The 23-Year-Old Queen of Real-Estate TikTok
7 min read
Video: alexander_zakhari, christina.kremidas, markonyc
Jason Lau, a luxury-true-estate agent, is pretending to choose a shower. Enclosed in the spalike white-marble shower of a $2.6 million condo’s en suite lavatory, thoroughly clothed, he holds the stainless-metal faucet head and mimes rinsing himself from his paisley scarf down to his Chanel loafers. Lizza Prigozhina, standing in the vicinity of the rest room in a crop best and blazer, choreographs with Iphone in hand. “Now block out the digicam with your hand,” she claims, “like, You just cannot see this.” Lau complies. His organization spouse at the Corcoran team, Marko Arsic (loafers: Prada), nods approvingly from the adjoining bedroom: “We do whatever Lizza says.”
Prigozhina is the 23-year-old queen of New York serious-estate TikTok, a material whisperer to the star agents of Corcoran, Douglas Elliman, and Nest Seekers. In a superior-close sector that has been slowing considering the fact that September, with whispers of downturns and 2008 in the air, what Prigozhina delivers to actual-estate agents is an injection of levity into their malaise and, preferably, thousands of new followers and doable clients. Below her assistance, brokers are flocking to TikTok, in which, for $700 and up a 7 days, Prigozhina allows them make viral written content, writes captions, and even posts on their behalf. Brokerages are laying off their brokers, and sky-high home loans are earning sellers skittish, but her business is booming: In a very good month, she’ll make around $10,000.
Prigozhina’s job this November early morning is a one-bed room condominium on the 28th floor of Waterline Sq., a growth on the much west side of the Higher West Aspect that needs to be the new Hudson Yards. Lau’s shower scene is the end result of a one particular-shot, steady-take video tour that has turn out to be endemic to actual-estate TikTok — and that, by means of Prigozhina’s direction, is intended to deliver some grandeur to the unit’s 984 ft. Immediately after a quick rehearsal, Prigozhina steadily winds around the condominium, Iphone in her appropriate hand and cuing Arsic and Lau with her still left. The brokers gamely dart powering household furniture and doorways in their designer fits, then out once more to enthusiastically clearly show off the Gaggenau stove and waterfall island and heated toilet floors with oversize hand gestures, connoting Ooh! and Aah! At one particular stage, Prigozhina tells Arsic to fling himself lightly on to the mattress to demonstrate its bounce.
Prigozhina discovered her specialized niche in true-estate TikTok in 2021 as the market was starting its manic rebound from the pandemic standstill. Born in Russia, she experienced arrived in the city in 2020 to show up at the New York Movie Academy and needed a place, so she reached out to Alexander Zakharin, a broker at Avenues Actual Estate and a fellow Russian. Prigozhina didn’t conclusion up applying his products and services (she located a no-payment studio on 63rd and West End Avenue on StreetEasy), but she saw Zakharin’s TikTok, on which he had started posting apartment excursions when no one was browsing them in man or woman. Prigozhina understood what was lacking: him. “Alexander has a major character,” she informed me matter-of-factly, and she convinced him to set himself in front of the camera. She had gotten her start at 14 with lip syncs on Musical.ly (and had even briefly flirted with a stint as an influencer in 2020) and commanded the type of obsessive fluency TikTok calls for: the demented pop-culture shorthand, the viral traits custom made for market audiences, an intuition about when to article. (“I’m on it for hrs a working day,” Prigozhina stated, declining to say the actual variety.) Because functioning with Prigozhina, Zakharin’s subsequent has surpassed 700,000 now, in his most repeated fashion of video clip, he stands on the methods of the Plaza and interviews unsuspecting tourists about their desire New York apartment. As his TikTok clout grew, the luxurious current market peaked, breaking information in 2021 and the first 50 percent of 2022 with a document $16 billion in income — in advance of they fell 18 {73375d9cc0eb62eadf703eace8c5332f876cb0fdecf5a1aaee3be06b81bdcf82} this tumble. Prigozhina’s central theory applies even additional in a slowdown: If you just cannot offer a condominium, you have to sell your self.
Right after 3 normally takes in the rental, we head down to the development’s empty facilities flooring and lounge, stopping for Prigozhina to film a number of additional TikToks on her way out (there is an even larger sized amenities amount underground, similarly tranquil, with a climbing wall, tennis court docket, recording studio, hydroponic-vegetable-growing facility, and bowling alley). The enhancement statements to be 95 {73375d9cc0eb62eadf703eace8c5332f876cb0fdecf5a1aaee3be06b81bdcf82} offered, though there are practically two dozen available rentals starting up at $5,873 a thirty day period. Lau acknowledges the softening condition of the current market but stays sunnily optimistic: “There are a lot of dollars purchasers,” he suggests. “But I do not assume it will be a big tumble.” As of now, with extra than a thirty day period and a 50 percent on the marketplace, the condo upstairs has but to be rented.
Next, Prigozhina and I stroll up Riverside Boulevard to an appointment with members of the Kim Crew at Nest Seekers Global. She fees her cellphone in her neon-inexperienced purse from Amazon that reads “Caution: Catwalk in progress.” “She’s our mastermind,” just one of the brokers claims. For this shoot, the aim is to build a dance to the viral YouTube song “I’m Petty,” which requires a effectively-timed lower-five behind the back again with the brokers in a sort of conga line and some coaching from Prigozhina on how to make it all feel all-natural. “Everybody’s nervous,” one of the agents told me as her colleague took new Instagram portraits to show off his new blond-highlighted recommendations. “It’s been a very little sluggish.” Young brokers, like people on the Kim Workforce, are particularly eager to do just about anything that can construct their individual profile in a commission-based marketplace whole of zigs and zags. One of them nevertheless performs nights at JFK as a Delta plane technician.
For Prigozhina’s past career of the day, we wander farther uptown to fulfill Zakharin Christina Kremidas, an Elliman agent who also makes use of Prigozhina’s content expert services and Kathy Murray, yet another Elliman broker, at one of Murray’s listings. Up in a 4-bedroom, $6.2 million condominium at 344 West 72nd Street in a not too long ago transformed prewar making, the staging furnishings and décor search virtually particularly like what we remaining at Waterline Sq.: huge, vaguely modern-day squiggle artwork oversize Phaidon artwork guides topped by an oversize marble chain. There are starched white shirts hanging in the master-bed room closet and handmade wood children’s toys in the home with the bunk beds. Subsequent to two wineglasses and a bottle of Pinot Noir is the New York Point out Housing and Anti-Discrimination See. Prigozhina will be filming three excursions, a single featuring each individual agent, for all of them to use on their respective social-media feeds.
Murray is the most seasoned agent, and as Prigozhina plots the filming coordination, Murray tells me that, certainly, product sales have cooled given that the frenzy of the earlier 19 months, when she offered a 13-home apartment to a relatives sight unseen (“They required additional area to do the job from property,” she suggests), but the market is basically stabilizing just after the last frenzy. “It’s the similar market place as 2018,” not 2008, she assures Zakharin when requested for her views on no matter if items are emotion as they did in the economic downturn. “Last time, none of the banking institutions would lend.”
Murray is more recent to TikTok as a income tactic — “I’m not the form to be on digicam a large amount,” she tells me — but Kremidas and Zakharin are resolutely bullish TikTok hustlers. “People constantly say, ‘Are your luxury purchasers genuinely on TikTok?’ Of system they are!” Kremidas suggests, changing her Hermès belt. Kremidas said even the most elite brokers have began to achieve out to her for ideas. Perhaps they’re fascinated in its likely, or maybe they are finding progressively desperate. Prigozhina is well prepared to experience the wave up or down. “Some are like, ‘I just cannot expend dollars on this.’ But many others say, ‘I’ll do just about anything to get out there,’” she told me earlier as we walked by condominium after condo on West Conclusion Avenue.
I conceal in the visitor rest room (one of four and a 50 {73375d9cc0eb62eadf703eace8c5332f876cb0fdecf5a1aaee3be06b81bdcf82}) as Prigozhina films each video tour snaking by means of the bedrooms. “Alex, now!” “Christina, go!” Prigozhina calls authoritatively as the agents’ heels clack on the shiny wooden flooring. Prigozhina breathes a sigh of reduction just after the shoot wraps, as if she experienced run a marathon. Sixty-6 days later, the condominium was continue to sitting down on the sector. But the TikTok had 145,000 sights.
