Ryan Serhant joined TheStreet to discuss housing trends post-pandemic.
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00:00Talk to me about the trends that you're seeing in the real estate market.
00:03You know, during COVID, everybody was moving to a place where they wanted to live
00:08because they could work from home.
00:10Now, things have changed a little bit.
00:12Talk to me about what the new normal is.
00:14Where are people moving?
00:16Where are people buying?
00:18Talk to me about, you know, urban versus, you know, suburban.
00:21Like, talk to me about the dynamics that are happening.
00:23At the end of 2020, when we started Surhant, we started a company.
00:26We started on September 15th, 2020.
00:28And I remember doing interviews when people said,
00:30are you crazy?
00:31You're starting a real estate company in New York City.
00:33The city is dead.
00:34It's over.
00:36Was not true.
00:38But I called then.
00:39I said, what we're going to experience now is you're going to experience an influx of
00:42COVID buyers leaving urban areas and buying elsewhere, which is exactly what we saw.
00:47Whether it was into New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, et cetera.
00:50Then we're going to experience COVID sellers, who years later, which is what's happening now,
00:54saying, okay, that impulse purchase I made in 2021 or in 2020.
00:58Amazing house.
00:59I miss my friends.
01:01I miss the school my kids went to.
01:03I've had another kid.
01:04I want to grow up on the same block that I was at.
01:06My parents are still there in that market.
01:08I got to call back to the office.
01:10Damn it.
01:10I got to go back and be in the conversation at the office versus trying to build my business on Zoom.
01:16And so I think you're going to see a resurgence back to cities.
01:19I think that's going to be probably the biggest thing we talk about at this time next year.
01:23Cities like New York City are going to be stronger than they've ever been before.
01:27You're going to see still a unique kind of transplant from, let's say, a market like California,
01:34where buyers are saying, you know what?
01:35I can go live in New York.
01:36I can go live in Miami.
01:38I can work from home from there.
01:39Or it'll cost me the same amount of money to live in New York City or South Florida
01:44and fly back to California a couple times a month to keep the same job than it would
01:48to actually afford housing prices in California.
01:50We're seeing that now too.
01:52And so I think you're going to see a lot of unique trends come to light by this time next year.
01:57And are there like secondary markets that benefit, like a runoff market, so to speak?
02:03Yeah, we are.
02:05I mean, if I talk about locally, we're selling a project right now in Williamsburg.
02:08It's in South Williamsburg.
02:09It's called Williamsburg Wharf.
02:11I think we've raised prices 10 times, might be more than that,
02:17because the demand we have is so strong from people in Manhattan and an international buyer
02:22base who are saying, pre-COVID, I would have looked at Manhattan.
02:25Today, I'm looking at Williamsburg.
02:28And I'm looking at Williamsburg Wharf.
02:30And I'm looking at quality developers.
02:31And that project is the Natale Group, right?
02:33Really looking at quality construction, quality design, and paying for quality.
02:38Our average price point there is well over $2,000 a foot for South Williamsburg,
02:42which if you had told me that five years ago, I would have said, I agree,
02:45because I was working on it back then.
02:46But I'm sure a lot of people would have said, no way, impossible.
02:48And we're raising prices every day.
02:50We're seeing a lot of markets across New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware,
02:55all over Florida still stay really strong because there's just a significant lack of supply.
03:01We need millions of homes created, which I think, with the incoming administration,
03:06one of the things they talked about that I thought was interesting anyway
03:09earlier this year was, who's the biggest landowner in the United States?
03:13It's the federal government.
03:16You want to solve the housing crisis.
03:18It's not giving people more money to then go increase prices all day.
03:21It's in saying, hey, maybe we should take some of this federally owned land,
03:25an in-estate, state-owned land, and use it to build more houses to provide more supply,
03:32which will then bring down pricing, which if you combine that with lowered interest rates,
03:38we start having a very different conversation about housing affordability.