Are TV real estate dramas your guilty pleasure? Do you bite your nails at the end of every House Hunters episode? Did your jaw drop when you heard that the Property Brothers were coming to Westchester? This one’s for you.
ABC Family recently announced the premiere of their newest series The Next Step Realty: NYC, an unscripted docu-series that will follow the young, competitive agents of The Next Step Realty as they navigate the competitive waters of commission-based Manhattan real estate. You might be thinking, “I’ve seen Million Dollar Listing New York, I know what it’s like,” but you haven’t seen real estate like this.
While the 2010 real estate startup will help any client who chooses them, The Next Step Realty specializes in serving recent college grads and young professionals who are unfamiliar with the renting process. About 40,000 college grads move to NYC each year, and with a 1 percent vacancy rate, finding the right place (let alone any place) in the city can be near impossible.
Erin Wilson is the Director of Client Relations at The Next Step Realty where she works directly with clients to find out what type of home they are looking for, and to eventually match them up with a Next Step broker who can best accompany their search. One of the biggest problems Wilson sees her clients face is “being unfamiliar with how to go about the rental process, because in Manhattan, it’s a very tricky situation,” she explained. “There are a lot of brokers out there who are not very trustworthy, so we try to help navigate that for people as much as possible.”That’s where Scarsdale native Erin Wilson steps in. “We saw an area of the market that was not being paid enough attention to…people who needed more help getting their first place in the city. We specialize in helping people who need a little bit more hand-holding,” Wilson said.
After graduating from the University of Richmond, Wilson began her career in real estate working under brokers at Brown Harris Stevens. Eventually through connections with Blair Brandt, the CEO of The Next Step Realty and fellow Richmond alum, Wilson found her place at the startup. Her favorite part? “I love when I can connect with clients,” Wilson said. “A lot of them are from Westchester, or are from similar alma mater’s as mine, so when I talk to them on the phone it feels really natural to talk with someone who is close in age to me. They can get a sense that we understand what they’re looking for.”
ABC Family has been pushing its way into the unscripted genre since the success of reality shows like My Transparent Life and Job Or No Job. The Next Step Realty: NYC will be one of three new reality shows premiering on ABC Family this summer.
I had to ask, is the world of real estate as dramatic as it seems on other TV shows? “It can be pretty cutthroat. The show is about our business and sort of what it’s like to be at a young company, a startup that’s becoming very successful very quickly,” Wilson said. “Most of the drama is inter-company, but we try to keep it as little drama as possible for our clients.”
Don’t miss the ABC Family premiere of “The Next Step: NYC” on Tuesday, August 11 at 9pm ET.
