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The year was 2016.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton swept the Tonys, Beyonce released her groundbreaking visual album Lemonade and Donald Trump transitioned from former reality TV star to president-elect.
Reality shows like Million Dollar Listing had hit their stride, and Ryan Serhant had become a household name. So when a scrappy, if somewhat unfocused, young rental agent named Noah Kaplan had the good fortune to cross paths with the real estate superstar, Kaplan thought his road to stardom had been all laid out, like the greats before him.
That same year, Kaplan released a pilot episode of a cheeky web series called Thousand Dollar Listing, the budget-on-a-shoestring answer to shows like MDL, that parodied the glamor of those shows with an often bleak, but humorous look into what apartment searching is like for young professionals moving to the city with a budget of about $1,000 or less.
After dropping the pilot, Kaplan found fame seemingly overnight — he was fielding calls from Time Out New York, Fox, Realtor.com, The New York Post and Inman News. Serhant emailed him out of the blue and told him he wanted to make an appearance on the show, and offered him a spot on his team, plus a cameo on MDL. It seemed he had found his calling.
But over the next few years, Kaplan’s life trajectory took some unexpected turns.
“I had a straight-up identity crisis,” Kaplan told Inman.
Serhant invited Kaplan to join his team, then at Nest Seekers International, so that he could learn more about the business and transition from rentals to sales. For two years, Kaplan worked on the Ryan Serhant Team and performed pretty well, considering where he had come from.
But after making his name at the bottom of the market, it almost felt like a betrayal to himself to start working with one of the most successful agents in New York. At the end of those two years on Serhant’s team, he missed the minimum sales threshold to remain on the team by about $4,000, and Serhant let him go.
Kaplan admitted that there were probably other professional considerations involved in his being “fired” — he mentioned missing or being late to team meetings, and that he struggles with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
Serhant did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
“I basically had a bit of an identity crisis while on Ryan’s team,” Kaplan said. “Because I was like, I really want to put out my Thousand Dollar Listing, but it’s a reality show about the fact that I’m doing rentals. Ryan is trying to save me from rentals — and that was actually [featured] in Million Dollar Listing.”
Noah Kaplan and his client, Alan, looking at a cramped room for rent during Season 1 Episode 2 | Noah Kaplan Productions
While this was all happening, Kaplan was also in talks with production companies who were interested in producing Thousand Dollar Listing. Even though he went through negotiations with three different companies over the course of several years, everything ultimately “fell flat,” Kaplan said.
“It was pretty depressing,” he continued. “I was up in the clouds, thinking this is the next big thing, and then all of a sudden, this thing falls apart.”
Kaplan started working with a coach who encouraged him to continue making the series, despite not being able to secure a contract with a production company. So Kaplan and his clients — individuals he found through Craigslist who needed to find an apartment in the city and consented to being filmed for a small payment — carried on with the show, and shot seven more episodes.
In between filming, Kaplan continued to work on his real estate career while also pursuing other creative opportunities, like booking professional music gigs (he plays guitar). He also worked on another comedic reality series centered around two friends traveling the world to refurbish vintage cars.
Nothing in Thousand Dollar Listing is scripted, Kaplan said. Once he decided to just finish off the project on his own, he enlisted around 50 interns and collaborators to help him with post-production, and teamed up with his primary production editor, Josh Depew, to help bring the project to the finish line.
Now they’re finally ready to release the new episodes, the first of which dropped last week, and which were shot around 2018. Every Saturday, a new episode will appear on the Thousand Dollar Listing YouTube channel. Each episode lasts about 15 minutes or so.
Even though Thousand Dollar Listing did not find the big platform that Kaplan initially hoped it might, he said he’s made peace with where it has landed, especially now that he has found other creative opportunities.
“After doing [the car show], I was like, I can let go of the outcome for Thousand Dollar Listing,” he told Inman. “We can just put it out in the way that we should have done years ago and just didn’t know at the time that that would have been the best way to do it. Now I consider myself process-oriented instead of outcome-oriented and I’m just happy to be an artist and not be stuck in life, and [to be] putting this out there.”
Today, in the real estate realm of his life, Kaplan has graduated to working in luxury rentals. On a recent call with Inman, he was speaking from the 24th floor of 505 State Street in Brooklyn, a new development project he’s representing. He now has dual licenses with Nancy Packes, Inc. and Acre NY Realty.
“Mentally, I could not bring myself to go to the next level of selling,” Kaplan said, even though he did gain some experience in sales while with Serhant’s team. “I’m good at sales; I’m good at real estate, but I could not bring myself to do it because I was really stuck in the show.”
When asked if he saw himself creating a more dressed-up, luxury version of Thousand Dollar Listing in the future to reflect where he’s transitioned in his real estate career, Kaplan was skeptical.
“What I saw in filming was that, if my suit is nicer than the walls in the room, then we’re on to something,” Kaplan said. “If the walls of the room are nicer than my suit or the same quality, then it gets a little more dicey.”
Kaplan added that he really thrives at playing it straight during the awkward situations that come up in showing clients apartments-on-the-cheap, like when he shows his client, Sahara, a room in Elmhurst whose door has fallen off its hinges and which seems to be infested with flies.
“Sahara has seen flies before,” Kaplan tells the viewer straight-faced in a confessional-style scene. “I have, too. It’s not the biggest deal, but it’s not the greatest thing. In moments like these, I have faith, and put a smile on my face that, you know, it’s not a big deal.”
When speaking with Inman, Kaplan explained, “We’re always trying to find an interesting situation that’s also real and playing off of that. Some apartments are obviously crazy. We find them, and they’re real; they’re on Craigslist. And others are winners. You sort of play this game of making entertainment.”
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