For thirteen years, residential brokers have owned reality TV. “Million Dollar Listing New York” turned Ryan Serhant into a brand on Bravo while the rest of us negotiated office leases and retail build-outs without a single camera crew caring.
October 12th, at 9 a.m. ET, A&E launches “The Real Estate Commission”, and commercial real estate finally gets its shot at primetime. Todd Drowlette’s hosting, which makes sense given his $2 billion track record. Yet, the real question every CRE broker is asking: Will viewers see what closing a commercial lease actually looks like, or will producers try to squeeze drama out of LOI negotiations?
Because if you’ve ever spent three hours debating HVAC responsibilities, you know our job doesn’t exactly scream reality TV.
What the Show Promises
A&E calls it “Shark Tank meets commercial real estate.” Drowlette says you can verify every deal online. Eight episodes, five states, and apparently, they filmed actual foreclosure auctions and lease negotiations without scripts.
The Shark Tank Comparison Makes Some Sense
Commercial deals don’t happen in five-minute pitches. They happen over months of arguing about lease expiration formulas and arcane sublease rules. The Real Estate Commission shows office leases that determine whether 500 people keep their jobs. Retail expansions that make or break strip centers. Foreclosure auctions where someone walks away with a 200-unit apartment building. Drowlette swears none of it’s staged, and given how boring most lease negotiations look on paper, producers must think the stakes alone carry the show. Maybe they’re right. A national retailer pulling out of a deal over parking requirements hits harder when you realize it kills the entire shopping center.
Drowlette Has the Resume for This
Twenty-three years, $2 billion closed, 1,700 transactions. As Managing Director of TITAN Commercial Realty Group, Drowlette’s done deals for Starbucks, Dunkin’, Buffalo Wild Wings, and IHOP. He’s negotiated enough franchise locations to know precisely when a tenant walks and why landlords cave. Most reality show hosts need producers to feed them lines. Drowlette can probably explain subordination agreements and percentage rent without cue cards. Whether viewers care about those details remains to be seen. But, at least we won’t watch someone pretend a TI allowance is revolutionary.
New York to North Carolina, But Not Where You’d Expect
They filmed across New York City, Philadelphia, Albany, Syracuse, and regions throughout Vermont, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Sunday mornings at 9 a.m., you’ll watch brokers negotiate office tower leases for law firms, retail brand expansions into new markets, and multifamily foreclosure auctions. These buildings won’t turn any heads architecturally. They’re where people work, shop, and live, and have direct impacts on the communities they serve when these deals fall apart. That’s the human interest element that this show’s banking on.
What TV Gets Right and What TV Gets Wrong
The Real Estate Commission has eight episodes to prove commercial real estate makes good television. Producers spent months filming actual deals, but anyone who’s negotiated a lease knows reality and reality TV aren’t the same thing.
What TV Gets Right
Commercial real estate runs everything. The office where you work, the coffee shop downstairs, the retail stores you hit on weekends: all CRE deals. The show captures how fragile these transactions are.
One law firm could walk away from 30,000 square feet because the landlord won’t budge on operating expense caps. A national retailer might kill a deal over loading dock access. Millions disappear because someone doesn’t like the parking ratio. The Real Estate Commission shows these types of deals collapsing and coming back to life three times before anyone signs.
That’s accurate.
What’s also accurate is the pressure when a foreclosure auction starts in two hours, and you have to lock down your financing. Or when a tenant needs space by month’s end but the landlord wants a ten-year lease.
The stakes are real because when deals die, businesses close, and people lose jobs.
What TV Leaves Out (and Why)
Television needs drama, and most of commercial real estate is reading 80-page leases where the action happens in footnote 37. Producers know 50,000 viewers won’t sit through debates about Good Guy Guarantees or attornment clauses. They want deals that live or die, not three weeks of arguing over after-hours HVAC charges.
So everything gets compressed. Month-long negotiations over sublease provisions become one tense call. The environmental report that killed the deal gets mentioned once, but you won’t see anyone reading 300 pages of soil samples. Rent escalations, base year calculations, usable versus rentable square footage—the details that determine whether deals actually work—disappear because explaining operating expense stops is ratings poison.
Most deals die slowly over email chains about parking ratios and signage rights. The show gives you the explosion, not the forty messages about logo placement. Every broker watching knows the boring stuff they cut is where the real work happens.
My Personal Views From the Trenches
I’ve watched Ryan Serhant sell $30 million apartments on MDLNY while I’m fighting with a Midtown Manhattan landlord about who is responsible for replacing lightbulbs. He’s showing Central Park views. I’m measuring column spacing in the Garment District because the tenant swears we’re short 500 square feet.
The Real Estate Commission will probably do the same thing.
They’ll show someone signing a lease for 50,000 feet on Sixth Avenue, not the three months arguing about Porter wage increases. They’ll film a retailer walking away from a Times Square spot, not the twenty emails about trash pickup on 47th Street that killed the deal.
Real NYC commercial deals happen in conference rooms where we negotiate build-outs for tech companies moving from Chelsea to Hudson Yards. We’re telling restaurateurs their kitchen exhaust violates Local Law 97. And when I close a Flatiron lease, 45 people stay in Manhattan instead of decamping to Jersey. No champagne. Just the next deal.
Your Commercial Real Estate Lease Won’t Make Good Television
October 12th, go ahead and watch The Real Estate Commission. See if they capture what we really do.
When you need 20,000 square feet in Midtown though, you need someone who knows that NYC leases live or die in paragraph 47, subsection 3a, about electrical capacity. Someone who’s spent years learning which landlords actually fix the elevators and which ones disappear after signing.
Reality TV won’t show you the base year traps or why that Madison Avenue space seems too good to be true. Metro Manhattan Office Space has seen it all over 20 years—the details that kill deals, the clauses that matter, the stuff television will never catch.
