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Josh Team, the former president of Keller Williams, has returned to the real estate industry after a three-year hiatus to become the first-ever president at SERHANT. Brokerage, the company has informed Inman exclusively.
Team served as president of Keller Williams from 2019 to early 2021, at which point, he resigned his position. He’s spent the last few years focused on being a dad to his two sons, the industry pro told Inman.
Team wasn’t sure he wanted to return to the industry at all. But there was something about SERHANT. founder, CEO and broker Ryan Serhant’s “big money energy” that drew him back in.
Josh Team | Credit: AJ Canaria of PlanOmatic / Inside Real Estate
“I left Keller Williams and was doing the dad thing full-on,” Team told Inman. “Walking the kids to school every day, I was the basketball coach, the baseball coach, organizing the library books at school. I have two amazing boys, so I was all-in on that.
“When Ryan reached out and we started a conversation, I didn’t really know if I was going to get back into real estate, to be honest,” Team continued. “I didn’t know if that made sense for me, just because I didn’t know if real estate had a real appetite to reimagine itself.”
As president of the brokerage arm of SERHANT., one of Team’s chief tasks will be to continue to scale operations nationally as the brokerage expands across the country. Part of that task will also be ensuring that agents are well-supported as the company grows, through systems like S.MPLE, an agent support product that Team helped imagine and that Serhant unveiled at Inman Connect New York last week.
Because of his technology background, Team became intrigued in recent years by AI’s emerging role in the industry and curious about what kind of opportunities it could bring to real estate. He also saw that the industry was at an inflection point, facing market pressures and commission lawsuits, and that most leaders were focused on how to survive in the present, instead of continuing to look ahead to the future.
Serhant, however, had a unique outlook.
“When Ryan was telling me his vision, it just sounded completely different,” Team said. “We spoke for months, and what surprised me the most in that conversation, is that I just fell in love with Ryan and who he is as a human. Life is too short to not be in business with people that you really respect and look up to.”
Serhant explained that he had spent years in a deliberate search for the right person to lead the brokerage side of SERHANT.’s operations and to guide the company as it continues to expand nationally.
The brokerage kicked off its national expansion in Spring 2023 and is now operating in New York, Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
Ryan Serhant | Credit: SERHANT. Studios
“To really operationalize with somebody who also had my same big vision for the change the industry is going through now and will continue to go through, I had to find the right person, and I spent a couple years finding that person,” Serhant said. “The first time I ever met Josh was at an Inman event. He came up to me to talk to me about Keller Williams Luxury and I think I said, ‘Great, good to talk to you.’ [Laughs.] And then we reconnected, and here we are.”
Once Team saw past Serhant’s TV persona and learned more about how he was building his company with seasoned leaders from some of the country’s biggest brokerage names (Compass, Douglas Elliman and eXp Realty, for instance) who all sought to “reimagine” the industry’s future, he was excited by the opportunity to work with them all.
“What I think me and Ryan are in violent alignment on is the industry is about to go through radical change,” Team said.
“And what that change will look like is not defined,” he continued. “There are organizations now all across this industry with really smart entrepreneurs putting together the work, which they think is where the industry needs to go … I am excited and confident about Ryan’s vision of that and to be a part of that journey. I think the macro here is that there’s a changing of the guard coming over the next five to seven years and the biggest companies that have been there for the last 10 to 15 years might look different seven years from now. I think the teams right now that have the appetite and the leadership and the vision to reimagine that are the ones that will get to play at a high level when that time comes.”
Serhant added, “We are redefining what a real estate brokerage looks like for 2030 and beyond. We’re probably going to get a lot of pushback at the beginning because that’s just the nature of the beast, but we’re going to do what we believe is right for our customers, which is our agents, to give them the absolute best brand power for themselves and brokerage support and resources to recreate the greatest customer service experience possible.
“We’re excited at the next evolution of our business,” Serhant continued. “I started the company with myself and a couple people around a dining room table in the middle of COVID in New York City in a townhouse that I borrowed from a friend in the summer of 2020. It was a really unique time, so for me, just to be able to sit here with someone like Josh Team, with [Inman] even doing this interview, only a couple years later, is pretty cool and I’m excited to see this thing grow as we go.”
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