California dreamin’: The nightmare situations luxury agents deal with

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This is the 11th and final article in an 11-part series spotlighting housing markets in Virginia, Texas, Florida, California and New York and the U.S. market. Read the entire Summer Cooldown series here.

Real estate agents are members of a privileged set who sometimes get a glimpse of the most private parts of their clients’ lives.

As agents guide their clients through what can be an incredibly stressful process, the best can come out in those clients — and the worst — as well as every odd thing in between.

Maybe it’s all those big, Hollywood personalities or the fact that California, with its incredibly pleasant climate and natural beauty, seems to attract all kinds of people. Whatever the reason, it seems like luxury real estate agents in the Golden State tend to collect more bizarre real estate transaction stories than most. And like the professionals they are, they’ve learned to just roll with the punches.

“It’s funny, I deal with so many people and so many things that are outrageous, it doesn’t even faze me,” Gary Gold, of Coldwell Banker, told Inman. “I’m rarely taken aback, because I think anyone who wants to buy a $20 million house [in Los Angeles], in my mind, is a celebrity — but they’re just buyers and sellers.”

As Inman caps off its Summer Cooldown series, we asked luxury agents in California to share the most unusual things they’ve seen in their time serving some of the world’s most elite real estate clients. From the seller who wanted to maintain a room full of snakes in cages during a home showing, to the luxury renter who turned out to be an insurance fraud artist, this is likely just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what luxury agents have to deal with.

The insurance fraud artist

Whether they’re a buyer, seller or renter, seasoned real estate agents know that ensuring new clients are qualified for contracts is crucial. Several years ago, Timothy Di Prizito, of AKG | Christie’s International Real Estate, learned the hard way that agents can never be too diligent when it comes to reviewing a potential luxury renter’s background.

“There was a guy that was very well-qualified financially and wanted to lease out a property of mine,” Di Prizito told Inman. “I had the listing, and the tenant was unrepresented, and he was a new person in my circle.”

The client drove a high-end car, had nothing objectionable in his bank records and had a clean criminal background check, Di Prizito said. “We thought that we crossed our T’s and dotted our I’s.” But shortly after he moved into the rental, odd things started happening.

“He moved in and day 1 we started getting photographs of cockroaches laying around the house,” Di Prizito said. “And he said, ‘What’s going on? It’s infested.’ I say, ‘I’m so sorry. The house is really clean, it’s a five-year-old property, it’s brand new. We’ll send the pest control out there.'”

So Di Prizito hired a pest control company to service the property, and the technicians didn’t see any signs of an active infestation but sprayed the house anyway and assured Di Prizito that there wouldn’t be any more issues.

A few days later, Di Prizito received more photos from the client of dead cockroaches scattered about the house — in the shower, under the bed, in the kitchen cabinets. So he sent another pest control company to the property. And then a third company after that.

Eventually, the cockroach issue seemed to fade away only for another issue to present itself.

“A month later, [the client] said, ‘There’s mold. All around the air conditioning there’s mold, and I’m getting sick from the mold,'” Di Prizito said.

Di Prizito and his associates went to inspect the property and sure enough, there was mold growing around the air conditioning vents and on the drywall around the vents. So his team moved the client out of the property and paid him back his rent.

In the process of moving out, the renter claimed he broke his foot by tripping on something in the garage and filed an insurance claim against the landlord.

The situation continued to spool out from there, and Di Prizito and his associates eventually brought in an attorney who had the idea to run an insurance claims check on the renter.

“This was 10 or 15 years ago, and we just weren’t running insurance claims checks on people as part of the background check,” Di Prizito explained. “It was never part of the background check — it’s still not part of the background check. You have to do it separately, and it costs money, and not a lot of people want to do it.”

Come to find out, this wasn’t the first time the renter had filed an insurance claim against another party — the check done by the attorney found that he had a serial habit. And throughout the whole ordeal, the renter had avoided paying a single month’s rent.

“We had to go through an eviction, and it was a year-long, absolute mess,” Di Prizito said. “The landlord lost a lot of money and was upset with me. The long and the short of it is, about a year later, this tenant, who we did evict, turns out to be one of the biggest art fraud dealers and was indicted on federal charges of stealing and selling fake art and crossing international lines. The guy’s in jail now.”

Daddy’s potty mouth

Gold has worked with a lot of celebrity clients throughout his career, and he’s learned to treat them just like any other client. He once showed a $20 million dollar listing to Miley Cyrus, Jay-Z, Jason Statham and Rihanna — all in the same day, he told Inman. And he somehow managed to sell The Playboy Mansion under terms that allowed Hugh Hefner to remain in the property for the rest of his life.

“Looking back, it was virtually impossible to put that deal together,” Gold said of The Playboy Mansion sale. “And we were able to do it, and it took three months. It was the hardest thing I ever did in real estate.”

But for Gold, extraordinary circumstances are all just part of a day’s work. And it often lets him see some of the most private moments of his clients’ lives.

“So I’m with this icon’s wife, and this guy is a big British rock star who has got a garbage mouth that you can’t even believe,” Gold said of a pair of clients he serviced in the pre-social media era. “Every other word that comes out of his mouth is f%*k. But it’s endearing. He’s a very charming guy.”

“And I’m with the wife and two kids, and the kids at this time were young,” Gold continued.

“They’re wearing private school uniforms, and they’ve got British accents. They look about as prim and proper as any kids could look. And I’m driving in the front, and the wife is in the front seat. And these two kids proceed to fight with each other. They sounded like longshoremen — drunk.

“They were going at it with such vulgarity, you couldn’t even believe it, wearing private school uniforms, looking like they were out of a Disney movie. And they’re just yelling at each other, saying the most outrageous profanities ever. And the wife says in her British accent, ‘Now children, don’t talk like that, especially in front of company.’ And the girl says, ‘But, Mummy, Daddy talks like that.'”

Michael Jackson, a room full of snakes and more

Over her 20-plus years in the industry, Valerie Fitzgerald, of the Valerie Fitzgerald Group at Coldwell Banker, has collected countless stories about client interactions with a little extra flair. Because the stories kept adding up, two years ago Fitzgerald and her colleague, Bob Hurwitz, decided to launch a podcast called Real Estate, Real Laughs, where the two recount some of their craziest industry stories and invite industry insiders, celebrities and more to give their take on what goes in the luxury market.

“The [podcast] is not about names and addresses,” Fitzgerald told Inman, “but the stories are unbelievable, because we literally experience people’s lives. Whether you’re working with buyers or sellers, you enter into their very personal life and things happen. Things happen all the time — crazy, wild, and you have to divert, to get on your feet quickly, and figure out how to react quickly to some situations that are pretty wild.”

Any agent who has crossed paths with the late king of pop Michael Jackson seems to have a story to tell, and Fitzgerald is no different.

In fact, Fitzgerald had to be the bearer of bad news one day when a home in the hills behind the Beverly Hills Hotel that had caught Jackson’s eye had been leased out to a wealthy Saudi Arabian family.

“So I said, ‘Michael, I’m sorry, it’s leased to a Saudi family and they’re very private,’ and you could see they had security there,” Fitzgerald said.

“So a couple days later, we went out again [to look at homes] and he said, ‘Let’s drive by the house I really like.'”

Fitzgerald is leading the brigade in her vehicle, while Jackson and his assistant are trailing behind her in an old, beat-up Volkswagen bus with tinted windows. When they pulled up to the house, something happened that Fitzgerald couldn’t anticipate.

“The door to the VW bus opens and he gets out in this full Saudi outfit,” she said. “He’s got the headdress, he’s got the gown, he’s got a whole beard, he’s got sunglasses on.

“He goes over and presses the buzzer at the gate, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god.’ My heart’s pumping fast, and the security guard opens the gate and he starts to walk into the motor court. And I’m thinking, ‘What’s going to happen?’ I was nervous as hell.”

Jackson went on to bow and greet the family matriarch and her two children who opened the front door. Then suddenly, Jackson removed his headdress and the looks of recognition swept over the face of the mother and her children.

“Well of course, then Michael Jackson is standing there in your driveway, in your motor court, and the kids are going crazy,” Fitzgerald said. “The woman of the house was just blown away and they were of course inviting him in.”

That story may come off as pretty tame, however, compared to another encounter Fitzgerald shared with Inman about a celebrity rock n’ roller she once worked with. The client invited her over one day to discuss prepping his house for sale.

When Fitzgerald arrived, everything suggested a relaxed, normal client meeting until she glanced over to the living room and saw it lined, floor-to-ceiling, with three rows of cages full of snakes, in what Fitzgerald estimates were a few hundred snakes total.

“I said, ‘You know, I don’t think we can show the house like this,'” Fitzgerald said. “And he goes, ‘Why not?’ And I go, ‘Well, because I don’t think people are going to react very well to all these snakes.”

The rock star was borderline offended, Fitzgerald said, saying that the snakes were “like my kids.” But she was eventually able to convince him to relocate them when it came time to show the house a few months later.

But the other stories that Fitzgerald has come across through her experience and by way of her podcast have run the gamut to include other reptilian pets, agents walking into a home showing to find people having sex, an Emmy-winning producer who once asked her agent to “deal with my husband” who was passed out naked on the living room couch and a buyer who faked his girlfriend’s death to try and get out of a transaction, among others.

“I try not to react to really shocking things,” Fitzgerald said. “You try to look the other way, not react, you didn’t notice it, you didn’t see it. Just keep going.”

RIP, Fluffy

Family pets hold a special place in our hearts, and everyone has their own unique way of dealing with their passing. And it’s something that real estate agents can inevitably end up taking part in.

“I sold a home that belonged to a very well-known rock star,” Kofi Nartey of the Globl RED team at Real Brokerage told Inman. “Before we were able to close on the home, he disclosed that their cat was buried next to the pool, and they wanted to come and exhume the cat and move it to their new residence.”

Nartey said prior to the seller mentioning it, no one had even realized the cat’s grave existed on the property.

“But they were able to say, ‘Well, there’s a rock, and there’s a little flower next to the rock,'” Nartey said. “And we were like, ‘Oh, there it is, the cat grave, right there — we see it now.’ And sure enough, they came and got their cat’s remains.”

As pet-friendly people, the buyers were “good-spirited” about the whole thing, Nartey said. But, “we had a good laugh about it,” he added, since the grave had gone completely unnoticed until someone told them what to look for.

The portable door

Many homeowners have that one special item that makes their home really feel like “home,” whether it’s a special piece of furniture or an old family portrait.

For one client of The Oppenheim Group’s Gio Helou that object is a bit more unorthodox: The front door.

“[The client] insisted on taking the front door with her when I sold her house,” Helou told Inman. “Needless to say, the buyer was not happy! I had to buy a replacement front door for them.”

This was just one of the eccentric celebrity’s quirks, Helou explained, which he had to learn how to work around.

“She’s obviously quirky, and apparently takes this door with her to every primary residence and retrofits it accordingly,” he said.

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Email Lillian Dickerson