As Los Angeles residents fled their homes last week, a luxury real estate broker started compiling a list of all the homeowners he knew with empty second or third homes in Los Angeles and asking them to rent them.
“The conversation was very simple,” said Josh Flagg, the broker who is a star of “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.” “For the amount of time that you spend in L.A., you can go stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel” and rent out the house to someone who needs it.
Then his phone began buzzing from early morning until late at night from displaced residents who lost their homes in the catastrophic fires and are desperate to glue their lives back together.
The grueling search for long-term housing is underway for thousands of Los Angeles residents, and real estate agents like Mr. Flagg are looking for untapped inventory — an exercise that has created a network of whisper listings.
At Compass, the local corporate office set up a Google spreadsheet where brokers are adding listings, some destined for the Multiple Listings Service, available to real estate agents across the city, and others that are off-market, known as pocket listings. Many of these listings were found by agents working the phones to find houses, condos and guesthouses that a homeowner might be willing to spare. Some brokers have added their own guesthouses or spare rooms to the list.
In an email statement, Parker Beatty, Compass regional vice president of Southern California and Hawaii, said, “We utilized our robust network to build an internal repository of ‘off-market’ inventory — properties not yet listed or not originally intended for listing. By uniting all our resources, we have been able to respond swiftly and effectively to address the urgent needs of those affected.”
Separately, on the Top Agent Network, a private real estate platform restricted to top performing agents, members have been compiling a private list of more exclusive properties, said Lea Porter, a real estate agent with Beverly Hills Estates. “It’s a place for us to post information of different houses that are not necessarily in the M.L.S.,” she said.
Agents have been calling their clients with listings that have been languishing on the market, asking them to consider renting out homes instead. They’re calling clients who were planning to list their homes for sale in the spring, suggesting they move up the timeline, or consider turning the property into a rental. Several agents interviewed for this article said they were waiving commissions and working across agencies to share information and clients.
“There is a sense of desperation,” said Ms. Porter, adding, “Everyone is trying to get a jump on what they perceive is going to be a run on the market” because “the insurance companies are not going to keep paying for a hotel. Then what?”
Josh Altman, a real estate agent with Douglas Elliman, estimates about 50 friends have lost homes in the fires. “I’m on nonstop, during lunches, during dinner, it’s nonstop hundreds of calls a day,” he said. “And these are not good happy calls.” The toll “is mentally exhausting.”
Nowhere is the frenzy of activity more intense than on the west side of Los Angeles, in neighborhoods close to the Palisades, including Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Westwood and Santa Monica. In the Palisades, where the average household income is $375,000, three times the city average, according to census data, and hillside compounds sell for well over $20 million, many of the people who lost their homes have the means to find alternate housing, whatever the cost.
Scores of people are applying for the same rentals, leading to bidding wars. Those with deep enough pockets to buy a temporary home rather than rent are bidding on properties that haven’t even been listed for sale yet.
With reports of price gouging rattling renters at an intensely vulnerable moment, some real estate agents say they see their efforts as a way to stave off predatory behavior because they can vet the landlords and the prices. Their listings, they say, are fair market value. However, with many of the homes trading hands off market, there is no way to track the size of the shadow market or the prices. While pocket listings are legal in California, the California Association of Realtors has guidelines for them.
“Because of the price gouging, a lot of people are just calling agents, saying, ‘What do you have? What do you have?” said Darlene Hutton, a real estate agent with Rodeo Realty. “And then we’re connecting people, even if it’s not your listing.”
Ms. Hutton has found rentals, some of them private listings, for seven clients since the fires began, with rents ranging from $10,000 a month to $70,000 a month. One of her clients is now under contract to buy a five-bedroom Santa Monica house for around $5 million that was not publicly listed.
Mr. Flagg has found rentals for about a dozen people, placing them in homes with monthly rents ranging from $30,000 for a smaller home in the flats to $300,000 for a hillside mansion worth around $35 million. “I’m encouraging my clients that can afford to spend that much to just buy something,” Mr. Flagg said. (Three of his clients who lost homes in the fire are now under contract for homes ranging from around $6 million to $21 million.)
Palisades neighborhood WhatsApp groups — mostly parent networks used to organize swim meets, elementary classroom activities and car pools — have turned into lifelines as neighbors search for housing.
Marissa Hermer, a restaurant owner whose smoke-damaged home is still standing on the border of Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, has been connecting friends and neighbors with real estate agents she knows. “All of our best friends have lost their homes,” said Ms. Hermer, whose Palisades restaurant, the Draycott, which closed in December, burned in the fire, as did the schools her three children attended. “It’s not just a house, it’s everything you know, it’s our neighborhood.”
In a city defined by its freeways, the I-405 is a dividing line, with the Palisades and Malibu to the west of that marker. Many of the people who lost their homes — particularly those with school-age children whose schools will be relocated, or the children reassigned to neighboring schools — are anxious to stay west of the 405. “You want to be close if you’re going to stay here and you’re not relocating out of state,” Ms. Hutton said.
Last week, Shauna Walters, a real estate agent with Beverly Hills Estates, persuaded a client to sell his house in Little Holmby, next to Holmby Hills, even though he was planning to remodel and keep it for himself. For the right price, he’d be willing to move. “We figured that this would be a good opportunity since we know there are people scrambling,” Ms. Walters said.
The four-bedroom house was never listed publicly, but after a private showing on Friday, it received three offers and is now in contract for $3.4 million. The buyers’ home burned in the Palisades fire.
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