Ryan Serhant, at home and on TV.

7:45 AM: Ryan Serhant, the former hand model/soap opera actor-turned-real estate superstar, beats The Observer to his Tribeca office by an hour. “I’m always the first one in,” brags the 28-year-old broker at Nest Seekers International, a boutique real estate brokerage firm.

He has been up since 4:23 a.m, was at the gym by 5 a.m. and in the office shortly thereafter. When we offer to go for a bleary-eyed coffee run, he yells from his office, “Don’t forget to write about how you were an hour late!”

8:30 AM: It’s time for a team meeting with Mr. Serhant’s partner, Nick Jabbour, assistant Olivia Robertson and broker Mariana Pomerlian.

As one of three realtors on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, Mr. Serhant plays the part of a rakish bad boy on TV. (He once threw an open house with nearly nude women and an Eyes Wide Shut theme.) But despite that playboy rep, Mr. Serhant is an extremely serious broker with a sterling reputation: he and Mr. Jabbour have put the relatively small Nest Seekers on the map since Mr. Serhant began working for the company four years ago. (According to Mr. Jabbour, the group now manages about $50 million in estates in New York City as well as $10 million in Miami and has at least one $7 million space in L.A.) Last year, Mssrs. Serhant and Jabbour earned a spot on The Real Deal’s “Top Manhattan Agents” power rankings, with a combined listing volume of more than $114 million.

9:00 AM: We jump into an Escalade with Mr. Serhant’s driver, Yuriy, and stop by his apartment. If such a thing is possible, Mr. Serhant has upgraded his already luxe lifestyle for the show’s second season: He moved from 20 Pine Street to a West Chelsea apartment furnished by Nikki Cheng at BoConcepts. He’s got a new storefront office in Tribeca, where he manages a team of 12.

And that Escalade? That’s new too.

Mr. Serhant is unapologetic about his reality TV stardom. “Someone with a father or brother in the business here, they might not need the show,” he says, a veiled dig at former co-star Michael Lorber, the son of Howard Lorber, chairman of Douglas Elliman and president and CEO of Vector Group Ltd., who left the show after season one.

Mr. Serhant was only 25 when he was approached by Bravo (his work at 99 John Street had made him the youngest sales director in New York City). He says he saw the show as a mountain ledge from which he could either climb to the summit, or fall very quickly.

“Friends cautioned me, ‘Don’t do it. You don’t want to be like the Kardashians. Just build up a credible business,’” Mr. Serhant chuckles. “But that just seemed boring.”

9:15 AM: We make a quick stop to look at some construction not far from the High Line. Mr. Serhant has a vested interest here, because he plans to rep the only non-rental condo on the block (which he asked us not to disclose). “West Chelsea, this is the next frontier in real estate,” he says. He talks about apartments going for $3,000 per square foot.

9:30 AM: We walk through a space on East 17th Street. Mr. Serhant is representing the owner, who wants to lease the 6,000-square-foot apartment for $25,000 per month. The potential tenant enters with his broker and, after a five-minute tour, they agree to fax over their signed contract.

9:45 AM: Mr. Serhant picks up his brunch: a Monster energy drink and a protein bar. “Most people are lazy,” he says. “Most people want weekends. People don’t want to wake up early. People want to go home and watch reruns of How I Met Your Mother.”

“Or Million Dollar Listing,” we joke.

“Exactly,” Mr. Serhant says, not joking.

Making deals.

10:30 AM: We’re uptown for a developer meeting at Young Woo & Associates to discuss a listing for 200 11th Avenue. Though Mr. Serhant doesn’t have the listing yet, he really wants it, and his presentation to Mr. Woo—known to be a little eccentric—is to give him a print by French photographic surrealist Allistair Magnaldo that features a girl who has built a ladder to reach the stars.

“I want to do something like that,” Mr. Serhant says confidently. He then slides another batch of photos across the table, having broken into the building across the street with a photographer to take pictures of the Sky Garage, which he then sent to Spine3D, a company that does photorealistic prints. Now the pictures include a car in a hot air balloon, floating up as if to try and glimpse inside the penthouse.

There is a second of silence, and then Mr. Woo slowly begins to clap.

11:45 AM:  From the car, Mr. Serhant calls a client to give her some good news: her offer of $890,000 was accepted at the Setai downtown.

12:00 PM: Lunchtime, but not for us. Mr. Serhant has prepared a personalized book for a potential buyer, a law student looking to stay in the West Chelsea. He shows her two properties. The first one is a fixer-upper in a co-op; the second one has a bedroom that the woman finds “too small.” Within 10 minutes of driving away, the woman’s father calls and tells Mr. Serhant to make an offer on the first apartment.

1:15 PM: Heading back to Nest Seekers’ HQ in Midtown, Mr. Serhant is going over the contract for a building in West Chelsea. Once sold, Mr. Serhant tells us, it will be converted into residential condos by a developer, whom he is representing, and he will receive $1 million in commission.

1:30 PM: Powwow at 415 Madison with Eddie Shapiro, CEO of Nest Seekers. They discuss the recent meeting at Young Woo & Associates, and then Mr. Shapiro hands out his latest assignment for his famous broker: start marketing in Brooklyn.

“We’re going to start listing around Brooklyn Heights area,” Mr. Shapiro grins, “but we need to find another name for places around there. Let’s get creative.” Mr. Serhant looks less than thrilled; the word “Brooklyn” has frozen his face like he’s in the middle of a sneeze.

1:45 PM: Explaining he “doesn’t usually do this,” Mr. Serhant stops for lunch: a tuna panini at Pax. To go.

2:00 PM: Back in the car, Mr. Serhant manages a quick phone interview with a local Pennsylvania newspaper in anticipation of a speaking engagement in Lehigh Valley.

“I want to leverage as much opportunity from this experience as possible,” he tells The Observer. Currently, he’s hitting the luxury property lecture circuit. “No one is educated about the market,” he says, finishing off his lunch in three bites. “So many people get into real estate because they are fascinated by quick money, which doesn’t really exist, and they are fascinated by the idea that you don’t have to have an education to go into business. So a lot of idiots get into real estate.” (We decline to mention that Mr. Serhant’s reality show does little to contradict this perception, cutting months-long deals into minutes of TV narrative.)

Erin Wicomb and Serhant

2:30 PM: Weekly sales meeting with Nest Seekers broker Amjad Pervez. Together, they are co-marketing a new condo in Kip’s Bay. At 90 days, they’ve already hit the 65% sold mark.

3:30 PM: In the financial district, Mr. Serhant is consulting for Erin Wicomb, the VP and cofounder of Equity Mavrix Group, who is working on the company’s first 40-plus unit condo building in the area. “You always want a walk-in closet, you always want a double vanity,” Mr. Serhant proclaims. “Hell or high water, you need a washer dryer. Yes, in the apartment.”

The developer takes the broker’s word as gospel. “We need to consult with the best,” he says, “and Ryan knows what buyers will want.”

4:30 PM: We head back to Mr. Serhant’s apartment in West Chelsea. His stylist is there with suits for Mr. Serhant’s upcoming LA trip. To keep The Observer occupied, he plays the week’s yet-to-be-aired episode of Million Dollar Listing.

It’s a surprisingly emotional episode, as the lives of all three brokers are suddenly disrupted by Superstorm Sandy. His co-stars shack up with family or significant others, while Mr. Serhant has a very un-reality show moment of self-awareness in a voice-over confessional.

“In moments like this, moments of chaos, moments of crisis, people go to their loved ones. You go to your girlfriend or your family or your friends,” he says, while we see an image of him sitting alone on the steps of the Financial Building, cold-calling former flames.

“I’m alone. When the city shuts down and everyone is taking a pause to be with their loved ones, um, I’m completely alone.”

We look at Mr. Serhant, who is standing next to the TV, to see if he’s watching himself, but he is not. He is deciding which tie to wear on Marie Osmond’s show next week.

5:00 PM: Back in the Escalade, Mr. Serhant is on his way to meet an interior designer to discuss a client looking for a three-bedroom in Soho for $8 million when he gets another good-news phone call: the seller accepted his client’s offer of $14.9 million for an apartment at Trump Fifth Avenue. It’s the first unit Mr. Serhant has sold in the building.

It’s been seven hours since he tossed back his Monster energy drink, but he is pumped. Only seven more hours to go before Mr. Serhant can sleep, when he will congratulate himself on another successful day, eager to start it all over again four and a half hours later.

Niki Cheng and Shaokao Cheng at their Chelsea BoConcept store. (PMc)

The first time The Observer met Niki and Shaokao Cheng, it was July, during the opening night of Julio Gaggia’s art show. Mr. Gaggia, the boyfriend of the plastic surgeon Mark Warfel, was preparing his work “Living Art: Chelsea Boy Apartment,” during which he would live for five days as a window display model at the BoConcept furniture store on West 18th Street. He spent the week eating, sleeping, working—and performing other, less-mentionable activities—in a showroom that divided him from gawkers outside with a pane of glass.

While we lounged about on the display furniture, socialite photographer Patrick McMullan brought over a petite woman with short, pixie-cropped hair.

“Niki is one of the few Power Asians in New York society,” he loudly whispered, flourishing Ms. Cheng before us. She smiled shyly and posed for a photograph before excusing herself.

It would be two weeks before we realized that Ms. Cheng and her husband owned the store where we had dropped more than one canapé between the cushions of a $3,000 couch.

In fact, the couple owns all five locations of the Danish furniture store in New York City, and another two in New Jersey. But the stores themselves aren’t the reason Mr. McMullan calls the Chengs “Power Asians.” Rather, it’s the couple’s seemingly innate social instincts, their ability to leverage a fairly cookie-cutter, mid-market design base into a celebrity-filled social whirl. One might say “Only in America,” or (even worse) “Only in New York,” but this wouldn’t exactly cover it. There is a certain type that thrives in Manhattan no matter what they’re selling, no matter where they’re from, no matter how few resources they have upon arriving.

If Darwin were alive today and researching the survival of New York species, he would do well to study the Chengs. They’re not social climbers, per se, but social movers—Gladwellian “connectors” who know everyone from celebrities to the guys with the best drapes in the city. They share their knowledge strategically with other key additions to their ever-expanding Rolodex. For Niki Cheng, 39, and Shaokao Cheng, 41, life is not about climbing a ladder. It’s about traversing the monkey bars that crisscross Manhattan.

“Niki and Shaokao have a wonderfully progressive view of New York society,” said Village Voice scribe Michael Musto. “They mix into their social circle drag performers, club holdouts, top celebrities and the corporate crowd. It’s all-inclusive.”

Last Friday, we met Ms. Cheng for a second time—again at the Chelsea store. While we were there, actress Faye Dunaway came in and had what one could only call a fit of method acting for a sequel to Mommie Dearest. The recently evicted Academy Award winner had come in two weeks ago and bought a piece of art from the store, and now she wanted Ms. Cheng’s help on a new design project.

“I adore this store. I’ve raved about it; they really need to get some of this stuff to London,” Ms. Dunaway told The Observer. “They don’t have anything like it there now.”

Unable to find a confidentiality agreement for us to sign, she stormed out shortly thereafter. (We didn’t get to tell her that there are actually 13 BoConcept stores in the U.K.) It was the kind of scene that no one wants a reporter to witness while writing a profile, but if there was any bad blood, Ms. Cheng didn’t show it.

“Really, don’t be upset,” she told The Observer, rubbing our arm soothingly. “She’ll call back. Anyway, where were we?”

The Chengs are adept at pleasing their celebrity clients, a skill that has come in handy while designing P. Diddy’s home, Jay-Z’s office (bed included), Mary J. Blige’s entire apartment and Estelle’s closet. Susan Sarandon, Lil’ Kim and Patti LaBelle have also used the duo’s interior design services, and Ms. LaBelle sang at the BoConcept flagship store for a Lance Armstrong benefit. They count designers Vivienne Tam, Asher Levine and Zang Toi among their closest friends.

Not that everyone in their circle is a brand name. After Ms. Dunaway left, we rushed over to Astor Place, where BoConcept was sponsoring a tent for a Christmas tree stand run by a Brit named Marco Romero, his girlfriend and his brother. Though he runs a jewelry shop in Greece most of the year, Mr. Romero spends three weeks in December living out of a van selling holiday firs, and Ms. Cheng took it upon herself to decorate the tent that the trio takes shifts in.

Despite a franchise that traffics mainly in large-scale items, Ms. Cheng has a burgeoning obsession with “micro-units”—apartments that are between 250 and 300 square feet.

She wanted to prove that it was possible to use BoConcept furniture to decorate a very small space, and the Romeros provided her with an interesting challenge. Their tent was about seven feet long and seven wide, and the guys had to hunch over even when standing at its tallest point. Empty, the space seemed minuscule. But after Ms. Cheng put down an orange rug, a short shelving unit, an ottoman, a table and two chairs (as well as several well-placed decorative objects), the tent looked like a living room on the Lower East Side.

It’s never quite clear why Ms. Cheng decided to treat Romero and his tent like VIPs, but when it was revealed that a $3,000 lamp from the store broke on the ride over, Ms. Cheng gasped, then turned to Mr. Romero. “We’ll have to get you another one.”

Shaokao Cheng, Cienna Cheng and Niki Cheng. (Patrick McMullan)

Perhaps the random act of kindness was a viral marketing ploy, or stemmed from her own back story of struggle. (Probably a bit of both, if we’re being honest.) Niki Cheng—née Chong—was 25 when she moved to New York in the mid-’90s. She had an architecture degree from the University of Malaysia and a visa that was only good for one year. She was scraping by as a coat-check girl at Von when she met Mr. Cheng, a young banker whose father had given him a $90,000 loan to buy a single-bedroom apartment on Madison and 32nd.

The two were introduced by a restaurant co-worker of hers, and she began relocating her belongings to his apartment after the first date, she said. After a heady three months of dating, Mr. Cheng invited her to move into his place permanently. “He didn’t realize I already had,” she laughed.

But there was a catch: his apartment in Murray Hill would be undergoing extensive renovations for two years. They made a pact: if they could live through the 24 months without breaking up, they would become a pair in the business sense as well. Mr. Cheng also pushed his girlfriend to get a job at a furniture retail outlet that would give her a three-year visa.

One day while working there, Ms. Cheng came upon a catalog that featured a coffee table identical to the type she sold. Except that Ms. Cheng’s outlet was selling her model for $2,000, and this unheard of Danish brand was selling its at $299.

The brand was called BoConcept, and its international franchise operation was just getting off the ground. The Chengs approached the company with the idea of opening a New York store on Madison Avenue, but were turned down. BoConcept’s owners thought that space in the city was too expensive and there wouldn’t be enough room to show the big items. In their view, New Yorkers were not the target market for their oversized aesthetic.

But the duo were undeterred. “We had spent a year putting together research that proved that this store could be opened in New York,” Ms. Cheng said. They also showed their plans to a friend they met at Bungalow 8.

Their friend turned out to be designer Max Azria, who spent 10 minutes calculating the figures the couple had acquired during their research, sketched a number down on his pad, and told them to go for it.

In 2003, BoConcept agreed to let the couple try their hand at a New York flagship for $300,000. “We had everything to lose,” Ms. Cheng said. “They had nothing to lose.” Niki was 28 and Shaokao 30. They had recently gotten married in Hawaii after three years of dating because, as Mr. Cheng put it, “My wife went to three different psychics who told her that marriage would bring us good fortune.” Mr. Cheng and his father remortgaged their houses to pay for the initial investment.

They barely survived the first two years; they couldn’t figure out the computer systems, and there were issues with shipping. Their business model might not have actually worked had Mr. and Ms. Cheng not been so socially ambitious.

With his degree in engineering and hers in architecture, they were able to use their conjoined home-decorating skills for seemingly un-BoConcept-related purposes. When one big-name celebrity client called, nothing from BoConcept would fit in their closet, so Ms. Cheng happily suggested shelves and fixtures that did. Soon, the singer was calling the couple to redesign her living room, and this time they used items from their Dutch catalog.

The fact that BoConcept’s furniture design is somewhere between IKEA and West Elm is somewhat beside the point. What the Chengs have done was take a relatively bland furniture store from a not especially popular Danish franchise and parlay it into a personal calling card.

When the two aren’t peddling 12-piece sectionals, they can often be found at yoga or otherwise getting fit. At 12:54 a.m. Saturday morning, The Observer received a text from Niki, who asked if we wanted to attend a 10 a.m. Bikram session with her. (We pleaded out.)

Later that morning, Ms. Cheng was at the Madison store, dressed from head to toe in brown Juicy velour. She helped hunk real estate agent Ryan Serhant from Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing find items for his move from Pine Street to Chelsea ... which of course will be documented on Bravo’s website. After he left, Ms. Cheng rushed out herself for a private second yoga session of the day, but not before inviting The Observer over for a home-cooked meal the next night with “some friends” that included Ms. Tam and Mr. Musto.
http://youtu.be/JjI2SwrGnHs
A 2010 BoConcept commerical featuring Mr. Musto and Ms. Cheng.

In 2006, the Chengs moved with their baby daughter Cienna from Murray Hill to a $1.7 million, 2,200-square-foot artist’s loft with 12-foot-high ceilings on Fifth Avenue at 29th Street. This is the space, apparently, where you can keep two six-foot ottomans without it feeling cluttered.

Cienna is now 6, their son Eden 3; when we arrived Sunday evening, their mom was running around the gigantic apartment, scooping them up for bed. Ms. Cheng looked ready to fall asleep herself, after making a feast: home-cooked dishes with pork belly, chicken, eggplant and fish, and a lotus soup for dessert. Ms. Tam was there, and Mr. Musto showed up for dessert. Mr. Levine wasn’t able to make it, but the table was more than full.

Mr. Cheng explained that she had rescheduled her meeting with Ms. Dunaway, but was too busy cooking to make it down to the store. So she had the actress come up to her apartment and multitasked.
As we were leaving, Mr. Cheng asked sincerely if we would come back and have dinner when we weren’t on the job. Ms. Cheng had already invited us to their Christmas party and a luxury garage sale they were co-sponsoring this week. They were so nice! How could we decline when they were so generous?

Another rung added to the monkey bars.

The Stiefels' city getaway.

Charles Stiefel's life has had its share of ups and downs. First he made a fortune when GlaxoSmithKline bought his family's company for $2.9 billion. But then the S.E.C. closed in after employees claimed that the family had bilked them out of $110 million by hiding crucial information—including plans for the upcoming sale—as it bought their stocks back at extremely low prices. This spring Glaxo settled the first of what will likely be many employee buyback lawsuits for $1.5 million.

Not ones to wallow over a pending fraud case, Mr. Stiefel and wife Danee have apparently spent the last few months looking for apartments to spend some of their possibly ill-gotten gains on. Now, they're on top of the world again, or at least on the top of 230 West 56th Street, where they bought a penthouse apartment, "the apex of the prestigious Park Imperial Condominium" as the Nestseekers  listing held by Ryan Serhant and Nick Jabbour boasts.

Is there any room for a person with so many pillows?

What's more, the $7 million that the couple paid for the three-bedroom, three-bath condo will hardly make a dent in the family fortune. We doubt that the Stiefels are even giving up their home in Pelham Manor, the address they list on the deed. Probably this is just a little pied-a-terre, albeit one with a high-end kitchen and amazing views from every window. And with Crestron home automation available in every room "moderating environment and ambiance," they'll have nearly scientific control over the place.

Even with all that cash floating around, though, the Stiefels were loathe to waste a cent. They bought the pad for $895,000 below the asking price. Still, seller Terry Johnson made out well. Having bought the place for $2.54 million back in 2003, he certainly saw his stock price go up.

kvelsey@observer.com

Whatever happened to soul mates? Well, as Ms. Bloom writes about Find Your FaceMate "no matter how attentive, loving and kind a new partner might be, if he or she is not a facial feature match, it’s unlikely you will have the attraction necessary to take your mind off a previous love and offer the possibility of new love." Intrigued? You can watch her talking more about this technology in her 15 CPW kitchen.

Anyway, onto the apartment.Turns out building break-ups end a lot more amiably than divorces, or at least, Ms. Bloom's will if she manages to sell the apartment she spent $4.98 million on for a whopping $10 million. We suppose Ms. Bloom is betting that this apartment will be the love of someone's life, someone who looks at the bookshelf lined galley or the herringbone hardwood floors and thinks, "c'est moi!" And if that fails, there's always a good view of the courtyard and reflecting pool for the true Narcissists. Then again, such charms have not succeeded in drawing any buyers in the past.

But there's still plenty to like for the right buyer. The apartment may be on a lower floor of "the most significant residential address in New York City," as the listing, held by Nestseekers brokers Ryan Serhant, Samuel DeFranceschi and Nick Jabbour boasts, but it has great light and it's more than 2,100 square feet.

Plus, the master bathroom has all sorts of nice features—lots of mirrors, soft diffused in-wall lighting, a marble soaking tub and a separate vanity space so that you can be sure to look your best for when you meet your facemate.

kvelsey@observer.com

Looking for a love nest to share with LiLo?

It looks like Lindsay Lohan may not need to camp out at her assistant's Tribeca apartment forever. Which is great news, as couch surfing can grow old, even for someone like LiLo, accustomed to crashing everywhere from club banquettes to L.A. county lock-up.

Ms. Lohan's portraitist and rumored lover Domingo Zapata is reportedly checking out townhouses in the West Village, according to The Real Deal, who spotted a tweet from NestSeekers broker Ryan Serhant announcing that he was taking the Spanish artist to view a townhouse on Downing Street.

Alas, Mr. Serhant, after the twitter declaration, apparently played coy when The Real Deal pressed for more details.

Perhaps Mr. Zapata is hoping that an attractive abode will encourage Ms. Lohan to spend more time indoors after last week's unfortunate hit-and-run incident, during which she allegedly hit a pedestrian while behind the wheel of Mr. Zapata's Porsche?

The relationship between Ms. Lohan and Mr. Zapata remains unclear, but besides the fact that the two were seen leaving the Bowery Hotel together last week (Mr. Zapata is said to make his hom there whilst in New York), we'd guess that only love could compel a man to lend his Porsche to a woman with Ms. Lohan's driving record.

Certainly, Mr. Zapata might be hesitant to hand over the keys of a new house to LiLo, but staying with Mr. Zapata would certainly be a win for Ms. Lohnan. At least, not having to cover rent should help Ms. Lohan pay off her $46,000 bill at Chateau Marmont?

kvelsey@observer.com

Everyone wants to be just like Katie Holmes!

Celebrity copycats, it turns out, do not restrict their mimicry only to the enviable aspects of a Hollywood star's life. Now people are scrambling to be just like the soon-to-be-divorced Katie Holmes, The Real Deal reports.

Ms. Holmes, who reportedly signed the lease on Chelsea Mercantile pad a few days before filing for divorce (real estate deals being one of the biggest predictors of a change in relationship status), is said to be generating unprecedented interest in the building. Ryan Serhant, a broker with Nestseeker, tells The Real Deal that interest in one of his listings is five times what it was before Ms. Holmes arrived.

“We went from showing once or twice a week to five showings today, four on Thursday and seven on Friday so far,” said Mr. Serhant. “Celebrities boost exposure and brand value.”

Apparently, the interested parties are entirely unfazed by the prospect of walking through a media scrum to get to Mr. Serhant's listing—a $22.5 million 4,000-square-foot apartment that went on the market this February.

“When people know a building is good enough for a celebrity, it is automatically more valuable," Mr. Serhant told The Real Deal. "You don’t pay $500 for Oliver Peoples sunglasses because they’re better, you pay that because Brad and Angelina wear them.”

Although celebrities including Jane Fonda, Nick Jonas and Marc Jacobs have lived in the Chelsea Mercantile in the past, the building had, Mr. Serhant claims, lost something of its star-studded sheen. And it would seem that Ms. Holmes's power is such that buyers want to emulate her, even as she wades through the misery of divorce (not that Ms. Holmes, with her barely concealed smile, looks all that miserable these last few days).

kvelsey@observer.com