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Home Flipper to the Stars
WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING? The talent game was never so lucrative to Sandy Gallin as real estate investment and development, which are Hollywood obsessions. By LAURA M. HOLSON
Beverly Hills, Calif.
LOWELL, who left these photographs out?” Sandy Gallin said to an assistant, pointing at a stack of pictures carelessly left near a fireplace. “They need to be taken to the garage.”
It was a late March afternoon, and Mr. Gallin, who used to manage the careers of musicians like Dolly Parton, Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson, had just returned here from a week in the Caribbean on the yacht of his friend David Geffen to find his two-story Maine-style shingled cottage, which he was renovating, in disrepair. Eager to finish the year-old project, Mr. Gallin had hired 30 workers to plant trees along the stone driveway. And on a deck outside a glass-walled living room, workers stripped the plastic off two mattresses, both of which were taken upstairs to newly painted guest bedrooms.
“It’s like producing a movie,” Mr. Gallin said of the hectic activity, as he rearranged a vase of white hydrangeas and lilacs. He groused about foot-dragging by his architect and contractors, who asked for a month to do tasks he thought needed only a week. “I’ve done this so many times, they can’t fool me,” he said.
Since quitting his job in 1998 as a successful talent manager and executive producer of movies like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Father of the Bride,” Mr. Gallin has reinvented himself. He leapt into a full-time career buying high-end houses, remodeling them and selling for a tidy profit. In the process, he has earned a reputation as a tastemaker among Hollywood’s status-conscious real estate obsessives. Owning a Sandy Gallin flipped home is now nearly as prestigious as it once was to be managed by Sandy Gallin.
Jennifer Aniston was interested in hiring Mr. Gallin’s longtime architect, Scott Mitchell, and she stopped by the house for a tour. (It turned out she needed an interior designer instead.) The chief executive of Oracle software, Larry Ellison, a friend, came to view the house and reflecting pool out of curiosity.
And when the finishing touches were at last complete, Mr. Gallin gave one of his famous parties there more or less as he put it up for sale. Gore Vidal, Goldie Hawn and Barbra Streisand oohed and aahed over the white oak walls and antique mug shots that Mr. Gallin had bought at a local gallery and hung in the bar days earlier.
The house was sold within days — furniture, mug shots and all — to a movie producer for about $20 million. It was the latest of nearly three dozen houses Mr. Gallin has sold since he started buying property in the 1970s. In 2001 he sold a 6,000-square-foot house on Carbon Beach in Malibu for $10 million. In 2005 he bagged his biggest prize when he sold a northern Malibu furnished estate he designed from scratch to Mark Burnett, the creator of “Survivor” and other reality shows, for close to $30 million.
“I don’t feel like a gypsy, but my friends always ask me that,” said Mr. Gallin, who moved out of the Maine-style house in May to make way for the movie producer. “I originally started redoing houses to deal with stress. I found that the hour I could go to a job site every day took my mind off the 24/7 of thinking about my clients. When my business manager said to me, ‘You’ve made more money doing this than producing,’ it really surprised me. So I thought, ‘Why not just do it?’ ”
In Hollywood, real estate is the easiest way to track who is moving up, breaking up and moving on. Brad Pitt and Ms. Aniston sold their Wallace Neff-designed home for $22.5 million when they split up. Robert A. Iger bought a new estate in Brentwood for about $19 million after he was named the Walt Disney Company’s chief executive two years ago. And the producer Brian Grazer has put his Pacific Palisades home on the market for $27.5 million and is contemplating buying an apartment in Manhattan.
“I go to these parties, and it’s all anyone talks about,” said Kurt Rappaport, a real estate agent who caters to the celebrity crowd. “All they want to know is what everyone else is doing. Some A-list actors, directors and producers have made more money buying and selling homes than with their first careers.”
The interest is not surprising, given that so much else in Hollywood — pounds gained, weekly box office receipts — is hawkishly tracked. “In Hollywood it’s all about keeping score,” said Kit Rachlis, the editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine.
But there is also a voyeuristic appeal in seeing how friends, competitors and sometimes enemies measure up. “You get to see what’s in people’s homes, on their desks,” said Laurence Mark, a producer, adding that some of his industry friends spend Sundays visiting open houses.
Mr. Gallin understands the rich. He has catered to them for years. Born in Brooklyn in 1940, he started in the entertainment business overseeing the careers of singers like Ms. Streisand. His closest relationship was with Ms. Parton, whose career he began managing in 1973 and with whom he shared an all-white New York apartment for nearly two decades. He is credited with steering her from a country singer into a mainstream star.
In 1998, Mr. Gallin quit the management business, in part because the casino owner Steve Wynn made him an offer to develop Broadway-style entertainment in Las Vegas. But Mr. Gallin hated the desert. He left within a year. The remodeling projects that had been a sideline became his sole focus, a vocation that appeals to him, he said, because, fundamentally, he likes to shop — for furniture, antiques, paintings, even marble countertops and flooring.
“Several people have asked to put up money to do five or six at a time,” he said of his real estate projects. “But I’m really designing a house for myself that I’d like to live in, and then I improve on it each time.” Still, he acknowledges, he always has a potential sale in mind. “Even if I wanted to build a two-bedroom house on an expensive piece of property, I know I would build a four-bedroom house with a maid’s quarters,” he said. “That’s what people want.”
On a sunny Saturday in mid-April, Mr. Gallin spent the day as he often does: driving around Los Angeles. First, he had an appointment with Mr. Mitchell, his architect, at the former estate of Jane Wyatt, the actress who played in “Father Knows Best.” Following her death last year, Mr. Gallin bought her 1938 Bel Air home for $7 million. Mr. Mitchell, who has worked with him on seven houses, said that Mr. Gallin understands what rich Hollywood wants today. “Lots of windows and light, modern, outdoor California living,” he said. “He comes up with the ideas, and then we make it work.”
At Ms. Wyatt’s home, which looked tired from years of neglect, they agreed it would be a tear-down. They made plans to build a two-story contemporary with sunken gardens, and for nearly 15 minutes they debated how best to build a long driveway, given the property’s steep incline.
PEEKING OVER THE BUSHES The home of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, top, sold for $22.5 million when they split up. Courtney Cox’s house, above, is on the market for $33.5 million. (Neither belonged to Sandy Gallin.) “People really like the idea of a grand entrance,” Mr. Gallin said. “We have to have that.” When Mr. Mitchell suggested planting bamboo, Mr. Gallin grimaced. “I think if we are going to build a contemporary house in Bel Air, you want to keep the land as Bel Air as possible,” he said. “Leafy, green, lots of trees.” Besides, he added, “Bamboo is more Westwood today,” a reference to the densely packed city that is home to the University of California, Los Angeles.
Later that morning, Mr. Gallin was due to see a Spanish-style mansion on Maple Drive on the market for about $7.9 million. At first he mistakenly thought it was on the more exclusive Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills, where homes start at $15 million.
Negotiating the narrow streets in his Lexus SC 430 convertible, he debated whether to skip the Maple Drive showing in favor of going over to Holmby Hills for a cruise.
“Do you know Los Angeles?” he asked. “Maple Drive is in the flats, not in the hills north of Sunset Boulevard, where a lot of famous people live and the views are great.
“Now, I’m thinking do I want to get out of this meeting and try to do something on Mapleton? I’m not sure.”
He stuck to his original plan. “It’s Spanish,” he said, referring to the Maple Drive house, “and I love Spanish architecture.”
As he pulled up at the house, two real estate brokers bounded over and embraced him. Mr. Gallin showed little emotion during the tour.
“Oh, Sandy, come take a look,” one agent squealed with delight, her voice rising as she peeled back a corner of worn carpet to show painted tiles underneath. “Look at this detail, for crying out loud. What do you think? You interested?”
“I have to think about it,” he replied.
As Mr. Gallin drove down Sunset Boulevard on the way home, he said: “Sometimes I think these people live so grandly, or they lived so clean, or how could they live in such squalor. You can’t look overly anxious.
“The question anyway is how much can you get for the top in the flats? I’m thinking $15 million. You are going to pay at least $8 million for that house and another $3 million for the remodel. That’s $11 million. Then you will have to take down the trees in the backyard and redo the pool. That’s maybe another $4 million in landscaping. It’s not worth the time or the investment or the aggravation.”
Besides, he added: “Being a manager is about getting into the minds of the people you represent. It’s no different in real estate.”
There is, of course, one big difference, he noted. “The houses don’t talk back.”
