Patrick Southern has spent roughly the past 20 years of his life fully immersed in the Jersey City, New Jersey, housing market.
Today, he’s known as one of the area’s top-producing real estate agents, a connoisseur of brownstones and new developments. But the 46-year-old says it hasn’t always been that way.
“The first half of my career, it was littered with failure and disappointment and losing,” Southern said in an interview. “I just failed more than most people, and because of all those losses, I started to pick up more wins. Over time, it just built up.”
The latest of those wins, according to Southern, is joining Serhant, the brokerage featured in Netflix’s “Owning Manhattan.” Southern officially joined the team Monday, executives at the brokerage said in a statement.
It’s a mutually beneficial move, Southern said. On the one hand, it fills a hole in the New Jersey market for the brokerage. At the same time, it affords him new opportunities and challenges.
“Things are changing all the time from technology to how things are done,” Southern said of his move. “I thought it would be, for me, selfishly, a nice place to go as far as the excitement of looking to the future.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Did you always want to be a real estate agent? If not, what did you want to be and why?
I don’t know if I have a good answer. I don’t have family in real estate or anything like that.
I think, without getting too deep psychologically, I just always had a fear-based mentality in which I’ve got to be able to take care of myself. I’ve got to win.
I just had big goals of how I wanted to feel and be and support. [Real estate] just happened to itch the aggressive, competitive nature I’ve had. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit.
What interesting jobs have you held?
I had my first job at 7 years old. I think I’ve worked every year since.
I worked for Rutherford Sporting Goods. I would clean the place. I wasn’t supposed to have a job. The guy needed me to get a note from my mother, and he thought that was going to deter me. My mother actually wrote a note because she was like, "I can’t tell my son he’s not supposed to work."
By fifth grade, I was picking out the sneakers they were supposed to order and selling them and bats.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?
It’s a really good question, and I could probably spend a week on it. But if I have to answer this now, I think it’s really trying to understand specifically what the goal is you’re trying to accomplish, not to be general with your intentions.
I’ll give an example. If you just say I want to get in shape, that’s probably not going to work out. But, if your goal is to get in shape, to lose this number of pounds by this date with this amount of muscle mass, and in order to do that, you're going to have to do these things, if you get really specific with that plan, your ability to accomplish that goal will be more certain.
What trends are you seeing in your market?
It’s a really tough question because so much has happened in the past few years.
The thing that’s happening is the positive that came out of COVID. It’s the first time we’ve seen a different demographic moving into Jersey City.
This is just my experience, but pre-COVID, we saw a lot of two-step processes in which people would leave Manhattan, go to Brooklyn and then come to us. I don’t want to say it was rare, but not as often did people come straight from Manhattan to Jersey City.
Once COVID hit, we saw a lot more Manhattan to Jersey City [moves]. A perfect example — and I saw it in the brownstone market a lot — a family would leave their $5 million apartment in Manhattan, buy a $2.5 million brownstone in Jersey City, and then go buy a $2.5 million beach house down on the [Jersey] Shore.
That started to make us more attractive to Manhattan. It was just different. As time went on — I don’t have a better phrase for this — but Jersey City’s just become cooler in the eyes of Manhattan. I don’t think that was the case 15 years ago. I remember when I first started, people would look in Jersey City and not tell their friends because they didn’t want to get picked on.