Steps from Stephen Shapiro’s Westside Estate Agency office, in a second-floor space on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills sits the storied Hilton & Hyland — once the gatekeeper to the well-manicured world of luxury living in Los Angeles.
WEA is also next door to Drew Fenton’s Carolwood Estates, which towers over the Golden Triangle from its Santa Monica Boulevard penthouse as its founder focuses on expanding his already fast-growing reach.
This couple of blocks has become the set for a drama unfolding in Los Angeles’ hyper-competitive high-end residential real estate industry, as recent trends point to a changing of the guard from one of Shapiro’s neighbors to the other.
Big names — Mauricio Umansky, along with Josh and Matt Altman – had already left the firm in 2011 and 2015, respectively. The trend accelerated with the departures of Rayni and Branden Williams and Fenton from the firm. Fenton launched Carolwood with another alum, Ed Leyson. Together with Nick Segal, they built a business that doubled its sales volume from year one to year two, hitting $3.2 billion in 2024 when you count both on- and off-market deals. Its agent roster, which began with about 50, is now near 200.
The quick success of the boutique has come amid a migration of talent in the broader industry that has since reached soap opera levels.
In four months so far this year, Carolwood poached Mick Partridge and his three-person team, along with sisters Shana and Emila Tavangarian (daughters of mega-mansion developer Ardie Tavangarian) from the Beverly Hills Estates. Meanwhile, the Beverly Hills Estates strengthened its Pacific Palisades presence by recruiting Jacqueline Chernov and her team from Compass. Paul Salazar left Hilton & Hyland for Compass, following the same path as David Kramer, former Hilton & Hyland president. And, like a deus ex machina just before the credits roll, Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California appeared fully formed in Pasadena by adding several former Douglas Elliman agents.
“There’s always been movement,” Shapiro said of the turmoil.
But, he added: “The Hilton & Hyland shift is quite obvious because they worked with Jeff [Hyland] as head of their ship and then Jeff [passed away] and Lori [Hyland] as nice as she may be, she’s not Jeff. She’s not in the business. They had David Kramer, who I like very much, and I think he saw all the people that gravitated toward Jeff leaving and then he wound up leaving. And then one of their last significant agents just left [last month], Paul Salazar, so he’s now gone.”
This outward flow underscores a common ancestry in Hilton & Hyland, in retrospect a breeding ground for the power brokers now dominating Los Angeles’ boutique brokerage landscape.
But watch the drama closely enough and there are signs that their launchpad, despite the excellent training it provided, is causing the commotion in the local industry.
End of an incubator
To see where L.A. residential boutiques are going requires an understanding of the business and its past, before conglomerates muscled their way into the marketplace.
In the 1970s, brokerage owners hung their names outside their doors and managed small, intimate businesses. Consolidation came in the ’80s and ’90s as Merrill Lynch entered the market, followed by Coldwell Banker, which acquired businesses such as Jon Douglas Co. and Fred Sands Realtors in 1997 and 2000, respectively.
But a handful of firms went the other way. In 1993, Hyland started the boutique Hilton & Hyland with Rick Hilton. In 1999, Shapiro and Kurt Rappaport’s Westside Estate Agency got going too.
Today’s top brokers see the early Hyland era as mythical.
“Jeff was a great person and literally wrote the book on the important properties in Los Angeles,” Fenton, who declined an interview, wrote in an email. “He was encyclopedic.”
Jack Harris, one of the Beverly Hills Estates’ top performers, read Hyland’s “The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills” “cover to cover several times” after receiving it as a gift, even driving to visit many of the properties featured in its pages, he told The Real Deal last summer.
“There was something special about it because it was run by a historian, an author and a top broker, which was Jeff Hyland, and then Rick Hilton had a great name.”
The Beverly Hills Estates’ co-founder and CEO Rayni Williams sees it as the golden years: “It was a time in Los Angeles real estate when there weren’t a lot of brokerages, so there was something special about it because it was run by a historian, an author and a top broker, which was Jeff Hyland, and then Rick Hilton had a great name,” Williams said. She left Hilton & Hyland in 2020 to start her West Hollywood brokerage with President Branden Williams. “When you have two strong leaders like that, it attracts a lot of attention and then you have to imagine — it was the most robust market that we’d ever seen in Los Angeles.”
Buyers, from foreign investors to Silicon Valley new money, wanted to be in L.A. then, for their first homes or their third.
But golden ages end.
In the 2000s, the brokerage landscape steadied, until a wave of start-ups arrived with the Great Recession. This new crop of companies included the Agency, Partners Trust Real Estate Brokerage & Acquisitions, John Aaroe Group and Teles Properties. More sales and consolidation followed. The last few years have brought even more disruptors, including Beverly Hills Estates, Carolwood and Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California.
At the same time, leadership at Hilton & Hyland became unsteady after Hyland died in 2022.
“What held that company was Jeff and Rick as a team together,” Agency co-founder and CEO Mauricio Umansky, who is another alum of the brokerage, said. “When that fell apart, it was a slow and steady demise and they were never able to maintain it and keep it going.”
Stuart Vetterick decamped from the brokerage to Westside Estate Agency in October.
Salazar, the most recent departure, reflected on his decision:
“I think it was the right choice. I had been at Hilton & Hyland for a long time,” Salazar said. “Sixteen years I’ve been loyal to that brokerage. I think since Jeff passed, it’s just been a hard transition for the company to be without his leadership.”
The agent called the brokerage a “great company.” It was simply his time to leave, he said. Hilton & Hyland declined through a spokesperson to make chair and owner Lori Hyland or Managing Director Steve Katz available for an interview.
As its agents fan out, what’s next for Hilton & Hyland isn’t obvious.
“I think everybody in town recognizes that they’re hanging on and I’m not sure why, but they are,” Shapiro said.
Hilton & Hyland in 2016 topped TRD’s list of luxury brokerages in Los Angeles County, with nearly 12 percent of the market share and sales volume of $895.1 million. While not an exact comparison, last year Hilton & Hyland didn’t make it onto TRD’s list of the top 20 overall brokerages in the county, which would have meant besting Keller Williams Realty at $362.5 million in volume.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Business Journal last July, Lori Hyland said she didn’t want to hold onto a “museum,” and she stressed the importance of legacy.
“It’s also very important for me to show that, in any field, the arts are very important,” Lori told the newspaper. “People who are artists have a great deal to say about how life should be led and how businesses should be led. It’s a slightly different approach, but the standards have to remain the same.”
Nothing created or destroyed
Many agents see the comings and goings of agents as the normal evolution of the market, as individual brokers search for a place to call home.
Leadership is the make or break in attracting and retaining top talent, particularly in the brokerage business, many say.
“The idea that brokerages run themselves is categorically false,” Nourmand & Associates President Michael Nourmand said. His father, Saeed Nourmand, started the family-run, Beverly Hills-based brokerage in 1976.
That means leaders have to impart a vision, another Hilton & Hyland alum — Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California founder Aaron Kirman, who spent 13 years there — said: “It’s not about commission splits. It’s about agents wanting culture.”
One cultural must-have, Williams said: less red tape.
“You want to make it easy and simple and if you need to make a fast decision, you need to be nimble and agile,” Williams said. “That’s just good business, especially when these deals are so convoluted and now with the new NAR ruling, we’re fighting for more things than we’ve ever had to — and we’re professional negotiators.
“I think everybody in town recognizes that they’re hanging on and I’m not sure why, but they are.”
Like attracts like, and top agents and brokers want to be with a firm that can ensure success.”
The four brokerages, according to Kirman, that have a “strong lock” on that would be, of course, his firm, Beverly Hills Estates, Carolwood and Westside Estate Agency.
“Luxury boutique companies in general have done a really good job of dominating the luxury market in L.A. and agent recruitment because we’ve really taken the lion’s share of the top agents and congregated them in the boutiques,” Kirman said.
You can see the results in the numbers.
Last year’s list of the top brokerages, which includes private and public companies in L.A. County, places Carolwood and Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California in the top 10 with $1.6 billion and $1.2 billion in volume, respectively, for the May 2023 to May 2024 period. Those totals only include deals listed in the Multiple Listing Service and not off-market transactions, which would lift those totals significantly.
The Beverly Hills Estates, Nourmand & Associates and Westside Estate Agency also appear farther down the list. The Agency, which views itself as a boutique brokerage but now has offices globally, was the highest-ranking independent brokerage with $2.8 billion in sales.
But movement among brokerages doesn’t always have meaning. Analyzing the comings and goings of talent is just not that deep, Umansky said. It’s like shuffling a deck of cards without adding or subtracting new ones.
“All we’ve done is created agents and created production and both of us have lost and both of us have gained…” Umansky said of the trades that happen with agent acquisitions. “That’s what’s happening in essence in the industry. It’s not like anybody’s winning.”
At this point, pricier deals and listings are concentrated in the hands of a few, according to Kirman, and he doesn’t see that changing.
“It’s become a top-down business,” Kirman said. “People at the top have so much domination in the luxury sphere and it’s only getting more and more consolidated.”
But sometimes financial calculations don’t align with reality. At a time of economic concerns Nourmand warned that agents aren’t always discerning enough in evaluating the companies they’re joining.
In other industries, upstart firms might be viewed with a bit more caution or, at least, there would be more scrutiny over an earnings statement.
Nourmand touted his own brokerage’s profitability as a green flag too many agents don’t look for.
“We are one of the few profitable brokerages, which I think says a lot. Cash flow positive is code for losing money,” he said in a not-so-subtle jab to some public brokerages that cite those figures during quarterly updates. “Adjusted EBITDA is not profit; adjusted EBITDA is you just made up numbers.”
In a down cycle, anything can happen, and Nourmand has been seeing signs of the shoe about to drop over the past 90 days as he watches offices close and hears of fewer perks being handed out.
All that is to say, the past or current volume doesn’t necessarily predict the future and vice versa. Longevity is the name of the game.
“The night is young,” Nourmand said. “We don’t know how this is going to play out with different companies.”
