Selling the City

As a guy who had to buy several apartmens in different countries, I actually found the first episode of the first season of this show quite educational. While it was sleep-inducing because of its extreme stupidity, it's still valuable material. If even you only have to watch a single episode to have enough of it. First off, these vultures actually take about 3% commissions off any apartment they sell. And for what? For sitting all dressed up in an office and getting driven by their drivers to the apartment just to show it to you? Well, I guess there is lots of tricky paperwork that someone in the backoffice or elsewhere does, so you'd be better off hiring them than working with the seller directly? Anyways, they are certainly trash. Much more than I used to think from dealing with several real estate agents in my life (no, not the "elite" ones). I would never ever want to have any people like that in my life. And I'd sooner kill myself than marry anyone like that. Actually, they aren't even young. Probably in their late 30s? Since they keep mentioning stuff that happened 10 years ago, and they already were in this industry. The main message of this show however is probably not something you'd expect. It's to stay away from New York because it's clearly in a bubble and is uninvestable. The way these girls are thriving on this bubble is just appauling. You don't want to buy into that. Instead, you should buy when these girls go bankrupt cuz there are no sales. One funny sentence I'll remember from this show is "you have to know luxury to sell luxury". Exactly the way of thinking of a vulture. Avoid vultures and parasites.

Okay take Selling Sunset, not great a fun "plot" to see the lifestyles of LA people who are notoriously fake and emotionally unavailable. All about the glitz glam and showing homes. And then since the characters are in this world they have small problems of contrived and interpersonal drama about she said this she said that and "I'm richer than you" type of stuff.

THIS IS (sort of) NOT THAT.

There are glimmers of an actual plot! With more meaningful stakes about who these women are as produced characters.

Selling a listing in Selling Sunset is "come with me on my listing" and "X was talking shit."

Selling a listing in Selling the City is "come with me on my listing" and "X was talking shit." AND "Let's make it as a team selling real estate and what does that look like and what does our success mean to us"

A little more on the plot.

A team of female realtors aspiring to be more successful are lead by their successful boss to become even more professionally successful. This professional success is deeply tied to their sense of self worth and social capital amongst their peers.

They are met with doubt and resistance from more established people and women in the field. Multiple dynamics come into play as some of the doubt and resistance comes from allies and colleagues of the boss.

This set up gives a deeper and richer show because of the multiple dynamics: colleague to colleague, mentor to mentee, boss to employees, friend to friend, coworker to coworker.

Yes, its popcorn TV. No, its not a Jane Austen novel.

The amount of times I hear them talk about themselves is nauseating.

Every five minutes you get bombarded with waves of " I this I that I know I feel I hate I I I" and then a 5 sec head shot of them pouting or shrugging or flipping their hair.

The show is just a collection of scenes where each girl just takes turn to talk about themselves (repeatedly) and the real estate becomes the background.

And the intro and ending of each scene (which takes up almost half the scene) is shots of themselves walking up to the table, door, chair.... Like how many times did they have to shoot that scene? Nothing else but a brain rot show as background while you scroll your phone.

I thought its gonna be similar to Owning Manhattan, with negotiation strategies, beautiful locations, real life work situations. But this show is wasting of time. Instead of enjoying luxury real estate, I was forcing myself to watch hoping its gonna be better. All I saw unprofessional soap drama, cheap looks, tacky makeups with lashes most New York woman would never wear. This show is very similar to Selling Sunset, which I stopped watching after half episode. Instead of real estate It was mostly about overdone girls and their tacky drama. These guys made the whole real estate industry look like trash, can't believe someone paid to make this show. Will never watch season 2.

Despite claiming multi-million sales achievements and being associated with "the best agent in the city," these girls are dressed in a manner that doesn't reflect such success. Their attire seems incongruent with the image typically expected from individuals who are purportedly successful and operating at such a high level. It's surprising to see this juxtaposition between their purported achievements and their choice of clothing, which appears to be quite casual or even disheveled, almost as if they don't care about maintaining a polished, professional image that aligns with their stated accomplishments.