Is 'Owning Manhattan' Real? Here's What We've Sleuthed

My personal coping mechanism for getting through the rest of 2024? Watching Owning Manhattan on repeat, aka the buzzy new Netflix reality show about high powered real estate agents in New York City who work for Ryan Serhant of all-caps SERHANT.

But, when watching a real estate reality show, one has to ponder the question: how...real is this? And in the case of Owning Manhattan, very!

Obviously, a ton of agents work for Serhant, and the ones featured on the show were technically "cast." But they aren't just random people hired for the show—they are all legit real estate agent hand-picked by Ryan. As he explained to Variety:

Ryan also told the Los Angeles Times that everything was filmed—for better or for worse:

"With Netflix, part of the deal was, 'Here’s the amount of time you’re gonna film for, and we’re gonna film everything, for better and for worse, and we’ll see what happens.' That removes some deal pressure. On Million Dollar Listing, it was formatted. So you’re gonna list it, and you would have those 12 listings up on a board for a year, and if they sell, they sell; they don’t sell, you get fired on TV. Because of the shooting window, you couldn’t leave things open-ended. This is different."

He later added, "If we’re gonna do this as a company, we have to go all in. I don’t want anyone watching the show and saying to themselves, 'What didn’t they show?'"

As for the real estate deals specifically, they speak for themselves! Like, we know for a fact that Bad Bunny rented that fancy apartment because it straight up leaked to the press. (And by the way, it's since been sold.)

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