Million Dollar Listing's Ryan Serhant Pushes Into Red-Hot Brooklyn With Bed Stuy Office

Can celebrity sell Bed Stuy brownstones? Million Dollar Listing’s Ryan Serhant of Nest Seekers is betting yes.

He and his team are prepping to open their first Brooklyn office, at 326 Tompkins Avenue, close to Gates Avenue, tony boutique Sincerely Tommy, and numerous new eating and drinking spots, including the Bed-Vyne mini empire. This will be Nest Seekers’ second Brooklyn office — it has had one in Williamsburg for years.

Brooklyn real estate is red hot, and the team has been selling lots of homes in Bed Stuy and neighboring Bushwick in the last year, Serhant told Brownstoner.

“There’s so much talk about the high end of the market slowing down, and questions about the economy, and we don’t see any of that in this part of Brooklyn. We put a house on the market and we sell it right away,” he said. “There’s not that much inventory. It’s a very liquid, exciting market to be in and it’s important for us to be there.”

Indeed, home prices in central Brooklyn and Bed Stuy in particular have skyrocketed, with prices in Bed Stuy leaping 194 percent since 2004 — the largest gain of any area in the U.S.’s 300 largest cities. The median price for a single-family home is now over a million dollars, according to a report in May.

When Brownstoner dropped by Tompkins Avenue this morning, the office looked ready to open any minute, with a bright-yellow telephone booth and desks and computers in place.

The grand opening party will take place Wednesday, Sept. 7 — just in time for the start of the fall real estate season.

Serhant, a licensed real estate broker, is one of the stars of Bravo reality show Million Dollar Listing New York, which debuted in 2012.

In 2015, Serhant announced he and his team had plans to enter the Brooklyn market, and listings started to appear earlier this year. So far, the group has closed more than 100 sales in Brooklyn, he said.

The Brooklyn office will have about 15 to 20 people working out of it, including eight dedicated to Brooklyn, and you just might catch Serhant himself there a couple days a week.

The team will join many others in the neighborhood, including Halstead, Fillmore and Aptsandlofts.com, which declared Bed Stuy “the new Williamsburg” in 2013.

The party invitations that went out Wednesday accidentally gave the address of the new office as Tompkins Street instead of Avenue. To make sure nobody accidentally ends up on Staten Island, which does have a Tompkins Street, new invitations were sent out right away.

Related Stories

• Halstead Opens Office in Bed Stuy
• Bed Stuy Home Values Jumped 194 Percent Since 2004, Highest Increase in Country
• Aptsandlofts Says Bedford Stuyvesant Is the New Williamsburg

Email tips@brownstoner.com with further comments, questions or tips. Follow Brownstoner on Twitter and Instagram, and like us on Facebook.