When you first encounter Eric Kang, you’re likely to think one thing: This dude parties. Heavily tattooed and handlebar mustachioed, he has long, head-banging hair and a surfer dude accent. Kang has a vibe that hovers somewhere between a character actor in a stoner comedy and a member of a biker gang.
The moment I step across the threshold into his industrial-chic workspace just off Jack London Square in Oakland, Kang greets me with a high five and offers me a pre-interview White Claw or tequila shot, my choice. He’s totally cool and totally disarming and totally not what you’d expect from a Realtor in one of the most competitive real estate markets in the world.
It’s exactly this departure from the norm that has brought the Kang of Realty, as he is known to his many clients and 22.2K Instagram followers, so much success. The average real estate agent is a 55-year-old white woman, and an untrustworthy one at that, if consumer polls and Hollywood archetypes are to be believed. Kang, 39, is a Korean-American millennial who wears turquoise rings and band tees and describes homes on social media as “rad,” “bitchin’,” and “epic.” His videos are full of slang because they’re unscripted, he tells me, and I’m inclined to believe him. Kang really does talk like that. It’s the first indication of what his satisfied customers — who call him “honest,” “human,” and “infectious” in their five-star reviews — already know: In a world full of phonies, Kang is a real one.
“I decided early on in my career that I was just gonna be me, and if people like that, then cool. If not, then they can go work with Barbara at Corcoran, you know what I mean?” Kang tells me. “When I first got my license, I went to Banana Republic for the first time in my life and bought chino pants because I thought that was how I needed to look, but real estate is changing. The times are changing. It doesn’t make sense to me to try to fit this old, antiquated formula of being a Realtor.”
Laid back in a leather swivel chair, the Kang sitting across from me is more buttoned up than his Instagram persona suggests, but only by a little. His dark locks, which flow gloriously in all his professional headshots, are wound into a neat bun today. This dude may party, but he’s also at ease sitting at massive conference room tables and leading his clients through business transactions, or a journalist through an interview.
“I remember at a very early age just loving San Francisco. It was like this idyllic kind of fantasy place.
Eric Kang
The son of Korean immigrants, Kang was born Eric Jun Ho Kang in Buena Park, Calif., a sun-baked city in the Orange County belt of amusement parks and strip malls. The northern section of Buena Park was officially designated a Koreatown in 2023, but Kang was part of the first-generation cohort of the ‘90s. There you would find young Kang among the punk-rock misfits who smoked pot and played in garage bands, the kids who read Kerouac and dreamed of one day ditching their one-horse suburbs for the sparkling cities up the coast. Kang’s father, a traveling menswear salesman, used to bring him on business trips to San Francisco, and the Bay sunk its teeth into young Kang — deep.
“I remember at a very early age just loving San Francisco. It was like this idyllic kind of fantasy place. It was just so different from SoCal, from what I was used to. I decided that if I were to move anywhere I’d move to San Francisco,” Kang recalls, dreamily.
That dream, plus a bad breakup with his high school girlfriend, was enough to push Kang to enroll at San Francisco State for college, the city’s hotbed of youth, punk, and protest. It was a place where Kang got to be Kang: partying, playing in bands, and charming everyone with his cheeky, boyish smile. For 12 years after graduation, Kang worked in hospitality and gigged at the city’s best dives: The Knockout, El Rio, Bottom of the Hill, and most often, Thee Parkside. (His three bands of note, for each of which he played some mix of guitar, bass, piano, and vocals, were called Poor Sons, Buffalo Tooth, and Banquet. “Like Coors Banquet,” Kang explains.)
But shit happens. Life does, too. At 33, Kang had to face the music: “Rock and roll doesn’t pay the bills.”
“I woke up one morning, hungover, stuck at my bar job, feeling depressed. I was just like, man, I need to do something different. This job is eating me alive,” Kang remembers. “I’m a product of immigrants. My parents didn't have a retirement plan. I am their retirement plan. So I was like, fuck, I need to figure something out and start making some money.”
There were two sides of being a product of immigrants, Kang came to discover. Yes, he may have had the weight of his family’s sacrifice on his shoulders, but he also had a sense of resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism deeply ingrained within him. Even today, he insists he hates salesmen, but the memory of his father’s small-business savvy on those trips to San Francisco got his gears turning. Then, he dug up another memory, of a childhood friend who lived in the biggest house of his whole crew. That kid’s mom? A real estate agent.
In 2019, Kang got his shit together, bought those chinos he’d eventually abandon, earned his California Realtors license, and joined Fast Real Estate, a subsidiary of a national brokerage called eXp Realty with a team of about 250 agents in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara counties.
He soon learned that the party doesn’t stop when you leave the service industry. “Realtors party way harder than bartenders, because Realtors have money, and it’s a really stressful job,” Kang says.
He also learned that he couldn’t have arrived on the scene at a better time. His first years in the real estate business coincided with the early years of the pandemic, which were terrible for many of us but great for real estate agents. Government stimulus suppressed mortgage rates to historic lows and those homebound Americans with well-paying jobs were particularly keen to expand their living-working-everything spaces. The market was booming, and Kang found that he had joined the scene alongside a new demographic of home buyers, one he knew all too well: millennials.
“That’s my niche market. Those are my people,” Kang says with a big grin. “I’m much more relatable to millennials, and that’s how I’ve been able to build my brand.”
Many millennials, it turned out, didn’t want the guy in chinos or Barbara Corcoran, especially not in the Bay Area, where one of the hallmarks of success was being able to dress down like Mark Zuckerberg in his hoodie phase. This cohort was ready to buy a house from a guy like Kang. More importantly, Kang was ready to sell the hell out of them.
A unique brand, of course, pays dividends on social media. In an Instagram post from his early days in real estate, Kang jokingly called himself a “borderline moron,” but even then he understood something we’re all waking up to: Everyone must be an influencer.
In his first few years as a real estate agent, Kang’s Instagram presence was random: some personal posts here, some professional milestones there, some ill-cropped memes and infographics in between. Around 2023, he started posting more visually consistent content and employing TikTok hacks like the greenscreen filter and subtitles to help his posts pop. But it wasn’t until the beginning of 2024, when he ranked second among all Fast Real Estate agents for the highest sales volume, that he realized that going all-in on social was the one thing the top seller had been doing that he hadn’t.
Thus, the Kang of Realty as we know him was born: the head-banging, break-dancing, loungin’ ‘round bro for all seasons, who walks his viewers through sick-ass, cozy-ass, fer-sher-buyable homes around the Bay, including ones he’s not personally listing. Whatever he’s showing, Kang makes you want to buy.
I’m more like a cringefluencer. I’m not trying to be an influencer, that was never my goal.
Eric Kang
After all, behind all his cowabunga vibes is a strategic businessman. “It’s very curated. I mean, it’s house porn. People are obsessed with houses, cool houses, even if they’re not in the market to buy. The pandemic really exacerbated that. I pick homes that I personally like and think are cool,” Kang explains. “I go and market other houses with the hopes to capture buyers that are interested in buying at all.”
The millennials ate it up — to the tune of hundreds of thousands of likes and comments, and 22.2K followers and counting, making Kang a bonafide microinfluencer, whether he likes it or not. And sometimes he doesn’t. When I bring up the label he bristles, as he does when I call him “entrepreneurial” or when we talk about being a “salesman” in the abstract.
“I hate that word and don’t want to be associated with it, honestly. I’m more like a cringefluencer,” Kang says, quick to play it off with a joke. “I’m not trying to be an influencer, that was never my goal. I’m just trying to make content that people want to see. All these videos you see from Realtors, it’s like, ‘Hey! This is so-and-so from so-and-so brokerage, welcome to my newest listing, a three-bedroom, two-bath’ — BO-RING! Like, immediately swipe. It was about breaking the mold for me.”
Still that punk ‘90s kid at heart, Kang grapples with what corporate success demands of him: the shameless salesmanship, the social media dog-and-pony show, the tech. When I ask what sort of tech he uses for his business, on and off Instagram, he rattles off the more innocent answers (video editing programs, software that tracks property values) before sheepishly admitting that he used to pay copywriters but that “ChatGPT has kind of taken that place.”
“To be honest with you, I’m even ashamed to admit that,” he says. “I used to be, like, anti-tech for a long time. When I first became a Realtor I didn’t even have Facebook because I was just over it. Now, ironically, my world revolves around it. On one end, I feel like it’s going to be like Terminator 2, you know what I mean? I do have kind of a dark view about how AI is going to integrate with our society. But at the same time, I feel like the people that are early adopters of this technology are going to be the ones that are more successful. It’s kind of a necessary evil. I don’t know. It’s a double-edged sword. A part of me hates that, but at the same time, in order for me to run with the top dogs, I need to stay on top of all that.”
To a Gen Z fool like me, who knows nothing of the real estate market except for the bad news I read about the collapse of the American dream, I assumed millennials, in large part, were locked out of the housing market. But Kang tells me that's not the whole story: In fact, millennials have made up nearly a third of buyers so far this year, and that’s with rates hovering around 7 percent, way up past pandemic levels.
Still, he tells me, my assumption is widely held. “A lot of people are deterred from home buying because they think it’s impossible. But it’s actually more possible than you think,” he reassures me, offering me sound financial advice (save money) as he slips into Realtor mode.
In fact, he felt very similarly before he bought his first home. “It’s a big, scary thing that people go through. Buying a house is terrifying.”
If it’s any consolation, it even took him — the goddamn Kang of Realty — four years into his real estate career to bite the bullet and buy a home.
“I dissected why it took me so long. When I took everything away, it was really because of fear. I was scared,” he says. “I was scared of putting down that big down payment. I was scared to be locked into a huge monthly mortgage. But looking back in hindsight, it’s like, fuck, I should’ve done it earlier.”
What finally got him to do it, of course, was the birth of his son, Sunny, on Thanksgiving Day, 2022. A few months later, the ‘burbs called to him and his little family. Kang and his longtime girlfriend gave up the “bitchin’ spot” they were renting in the Outer Sunset and found a home for three in Santa Rosa, a single-story, ranch-style home with original hardwood floors and an ADU in the back for Kang’s parents to stay in. Like with everything else, there were tradeoffs: It’s a long commute to his Oakland office and it’s not quite as extravagant as some of the houses he shows on Instagram, but it’s everything he wanted. It’s a dope situation, one he’s determined to secure for others.
“I really love my job,” Kang beams. “I’m really passionate about, well, I wouldn’t say real estate, but about helping people buy and sell homes. It’s the best feeling.”
So, when he closes a sale, does he celebrate with White Claws or tequila shots?
“You know what, I stopped drinking. I haven’t had a drink in six months, and I’m running a half marathon this weekend” he says. “Yeah, I’ve made some big life adjustments. Having a kid really changes your outlook on mortality and longevity, you know? Like, I’m trying to be around for a while.”
The party didn’t end; it’s just bumping to a different tune. This life shit, man. It’s real as hell.
