New York, NY — The Wall Street Journal has officially named SERHANT. a leader in the race to bring artificial intelligence into real estate. In a feature by investigative tech reporter Isabelle Bousquette, the publication details how Ryan Serhant and his team are quietly revolutionizing the industry through their proprietary platform, S.MPLE — a generative AI tool designed to streamline, automate, and elevate every stage of the agent experience.
For Serhant, who rose to fame on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York before launching his namesake brokerage in 2020, the article represents a milestone moment. What began as a vision to merge media and technology has become a proof point for how innovation can reshape one of the world’s most relationship-driven businesses.
“As it turns out, what we’ve been building with our incredible staff and agents at SERHANT. is leading the industry,” Serhant said in an internal note following the article’s publication. “I’m speechless — and so proud of the engineering team and the agents who took a bet on a company that dared to fight the resistance.”
Building a Smarter Brokerage
S.MPLE (short for Serhant Machine-Powered Learning Environment) was created to tackle a universal problem: real estate agents spend up to 80% of their time on administrative tasks instead of selling. The system automates everything from writing market reports and client emails to updating CRM data and producing newsletters — giving agents their most valuable resource back: time.
In just over a year, more than 90% of Serhant’s 1,300 agents across 13 states have adopted the platform. Together, they’ve used it to complete over 12,000 automated actions, equivalent to more than 15,000 hours of saved work, contributing to over $5 billion in sales volume in the first half of 2025 — all during a high-interest-rate market.
Florida agent Shane Aronson told The Journal that his quarterly sales have jumped 133% since integrating S.MPLE into his routine. “I’m not spending two hours on data entry at 10 p.m. anymore,” he said. “I’m still working — but now it’s on what matters.”
Agents in New York report similar results. Abigail Palanca credited S.MPLE for helping her close a $2.995M Brooklyn townhouse, while Alyse Kenny used it to secure a $2.65M listing on Riverside Boulevard.
AI with a Human Touch
Unlike many Silicon Valley experiments that aim to replace human work, S.MPLE is built around enhancing it. “No one is buying a house from ChatGPT,” Serhant told The Journal. “Technology should transform the client experience — not erase the relationship.”
The app was developed in-house by a 15-person product engineering team using open-source standards and large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude. It currently automates around 30 distinct tasks, from content creation to data management, all within one unified interface. The development cost? Roughly $3 million — a modest investment for a platform that’s reshaping how agents operate daily.
Even Serhant’s early experiments weren’t always successful. A previous attempt at a metaverse-style virtual office — complete with zebra rides — flopped. “The feedback was clear,” he said. “Agents didn’t want another tool. They wanted fewer.” That insight became S.MPLE’s core design principle: simplify, consolidate, and empower.
From Reality TV to Real-World Impact
Today, Serhant Technologies — the umbrella company housing S.MPLE, the brokerage, and SERHANT. Studios — has raised $45 million in venture capital to expand its tech infrastructure and media ecosystem. Season two of Owning Manhattan, premiering on Netflix this December, will feature the S.MPLE platform on screen for the first time, blurring the line between entertainment, innovation, and enterprise.
In the Wall Street Journal piece, Serhant shared that he’s already experimenting with OpenAI’s Sora for AI-generated video tours, using the tool to visualize unbuilt luxury developments. “Imagine showing a client a full cinematic walkthrough of a property that doesn’t exist yet,” he said. “That’s where we’re headed.”
Defining the Future of Selling
As the real-estate industry grapples with rapid technological change, SERHANT. is demonstrating what a next-generation brokerage can look like — one where agents are creators, data analysts, and brand builders, supported by intelligent tools rather than buried in admin work.
For Serhant, the mission is simple: combine media, technology, and human connection to help agents sell smarter and live better.
“We’ve always believed in doing things differently,” he said. “S.MPLE proves that the future of real estate belongs to those who build it.”
Read the full feature:
“Selling $50 Million Penthouses—With a Little Help From AI” (The Wall Street Journal)
