A+E to premiere new commercial real estate reality series

For decades, real-estate reality television has mined the drama of luxury homes, quick-flip makeovers and high-end staging. And, of course, catty broker drama.

But the engine that powers downtown skylines, fills shopping centers and underwrites small-business survival has rarely made it to primetime. That changes this fall.

On Oct. 12, the A+E network will debut “The Real Estate Commission,” an eight-part unscripted series that steps inside commercial property deals — a trillion-dollar industry rarely seen beyond boardrooms and brokerage offices. A show focusing on the commercial end of the industry has never before existed.

The show premieres at 9 a.m. eastern time as part of the network’s Home.Made.Nation programming block.

The series follows Todd J. Drowlette, managing director of TITAN Commercial Realty Group, who has closed more than $2 billion in transactions across 1,700 deals over a 23-year career. 

Season 1 spans New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina, capturing negotiations over multimillion-dollar office leases, national retailer expansions and even a court-ordered multifamily foreclosure sale.

“There has never been a series that’s specific about commercial real estate before,” Drowlette said. “So commercial real estate is a $1 trillion industry that’s kind of hidden in plain sight.”

Producers are billing the show as a cross between CNBC’s “Shark Tank” and Netflix’s “Selling Sunset” — but with fewer champagne toasts and more financial risk.

“The deals are real, the stakes are high and viewers will see how empires are built one deal at a time,” Drowlette said. 

“Commercial real estate touches people’s lives every single day — from the gas station where they fill up, to the grocery store that stocks their shelves and the drive-thru coffee they grab on the way to work.”

Unlike heavily produced real estate soaps, Drowlette insisted that nothing here is scripted. 

“It’s a docu series, so every deal that people will watch, you can Google them. They’re real. Nothing staged. Nothing’s fake. They’re real people that do actual business deals,” he told The Post. 

The show captures Drowlette working with law firms weighing office relocations, entrepreneurs scouting locations for multiple businesses and landlords battling through federal bureaucracy to sell distressed assets. Viewers also see brokers clash over commissions ranging from $5,000 to $250,000.

“I told producers in the initial production meeting, ‘You don’t need to talk about how [to] set up scenarios to create drama. Trust me, just roll the cameras, watch what happens,’” he said. 

“When you’re talking about millions of dollars, if you’re wrong, I lose millions of dollars a month. Trust me, the stress that brings out in people in real life comes across on camera.”

Drowlette said the concept emerged during the pandemic, when his career came to a standstill for nearly two years. 

“It came about in a very odd way,” he said.

He argued the delay in commercial real estate reaching TV had more to do with familiarity than lack of drama. 

“The expression is hidden in plain sight. Commercial real estate is kind of like the air you need to breathe constantly, but you’re so used to being around it and interacting with it, you don’t even think about it,” he said. 

“People don’t think, ‘Oh, I stopped and got coffee this morning. That’s commercial real estate. Oh, I went into the supermarket. That’s commercial real estate. I went to my office. I work in a warehouse. That’s commercial real estate.’”

The network hopes to appeal to viewers curious about how real estate shapes their daily routines, as well as fans of high-stakes unscripted drama.

“If people just want to learn about something that is not difficult to learn, and anyone who is that interested in the business world and you want to see a real behind-the-curtain view of how deals are put together … I think would find the show interesting,” Drowlette said.

Each week, A+E will air back-to-back new episodes, following negotiations from first handshake to final signing — or collapse. 

“This isn’t every story that has a happy ending. This is real life,” Drowlette said. “Some work out, some don’t.”