Take Million Dollar Listing New York, add some Lonely Island-esque musical comedy, subtract a few zeros, and you’ve got Thousand Dollar Listing. Created by and starring 30-year-old struggling apartment broker Noah Kaplan, the series pilot sheds light on the tough-sell conditions (no windows, no AC) that characterize low(er)-cost tenements in Williamsburg and Bushwick, and keep Kaplan from pocketing even relatively petty commissions.
Kaplan and a prospective renter climb over a pile of clutter in order to access the rooftop.
The series got some nice attention last month, but now it may need to change its name. Kaplan tells us that he just joined Nest Seekers at the invitation of Million Dollar Listing star Ryan Serhant, a broker at the company. “Ryan just happened to see [the pilot] and he shot me an email and said, ‘This is hilarious,’” Kaplan said. “And then all of the sudden I’m having a meeting with him, like, last week; it was like literally out of the movies. It was surreal.” As an independent agent at Corcoran, Kaplan had to hustle for clients, but at Nest Seekers he’ll be a proper member of the team once its new Brooklyn office opens. “Who knows, maybe there’ll be a huge bump up in my business,” he said. He told us that doing the web series while working at Corcoran hadn’t clicked with their philosophy, but he plans to continue with it at the new gig, with a second episode coming out a month or so from now. “Maybe it takes on a whole new form, or maybe I just continue shooting the show sort of the way it is.” “All of the sudden I’ll be in a new income bracket,” imagined the broker, who in the show’s pilotsays he made $31,000 in the previous year, “but I’ll continue exposing everything I’ve been through over the last years anyway…and have it not be completely reality but actually exposing a lot of realities.”
Kaplan and his production team. Left to right: Nolan Doran, Gabriel Packard and Dave Burdette.
We asked Kaplan for some apartment-hunting tips before he follows in the footsteps of his new boss and starts selling $15.5 million Noho apartments. He told us the Lower East Side and Bushwick are where it’s at: “One of my favorite areas is the Lower East Side. I like Bushwick a lot. I’m not the biggest fan of Williamsburg, believe it or not. I think it’s sort of passé. I think it’s sort of done.”
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