{"id":367845,"date":"2026-10-08T13:31:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T13:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/367845\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T13:31:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T13:31:19","slug":"owning-manhattan-star-ryan-serhant-creates-ai-avatar-for-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/367845\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Owning Manhattan’\u00a0Star Ryan Serhant Creates AI Avatar for Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRyan Serhant<\/a>, the star realtor captured<\/a> in Netflix\u2019s \u201cOwning Manhattan<\/a>,\u201d claims his company produces about 2,200 social posts a month. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tProducing so much content, however, is a tough ask for someone trying to do their day job: managing a brokerage. Enter AI.<\/p>\n

\n\tSerhant has partnered with HeyGen<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve accumulated years of lessons that I don\u2019t always have time to turn into content,\u201d\u00a0he tells Variety. \u201cI do my best, but I don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSerhant\u2019s 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. \u201cThe View\u201d\u00a0host Sunny Hostin licensed<\/a> her image to the AI studio Fountain 0 to appear in movies based on her books, while Higgsfield paid<\/a> a coterie of streaming and sports stars to use their likenesses in a recent AI-generated film.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe relationship with HeyGen came about \u201corganically,\u201d\u00a0Serhant says, after witnessing the types of content the company was creating. His content arm \u2014\u00a0of the 100 people, roughly 30 are based with Serhant in New York \u2014\u00a0has tried to figure out ways to balance building content around the broker\u2019s image as he\u2019s traveling the country for showings.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI 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,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWith his HeyGen avatar, his audience can now hear from him every day without Ryan having to be on camera every day,\u201d Andrew Mok, HeyGen\u2019s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. \u201cWe believe in a future where everyone can scale their presence \u2014 sharing what they know and showing up wherever their audience is, without being limited by their own time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat the @HeySerhant account won\u2019t produce is some of the personalized content Serhant is known for, including \u201cday in the life of a CEO\u201d\u00a0videos and clips featuring his daughter Zena. \u201cThe connection to me and my brand and my life, and people along the ride on my journey \u2014\u00a0none of that changes,\u201d\u00a0he says. \u201cThis is in addition to, which is awesome and highly helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNy wife always told me, \u2018You just need to replicate yourself, you\u2019re the only one who can understand what you say,\u201d he jokes. \u201cWell, look, guess what? Welcome to the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryan Serhant, the star realtor captured in Netflix\u2019s \u201cOwning Manhattan,\u201d claims his company produces about 2,200 social posts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[135950,75,84,83,9,24,63,18722,5045],"class_list":["post-367845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-heygen","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-owning-manhattan","tag-ryan-serhant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}