Cities are booming again, says real estate expert

The Street

Ryan Serhant joined TheStreet to discuss housing trends post-pandemic.

Transcript

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.

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