Serhant Expands to California with $2B in Listings

Ryan Serhant brought his namesake brokerage into California with $2 billion in active listings and offices running from Beverly Hills up to Lake Tahoe.

The California rollout covers Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco, and Tahoe. The Beverly Hills office opened with three founding agents: Ben Belack, Courtney Poulos, and Patrick Michael. Of that $2 billion in statewide inventory, $1 billion is concentrated in L.A., according to the firm.

Belack arrived from Beverly Hills-based The Agency, pulling seven agents with him. He’s taken the title of executive vice president at Serhant. He’s also a familiar face to Netflix viewers from “Buying Beverly Hills,” a profile that made him an appealing choice for a firm that treats media presence as a business asset, not a side effect.

That visibility factored directly into the hire.

“I’ve been following Ryan for a very long time, and I really admire the way with which he approaches business and his way with the media, and I feel that we have a very similar approach,” Belack told the LA Business Journal.

Serhant founded the brokerage in 2020 after his run on Netflix’s “Owning Manhattan.” The firm spent its first years pushing along the East Coast before moving into Arizona and Nevada. California is the biggest single expansion it’s attempted. The company now operates across 16 states, carries more than 2,000 agents on its national agent roster and production data, and recorded $7.1 billion in sales volume last year while growing more than 100% annually.

Serhant didn’t spend much time hedging when asked why California came when it did.

“California was inevitable,” he said. “There’s no better marketplace that truly understands the integration of media, technology and real estate than California. It wasn’t a matter of if Serhant would come to California but when.”

The firm is calling the California entry one of the largest brokerage openings in the state’s history, a claim that sounds outsized until you factor in what $1 billion in active L.A. listings on launch day actually means in this market. Licensing for agents operating under the firm falls under the California Department of Real Estate, which sets the compliance framework for the state’s roughly 400,000 licensed agents.

Serhant isn’t walking into an empty room. The Beverly Hills luxury market has been carved up by founder-led boutiques for several years now, and the track record of those firms makes the competitive picture clear. Drew Fenton left Hilton and Hyland in 2022 to start Carolwood, which posted $5 billion in sales for 2025 and holds $3.5 billion in active inventory. Branden and Rayni Williams, also former Hilton and Hyland brokers, launched The Beverly Hills Estates in 2021 and closed $3 billion in sales last year. Kofi Nartey left Compass that same year to found Globl RED, also based in Beverly Hills. What those firms proved, collectively, is that clients don’t stay with companies when the agents they trust walk out the door.

Serhant enters knowing that dynamic cuts both ways. It can pull talent and clients from established rosters, but it’s also entering a market where every significant founding agent is already running a book of business elsewhere.

Agent interest after the California announcement was immediate and loud. Belack described the reaction.

“On the ground, it’s been crazy. I have never been inundated with so many direct messages on Instagram,” he said. “It was wild, it was truly wild.” Serhant himself said the California launch generated more inbound agent inquiries than any previous expansion the firm had run.

The timeline from founding to California took roughly five years. Serhant launched in 2020, spent 2021 and 2022 building density on the East Coast, and pushed west before arriving at a state with the market depth to justify calling itself inevitable. With $2 billion in listings on day one and a founding agent who came with a television profile, a team of seven, and name recognition in the specific zip codes Serhant wants to own, the Beverly Hills office isn’t starting from scratch.

Whether the firm can sustain that opening velocity against Carolwood, The Beverly Hills Estates, and the other boutiques that have had years to build client loyalty is the question the next sales cycle will start to answer.