Like the Kardashian-Jenners of Calabasas, the D’Amelios of Norwalk, Conn., the Paul brothers of Westlake, Ohio, and, er, the Culpo sisters of Cranston, R.I., the Luries of San Francisco are establishing themselves as a preeminent, multiplatform influencer family.
I am still very much not into Mayor Daniel Lurie’s social media performances, but I hate to admit that he, in his own “How do you do fellow kids” way, has managed to charm many users of Instagram and, to a much lesser extent, TikTok. Now, Alexander Lurie, the mayor’s Schlossbergian younger half-brother, is ramping up his activity on TikTok in a way that suggests that he’s trying to crib some of his influencer brother’s clout.
Alexander is the founder of real estate agency The Lurie Group, and has handled his share of pretty swanky properties in the city’s toniest neighborhoods. In 2024, he sold a Bolinas farm owned by Annie Leibovitz for a cool $8.5 million; he represented a $7.5 million Noe Valley home last year. Selling these homes probably made him a very decent living, but there are some things money can’t buy, mostly internet fame. (Ask Joe Lonsdale.)
This isn’t Alexander’s first foray into making content. Like many an enterprising real estate agent before him, he’s been posting on Instagram for a hot minute — doing the whole “selling homes” thing but also the city booster-ism bit to raise civic pride and property values.
To his credit, he’s been clearly taking notes from his brother, who is arguably a distant second-best social media mayor after New York’s Zohran Mamdani. Alexander hits all the right power poses; his speaking cadence is nearly identical to big brother Daniel’s. If you watched one of his videos for a half-second before moving onto a TikTok Shop ad or something, you would think that the mayor moonlights in real estate and sometimes looks really young. The only difference, really, is that the mayor is partial to a front-facing video for relatability and celebrity proximity purposes, while Alexander tends to gravitate toward a full-body shot, all the better to show himself inside these multi-million dollar properties.
Alexander has been posting consistently on TikTok since last December, but this pivot has not really panned out for him. He only has a couple of hundred followers and a couple thousand views. His most viral clip, a video where he proclaims that he’s “gonna do something crazy” and then proceeds to go on a perfectly regular broker tour, has 25,000 views; the top comment is a withering one-liner from local drag queen Fran Zaya: “So you’re all like that.” Oof. Another viewer inquired about the possible conflicts of interest that could emerge between the two social media brothers, both of whom have such deeply vested interests in the city. Alexander did not respond. It also doesn’t help that TikTok real estate scams are prevalent enough now that even a KRON reporter could get fooled by them; he’s tardy to the real estate TikToker party.
Younger (and arguably more jaded) TikTok users (so, all of them) have mistaken Alexander for Daniel’s son; about half of all his comments are pondering whether or not Alexander and Daniel are a son-and-dad duo, which is flattering only for Alexander. He seems to have a much more sympathetic audience on Instagram, where everyone from your mother on down enjoys looking at houses they could never buy.
What has worked for him is the evergreen celeb move of starting a real podcast and almost immediately abandoning it, but not before clip farming it on social media. A couple of those clips have gone viral on Instagram, and he’s even landed Supervisor Rafael Mandelman in one. Maybe he could stick to the podcast bro shtick; that’s where the real clout is.
