NYC Real-Estate Agent Turned Reality TV Star

Noho is rainy and gray, but Eleonora Srugo’s tan is a deep ocher. We’re standing in the entrance to 40 Bleecker, a brick-and-glass luxury building, waiting to visit one of her clients in his multimillion-dollar condo. At 38, she is a top agent at Douglas Elliman and the star of Netflix’s most recent “occu-drama” real-estate show, Selling the City, a soapy chronicle of her all-female team’s deal-making and infighting. Srugo, a tiny five-foot-three with giant brown eyes and perfectly arched brows, starts pitching me from the moment we enter the minimalist white lobby (the work, apparently, of Kanye West’s interior designer). “It’s very rare to find a ground-up condo with a doorman in Noho,” she says. “People really want to be in this building.”

On the fifth floor, we’re greeted by the apartment’s owner, Ryan, a trim mid-30s guy in all-black athleisure who bought the place for $4.5 million in 2022. Srugo thinks she can get him at least $6 million for it but is here to inspect. Once inside, she ducks into the hallway bathroom to strip off the plastic hairnet she’s wearing to protect her blonde updo and change from her puffer and slippers into her signature broker-influencer uniform: a blazer over a white crop top and four-inch Valentino platform heels. Crop top on, she leads us into the open kitchen, where we gather around the waterfall island. Srugo begins noting features that will help the condo sell: the French-oak chevron floors, the gray detail on the marble backsplash, the building’s full-size pool and garden. She tells Ryan she might move a few things around but otherwise feels the place is in perfect condition. “There is just nothing else like this in the area,” she declares in her surprisingly low voice. “Nothing.”

Downtown is Srugo’s world. Or a specific slice of downtown, anyway. She hangs out at Casa Cipriani and Crane Club, and her clients are a mix of financiers, hedge-funders, and tech bros, like the billionaire former owner of the Houston Rockets, Adam Neumann, developer Meyer Orbach, and Kimora Lee Simmons — the new-money–old-money mix of the Zero Bond scene. She met Ryan, a venture capitalist, at Jean’s, Max Chodorow’s restaurant on Lafayette with a club underneath. On Ryan’s coffee table are cocktail napkins from ZZ’s, the private club in Hudson Yards. “Oh my God,” Srugo exclaims, “they let you have these?!”

Photo: Dina Litovsky

Srugo has been a broker at Elliman for 15 years, but her profile has been growing in the past two, first for a $75 million apartment sale on Central Park South, one of the city’s largest transactions of 2023. Then, in July, an unnamed client of hers bought Jennifer Lopez’s Nomad penthouse for $23 million. Most recently, she has made headlines for her close friendship with Mayor Eric Adams. The pair have been photographed partying at Osteria La Baia with Ja Rule and French Montana, serving food at charity events, and marching arm in arm in a parade for Israel. A few weeks ago, the New York Post quoted a source who claimed that Srugo “goes everywhere” with the mayor, “flies with him, and heads over to his home in the middle of the night.” But “we’re just friends,” she emphasizes when I ask her about him. “There are a lot of lies out there.”

While they may not be dating, Srugo and the mayor have a shared vision for the city, starting with the idea that anyone can make it here in a nebulous “Empire State of Mind” kind of way. In her first scene in Selling the City, which aired on January 3, Srugo exits a Blade helicopter in patent-leather leggings, proclaiming, via voice-over, “I was raised by a single mother, and her co-parent was New York City.” Born in Israel, she moved to New York as a child and grew up in Soho’s artist lofts, where her father was a jazz drummer and her mother an actress. “It was a cool building,” Srugo says, opening the curtains in Ryan’s bedroom. “The guy from Crash Test Dummies lived in it.” (Ryan’s south-facing view, she says, is a “moment.”) Her parents divorced, and her mom became a partner in a West Village Italian restaurant, where Srugo spent her teen years working as a hostess. “I was, like, this shy, nerdy girl,” says Srugo, the CFO of Stuyvesant High School’s student union. After graduating from Boston University, she tried a short stint at E! News in its marketing department before she realized it would take too long to pay off her student loans. So Srugo got her real-estate license in 2009 and went to work, staying focused and grinding, as Adams might say. Years of sweating it out on rentals, networking, and gaining the trust of her high-profile clients, Srugo says, led to all of this: the Central Park South deal and now her own Elliman team, Eleonora & Co., the crop-top-clad girlbosses-in-training who populate her TV show. “I clawed my way here,” she says, gesturing toward the living room with her diamond-hard white manicure.

Selling the City is new for Netflix but only the latest iteration in a long-established genre. Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing premiered in L.A. in 2006 and in New York in 2012, where it chronicled not just the postrecession luxury boom but the rise of a new entertainment archetype: the celebrity broker. Along with its real-estate porn, MDL showed how, as the market soared, the most enterprising agents, formerly sleazy hangers-on, could become rich and famous too. People like Josh Altman and Tracy Tutor (also Elliman agents, though Tutor recently defected for Compass) and Ryan Serhant became household names. In 2019, Netflix followed Bravo with Selling Sunset — a sleeker offering produced by Adam DiVello of The Hills — of which Srugo’s show is the latest spinoff after versions set in Orange County and Tampa. (“If any of this fucking shit airs, I will sue every single one of your asses,” cast member Jade Chan says in the last episode of the new series, breaking the fourth wall.)

These shows have now been around so long that Corcoran broker Steve Gold, one of the old MDL stars, plays the role of wizened mentor to Srugo on Selling the City. Serhant, who opened his own brokerage, has been given a Netflix franchise, Owning Manhattan. You might ask yourself, as I did, if we need another program of this ilk — especially when the ultraglamorous façade necessary to bring in viewers seems further and further away from the reality of working as a broker. Not only is there more competition than ever before among agents, but the industry is in crisis mode. Tenants in New York City no longer have to pay broker fees, and a judgment against the National Association of Realtors will slash commissions on sales. Splashy developers are declaring bankruptcy. Douglas Elliman CEO Howard Lorber, who makes a short appearance in the show, suddenly stepped down in October amid rumors that he created a “sexually charged work culture.” (When asked for comment about Lorber’s departure, Douglas Elliman declined to comment.)

Selling Tampa is no more, and Beverly Hills Real Househusband Mauricio Umansky’s series was canceled after two seasons. But Srugo, like the mayor, believes in faking it till you make it. She sees Selling the City — whether or not it lasts past a single season — as a necessary branding exercise for the broker industry and the city. “I believe that New York is due for a comeback, both socially and with my show,” she says in Ryan’s living room on his giant white cloud of a sectional. “I wanna make New York happen.” She jokes that she’s glad to be “part of the counternarrative to the murder in the middle of the street.” She seems as committed to making this project work as selling, say, this apartment. “New York has never looked better on-camera,” she promises. To her, the fates of her luxury listings, and of the show and the city, are intertwined with her own. “I have to sell the city,” she says. “Otherwise, how will I make a living?”