$1 Billion in 365 Days: The Habits of an Elite Closer
- Guest
- Ryan Serhant
- Read time
- ~5 min
- Uploaded
- 13 Oct 2026
- Duration
- 0:55:32
- Views
- 71.3K
KEYPOINTS
- 01
Don’t ‘fake it till you make it’—act now as the person you will verifiably be in 12–24 months.
He rejects the phrase because it implies lying, and in sales ‘everything sounds great until someone lies to your face.’ Instead: write down who you’ll be in one to two years and behave like that person today. You rarely become exactly that version, but you become ‘some alternate reality version’ of it. He now runs this with his daughter, agents and staff.
- 02
Embarrassment, not failure, is the modern career killer—people willing to look foolish make more money.
He argues social-media natives have normalised failure but are ‘100,000% afraid of embarrassment,’ so they won’t talk to 100 people to meet five. Theatre gave him memorisation and diaphragm breathing—selling isn’t acting, ‘but it’s the same muscle’—so he strongly recommends improv for agents. Bad comments are fine; worry when people stop talking about you.
- 03
Treat your ~1,000 productive minutes a day as cash, and don’t hand the rest of the wallet to whoever stole five.
Of 1,440 daily minutes, about 1,000 are usable. If someone grabbed $5 from your $1,000 you wouldn’t hand over the rest, yet people let one bad five-minute call wreck an afternoon. He split days into find, keep and do business, cut meetings to 15–30 minutes and lived in 15-minute blocks—done humbly, never ‘I have 14 minutes, go.’
- 04
The best sale is no sale: people hate being sold but love shopping, so sell the dream before the bed.
Open with the ‘two C’s’: a compliment to disarm and something in common (the street, a job, a star sign). Then the ‘question game’: never ask anything answerable with no, and let people talk. Discuss everything but the sale, yet set expectations and next steps (his ‘CODO’, close on day one) so you don’t just make a friend. Weak sellers pitch the bed; strong ones sell the dream first.
- 05
Follow up, follow through, follow back—forever, until people buy, die, or tell you to stop.
Follow up until there’s an outcome, follow through on every promise, follow back with everyone who chose you. His follow-ups are personal notes every other week—market news, a listing, a sale—never an ask. Not a 100% hit rate, but ‘far greater than the not.’ Quitting is easy; trying is harder ‘but it’s also free.’
- 06
Ego kills more deals, careers and relationships than anything; play for the other side to win.
In $20–100M deals, agent, buyer and seller egos collide. Over-communicate, ‘kill bees with honey,’ ‘kudos them to death.’ Outside true zero-sum contests, a deal only works if the counterparty wins too—even a bank in a short sale wins by clearing its books.
- 07
Distribution is the most valuable asset: content pulls, advertising pushes.
When Million Dollar Listing aired the phone didn’t ring—nobody calls people they see on TV. What worked was ‘content to community to commerce’: Instagram from 2013 democratised luxury homes visually, then YouTube because reality TV aired after properties sold. By 2015–17 developers wrote clauses into listing agreements requiring tours on his personal YouTube. Ads push and must repeat endlessly; content and PR pull.
- 08
Hook ’em, help ’em, ask ’em: no one owes a stranger attention, so earn the right to ask.
Everyone already has friends, so first give a reason to know you (the hook), then help with something unrelated to you—an introduction, a discount, a hard-to-get table—before any ask. He says 60,000+ salespeople in 133 countries train on these frameworks, needed because many young people ‘have no idea how to talk’ off their phones.
- 09
Being pleased but never satisfied is both the engine and a cost borne by the people closest to you.
His wife told him on camera he used to be happy. He argues businesses that don’t grow die as costs and taxes rise. After a $1B sales year and about $22M in commissions in 2019, he ‘went to zero’ to found a brokerage, and reframes his chip on the shoulder as ‘pure brutal responsibility’ to people who win when he wins.
EXAMPLES
- 01
The Million Dollar Listing audition: ~3,000 applicants down to 16, then four.
Living in a tiny studio and riding the subway, he asked who a casting director would want. He borrowed a Range Rover, had the LA crew meet him at 5am (2am their time) for shirtless boxing, showered in front of them to show he had no filter, had friends call nonstop, and cast an acting-class friend as an angry hedge funder. When a showing fell through, he copied a date who once walked out on him—claimed an emergency and drove off. They called the next day.
- 02
Five years of fortnightly notes, then $16M, $73M and $33M sales.
He met a wealthy prospect briefly in 2012 and wrote every other week until the man replied in late 2017—he had simply been busy. Google Alerts on names and companies gave him reasons to send a no-ask ‘congrats, crushing it.’
- 03
The $8.3M ‘con artist’ deal that turned out real.
In 2011 a phone buyer offered $8M cash on an $8.5M listing, settled at $8.3M, then vanished. Months later an $830,000 deposit arrived from a bank in a dubious country; peers called it a laundering pattern. Serhant found his Paris address, flew over, drank tequila, got partial signatures, and later rode armoured Escalades to JFK while the buyer inspected a new plane. They closed in cash. The buyer’s reason: he’d been drunk online and ‘felt bad for you.’
- 04
Rock bottom: a declined card at Food Emporium in summer 2008.
Avoiding his balance, his card was declined buying chicken, rice and tofu, and he cried on the subway. His parents said come home; a friend said get licensed. He licensed the day Lehman filed, needed only $2,000 a month, made $9,000 in year one, and thrived because competitors fled the crash.
- 05
2018: outselling the next team by ~$350M in a bad year.
In a rough New York market he crossed roughly $800M in sales despite being ‘by far the least connected,’ beating the next team by about a million dollars a day. He credits treating time as high-value currency.
OTHER RELEVANT
- 01
Build a brand from zero by becoming the ‘mayor’ of a town.
Anonymous in a new city, he’d interview every dry cleaner and café owner on his phone, buy a cheap alliterative site (‘Growing Up Georgetown’), optimise it for search and AI answers on where to eat and who to hire, then convert that trust into real estate. Give, give, give, then ask.
- 02
Move up-market by saying no to the comfortable work.
Burnout is repeating the same thing without results. He dropped rentals—70% of New York’s market—for sales only and endured ‘brutal’ months. Most people never take that bet because their bills depend on the old work.
- 03
Contrarian timing can be an edge, but judge the economics.
He launched his firm in 2020 amid COVID with a 9-month-old and a house under construction, against his parents’ advice, using the frozen spring market to build ‘under the cover of darkness.’ Now he sees struggling brokerages whose ‘underlying economics don’t work’—losing money not to grow but because they lose money—and ego stops them fixing it.