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Ryan Serhant, the star realtor captured in Netflix’s “Owning Manhattan,” claims his company produces about 2,200 social posts a month. It’s a hefty amount for a man who oversees a sprawling real estate empire across
19 U.S. regions, an in-house production studio that employs roughly 100 people and millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Producing so much content, however, is a tough ask for someone trying to do their day job: managing a brokerage. Enter AI.
Serhant has partnered with HeyGen, a company that lets users create personalized AI avatars, to build a new social media presence featuring an AI persona modeled after his likeness. The avatar will appear across Instagram, TikTok and X under the handle @HeySerhant, an extension of his main presence that will share lessons learned from decades in real estate.
“I’ve accumulated years of lessons that I don’t always have time to turn into content,” he tells Variety. “I do my best, but I don’t always have time anymore. As I run the businesses and I still sell and we still do the TV shows, this gives us a way to make more of that accessible to the people that want to watch it.”
Serhant’s decision follows a wave of high-profile figures opting to license their images to AI companies, allowing for new forms of content featuring their likeness while potentially creating a new revenue stream for those who opt in. “The View” host Sunny Hostin licensed her image to the AI studio Fountain 0 to appear in movies based on her books, while Higgsfield paid a coterie of streaming and sports stars to use their likenesses in a recent AI-generated film.
The relationship with HeyGen came about “organically,” Serhant says, after witnessing the types of content the company was creating. His content arm — of the 100 people, roughly 30 are based with Serhant in New York — has tried to figure out ways to balance building content around the broker’s image as he’s traveling the country for showings.
“I get very, very interested in how we can add accelerant to what we do and how to scale the one asset that is really, really hard to scale, which is ourselves,” he says. “It’s an age-old problem: If you have a brand built around a face, if you have a brand built around a voice, how do you scale that?”
“With his HeyGen avatar, his audience can now hear from him every day without Ryan having to be on camera every day,” Andrew Mok, HeyGen’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “We believe in a future where everyone can scale their presence — sharing what they know and showing up wherever their audience is, without being limited by their own time.”
What the @HeySerhant account won’t produce is some of the personalized content Serhant is known for, including “day in the life of a CEO” videos and clips featuring his daughter Zena. “The connection to me and my brand and my life, and people along the ride on my journey — none of that changes,” he says. “This is in addition to, which is awesome and highly helpful.”
The account will produce at least one video a day for at least 12 months (though Serhant expects the arrangement to extend well beyond that), with Serhant and members of his team working on each one to make sure they accurately reflect his sentiments and image. Those videos will exclusively feature the avatar, though Serhant expects clips to pop up where his actual persona will engage with it.
“Ny wife always told me, ‘You just need to replicate yourself, you’re the only one who can understand what you say,” he jokes. “Well, look, guess what? Welcome to the future.”
