After nearly 10 years of selling lavish properties on Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing New York,” celebrity real estate broker Ryan Serhant is now calling one of them home.
Per Bravo, Serhant and his wife Emilia Bechrakis purchased a $7.6 million Brooklyn townhouse in 2018 for their family of three, including their daughter, Zena. Previously, the family rented a lower Manhattan penthouse with a steep monthly price of $15,000.
The nearly 8,000-square-foot townhouse was a potential listing before Serhant “fell in love with it,” as he told Bravo while giving a video tour of his new family home in 2019. The realtor sold the house to himself in Season 7 of “Million Dollar Listing New York.”
Although the new townhouse already looked like a million bucks when it was first purchased, Serhant wanted to make a few cosmetic changes.
So, Serhant and his wife spent the last couple of years renovating the home to their liking, although it took a little longer than they anticipated.
Naturally, the reality TV family’s new project became a four-episode limited series on Bravo, “Million Dollar Listing: Ryan’s Renovation.”
Before the show premieres tonight, June 3, here’s a sneak peek at the family’s dreamy townhouse:
It Took Three Years to Complete the Renovation
Serhant and his wife purchased the Brooklyn townhouse in 2018 but didn’t move in until the renovations were complete in 2021.
What was the holdup?
Well, for starters, what was originally supposed to be a house for the family of three is now also home to Bechrakis’s mom.
The conversion of the five-story brownstone turned the basement level into a suite for Serhant’s mother-in-law. However, as seen in a promo video for the limited series airing on Bravo on June 3, that only prompted the rest of Bechrakis’s Greek family, including her father, to want to move in as well.
The family drama was far from the only challenging part of the renovation project.
In 2020, Serhant and his family also had to deal with the delays that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic (per Bravo).
Although the renovations took longer than expected, Serhant told E! News in an article published on May 12, 2021, that it was worth it.
“We bought our house three years ago not knowing it would take three years to renovate. That’s a whole process, but a brownstone in Brooklyn in a townhouse is pretty great living,” Serhant said.
His wife seems to agree.
On June 3, 2021, ahead of the series premiere, Bechrakis’s posted a promo shot of her and her husband on Instagram with the caption: “We laughed, we cried, encountered the unexpected, brought a touch of Greek and finally built our dream home.”
The Renovation Cost Was Way Over Budget
When Serhant and his wife began renovations on their family townhouse, they didn’t foresee the project going way over budget.
In a sneak peek of the Bravo limited series released to People ahead of the June 3 premiere, Serhant told the camera that they had originally set a renovation budget of $1.5 million.
However, the house had other plans.
Between the unexpected costs of extra insulation and sprinklers and the added complication of installing an elevator in the space, they ended up going $1.1 million over budget.
The final renovation cost ended up somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.6 million.
“Million Dollar Listing: Ryan’s Renovation” premieres on Thursday, June 3, 2021 at 10:15 p.m. Eastern on Bravo.
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