was interesting. I mean, her commission on my side was gonna be like tens of thousands of dollars.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Jack Selby?

  And let's just say more than 20,000.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Jack Selby?

  And then I asked her, I was like, you know what, like the best I can do is like 7,500. If you're willing to do it, it's just some paperwork. And she was like, yeah, I think I could do that. And then two days passed and then she contacts me again. She's like, hey, sorry, the brokerage, like they won't let me do it for this. Um, I have to do it for $35,000. And I was like, oh my gosh, 35. I'm like, okay, well, I'm just gonna hit up this other agent that I just had this agent's contact in my phone, like, hey, can you just transact this property for me for 7,500? She said, yes. I went back to the other agent. I'm like, I found someone else to do it for 7,500. She's like, okay, I can do it for 7,500. And so it's like, for me in that experience.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  It's all a negotiation, but you know what you're doing.

• 1:37:50Jack Selby?

  It's all a negotiation for sure, but like something as simple as a few texts back and forth saved me like $20,000 on that deal.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Good move. Yeah, of course.

• 1:37:58Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. Have you seen that lawsuit affect commissions? Cause it, it, I don't see any change.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  No, cause there's no inventory. If there was a lot of inventory, it's kinda like we're going back to, I don't know, an hour ago, talking about the city, right? New York City, politics, like there's only so much you can do. If there's no inventory, if you have high rates, you have far less people who can afford to buy and you have far less things for them to buy. And so when you have a tough inventory market and a tough buyer's market, because the monthly payments are just high, you need to incentivize people to get deals done. And so the standard hasn't really changed. What has changed now is additional paperwork and everyone's very clear and above board, which I actually. I am for free market transparency. I was kind of okay with what went down because it stops some of the shenanigans that you're just talking about, right?

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  If you earn 6%, by all means, earn it. If you can find a great living and a way to do that, but you have to be black and white and you have to be above board. So now there's, there's buy side agreements in a way that most markets just haven't had before. And you go through and you write down, hey, I'm going to show you these 10 properties. These eight, the sellers are paying my fee. You're good. These two, the sellers aren't. So if you like them, the fee's 3%. And then the buyer gets to say, no, don't show me those. I'll go by myself. Or the buyer gets to say, I understand. Okay, let's go see them. But now everything's above board and totally, totally transparent. That way, there's, there's no sneakiness. There's no weirdness, the way it used to be.

• 1:39:25Jack Selby?

  What would you say are the strongest reasons to live in New York City and against living in New York City?

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Well, you seem like you don't want to live there.

• 1:39:34Jack Selby?

  I want to live in New York City. Are you kidding me? I tell Graham all the time. It's like, if I could live anywhere in America or anywhere, honestly, in the world, it would be New York City right now.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  New York is the most intellectually curious city on the planet. You could walk outside and see someone you've never met 100 times a day, every day for 100 years. You can't do that anywhere else. There is every industry. There's art, tech, finance, sport, right? Pick an industry, it has a headquarters in New York City. You have the poorest of the poor, the wealthiest of the wealthy and everyone in between. You have great education, great art, great food, great fun, great sadness, and everything is on a rock. It's also full of vertical neighborhoods, which just make it also, in a weird way,

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  incredibly environmentally conscious versus like where we are today. Everyone has 8,000 square foot house. I want acreage. I want this. I need my yard. We're in the desert, but whatever. I want grass. Like everyone wants to have their stuff in New York. It's like, no, you want a three bedroom that looks at the park? You've got to be so successful that you can pay me $10 million a bedroom. If you can't do that, you don't get one. And so it really, really, really kind of democratizes the world in a very, very tight and efficient place. And it's also one of the most productive markets that I know of, next to, you know, like a Hong Kong, let's say, where people just work their ass

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  off to build because there is just so much opportunity. And you don't need to have a car.

• 1:41:12Speaker 00

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• 1:42:12Jack Selby?

  What I love about New York is that you can go into a bar in New York, like in East Village or something, and strike up a conversation with anyone and they can be a fascinating person, up to something that's super unique, something you can learn a ton about. Whereas if I go out here in Las Vegas and I'm down on Fremont Street, or I'm like at a Parkway Tavern somewhere, and I talk to someone, it's like, they're not up to much. Most of the time.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Especially on Fremont Street.

• 1:42:39Jack Selby?

  Well, I'm just, especially on Fremont Street, but like, of course, I like talking to these people in, in just a way of like, oh, cool. Yeah, this is awesome. But like, there's no substance to the conversation, whereas you can strike up a conversation with literally anybody on the street in New York, which is so fun. And they'll tell you something interesting. Think about-

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Think about higher education, though, right? There's gated entry. We're talking about like New York City. New York City is so expensive. There's an exclusivity and there's gated entry to it because most people just can't afford to live there. Which means the people that have figured out how to live there, for better and for worse, fucking interesting. And they do something that has created the wherewithal, whether someone else is paying for it, or they're paying for it, or they stole it, that makes them worthwhile of a conversation at a bar. Other cities have a far lower barrier of entry. And so you're talking to people that didn't need to go through 70,000 hoops just to get into the bar. So, you know, it's kind of the same thing.

• 1:43:39Graham Stephan?

  What's for you been one of the most unexpected benefits of the Netflix show?

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean Netflix changed my life. Million Dollar Listen New York changed my life in 2012. Overnight, that show syndicated around the world. I did not know that. That wasn't like something they told me, nor did I ever expect it. And it enabled me to open doors. Cause then I could call people and say, hey, my name is Ryan Serhant. I'm a Realtor. I also have this TV show. Have you ever, oh, you'll meet with me? Okay, great. Then I had to go and do my job.

• 1:44:05Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  I mean, in one night, on June 28th in 2024, Only Manhattan comes out and they put it in front of just under 300 million people and gave them the option to watch it. And a lot of them watched it and was just insane. Everything we had broke. Like I've never, ever experienced anything like it. Because everything we do on social is lean back content. You're watching a podcast, I'm leaning back, right? I'm watching it, cool, cool, cool. And it fills up this much of your brain. Netflix long form, character driven dramas, right? Which is really what we do. It's an occupational docu-series is lean in TV. To really, to enjoy it, you can watch it in the background, that's fine. There's a lot of stuff like that.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  But you, it's a deal show, so you really lean in, which means it fills up this much of your brain, which means you get that more engaged. And so the inbounds we had, I mean, changed everything for us. We were just a different company now because of it. And season two comes out December 5th and will just be insane. The level of inbound lead flow is just crazy.

• 1:45:10Graham Stephan?

  Do you know how many views your first season got? Do they tell you any of the metrics? Or do they just come back and they say, we're going to renew again because it was good?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Um, more the latter than anything.

• 1:45:22Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  They said we're gonna renew, uh, they renewed it in like 28 days.

• 1:45:26Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Which was pretty quick to season two. It's also, owning Manhattan's also now like, isn't Selling Sunset is like Housewives for real estate, right? There's a lot, you know, HGTV is slowly dying.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  I don't know of any other real estate TV show, really.

• 1:45:45Graham Stephan?

  Mauricio Umansky had a, he had a Netflix show, right?

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was canceled. Yeah, it canceled. So, um, so our show, one, it's the only one in New York City. There's no others. And two, it's the only deal show that's out there for real estate that, that anybody watches anyway. I just don't know of any others. I could be, I could be wrong. And so it has a very, very, very captive audience and, um, it's just wild. I don't know, like in the first 15 days, it said a billion minutes had been watched. That's one thing they told us. I don't really know what that means. I could do the math.

• 1:46:18Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  But like, is that episode one? Is that, I really don't know.

• 1:46:21Graham Stephan?

  The thing with Netflix that I didn't realize that I heard from Selling Sunset.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:27Graham Stephan?

  Is that when you get a view, it's usually just not one person. It's you're watching with, one person watching with like three others. So you kind of multiply that and you get a much higher number. So if you get a billion minutes, it's really probably three to four billion minutes because you're getting people watching with, you know, a wife or a husband or a kid or someone else.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, people watch solo on their phones. So when you get views and it's on the phone, oftentimes it's someone watching on their phone, in the bathroom, at the bed, whatever, you know?

• 1:46:54Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. I'm gonna call it here first, but I have a feeling you're probably gonna do a spinoff with a different office in the next like two seasons. That's, that's my prediction.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  This, this season of season two, one episode is in Miami. Because we opened up the Florida office, we're selling the Mercedes Benz places in Miami. And so Mercedes Benz executives flew in from Stuttgart and we did the whole thing down there.

• 1:47:16Graham Stephan?

  Owning Miami.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  Owning Vegas, maybe?

• 1:47:19Graham Stephan?

  Vegas?

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, it, it would have to be incredibly worth it. Making a TV show is a ton of work. It takes so much time. It's been a year and a half since season one and I've been. Working on season two ever since. So like it's just, and it comes out all in one day and it's gone. So it is a lot of work. It's a lot of time, but I love it though. And I think, um, uh, I just really, really enjoy making it. I enjoy being executive producer. I enjoy finding those cool moments and working on the music and the edits and stuff.

• 1:47:48Graham Stephan?

  What's the biggest misconception people have about you from the show?

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  That I'm a psycho crazy boss. I don't know. I think I'm relatively normal.

• 1:47:56Graham Stephan?

  For me, I would say it's probably your work ethic is that I, I see your schedule of like four o'clock in the morning, going to the gym, working until like 11:00 PM at midnight, doing emails. I'm like, how does, how does he do it?

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:08Graham Stephan?

  And is that all real? Are you really going from like 4:00 AM to midnight?

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Graham Stephan?

  Do you sleep?

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  When you say terrible, you, you, you choose to do that every day. I think so. I think I choose to do it, but I also, I don't think I choose to do it. I think, um, I think there is a problem that I have, and maybe it's just the way I was raised or the way that I've grown up in the industry where I was like, if I, I, the least I can do is do the most. Like if all else fails, at least I did everything I could with the productive hours that I have on the planet. And I don't think that's necessarily the healthiest way to operate. It's how I operate and it's hard for me to change. But if I'm being totally, totally honest, I, I am very envious of people who have relatively empty calendars,

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  who are just builders and makers, you know? I feel like I am so, so scheduled and so busy at all times.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  You know, I don't wanna, I don't wanna die and be like, at least I had a full calendar is completely meaningless. So you do have a slight desire to change it. I would, I would love to if I could figure out a way to do it.

• 1:49:18Graham Stephan?

  Have you ever spoke to like a professional about?

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Like a therapist?

• 1:49:21Graham Stephan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  I have spoken to a therapist. I have unproductive use of my time though. Like I just.

• 1:49:27Graham Stephan?

  You could do it on a treadmill though. So at least you're getting a.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  No, I like listening to music when I, when I work out. I don't want to listen to someone be like, so tell me about your mom. And I'm like, no, fuck you, man. My mom's fine. Uh, yeah, I would love to be in that position. I think. Going back to one of the mistakes that I made, I told you about hiring people, not having the right people in leadership early on that are too dependent upon me, where every decision has to be Ryan, everything is me, me, me, me, me. As much as I, I felt like I needed to have that type of control. I think our company is at the point now where it's probably better if I don't, to enable me to have more space to think and to brainstorm and to do what's biggest for the business during the day, not just what's the neediest thing for the business during the day. And I hope to get there. Maybe the next time I come back here, I'm like, dude, I'm so, I'm chill.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  Well, last question I have for you, has your skincare routine changed? Has my skincare, finally, a hard hitting question. No, I haven't changed my skincare routine in like 15 years. And what's the skincare routine? Well, since you ask, at night I use an Erno Laszlo mud soap to wash my face. During the day, I like like a harsh chemical Neutrogena deep clean. I use one of those ultrasonic brushes, right, for exfoliation. I use a zinc, tinted zinc sunscreen every single day with SPF 20 in it every day for like 20 years, probably.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  And then every December I do- Where do you put the sunscreen? On my face. On your beard and everything too? No, no, not my beard. I don't think so. Just, just nose? Yeah, nose everywhere. Okay. And has zinc in it, so it helps keep my face cool. And I, every December I do a V beam laser treatment, which shrinks blood vessels in the face. And I had really, really bad acne for like 10 years. And so I had like four doses of Accutane when I was younger. And I think it just ruined so much of my self-confidence, especially because I wanted to be an actor and all that stuff that like, once I finally got that under control. It has just become like a part of my process.

• 1:51:42Graham Stephan?

  And you met Jeff Allen, by the way, your look alike.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we both are gray and white. Yes. Yeah. Every, every white guy with gray hair, like you and yo, what's up? What's up? You know?

• 1:51:53Graham Stephan?

  Do you guys give each other looks when you see each other?

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  No, but he did. I was like, what's, what do you put in your hair? And he gave me this like crazy product. He said, what do you put in your hair? I'm like, I'm horse conditioner. Um, cause gray hair is hard. Cause it's just super, it's a lot of very thin hair. It's really, really annoying. But yeah, he was, he was amazing. He was awesome. His story is super, super cool. It was fun.

• 1:52:13Graham Stephan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. And speaking of zinc, uh, there's a member of the index, which is down below in the description, if you want to apply, who also sells a zinc sunscreen. So I'll see if he could send you some.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Nice. Please do. Thanks, guys.

• 1:52:26Jack Selby?

  Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you guys for watching so much.

• 1:52:31Graham Stephan?

  And make sure to check out December 5th, Owning Manhattan.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  Netflix.

• 1:52:36Graham Stephan?

  Season two. Thanks. Till next time.

• 1:52:47Speaker 06

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