Hollywood’s Top 30 Real Estate Agents
The elite Los Angeles brokers who are setting records (including a $177 million sale) even while navigating market headwinds, such as rising interest rates.
After the banner year of 2021, L.A.’s high-end real estate market is seeing challenges, including some softening of prices, continued low inventory and rising interest rates (an average 30-year fixed mortgage rate today is about 5.8 percent compared with about 2.9 percent a year ago). “It will take some time for buyers to acclimate to the interest rate increases; it’s all cyclical,” says Hilton & Hyland’s Justin Paul Huchel. But for L.A.’s top agents, these setbacks are an opportunity to refocus on a core value: finding clients their perfect home. Despite the market softening, agents profess that they aren’t worried. According to Redfin, the median sale in Beverly Hills still clocks in at $3.8 million, up 15.4 percent from last year. And agents aren’t hurting financially, either. Although marketing, staff and office space must be factored in, many of the area’s highest-performing agents can expect to make $5 million to $10 million a year (according to one person on this list), while those on the rung below net $2 million to $5 million. For the 2022 list of the top 30 agents in L.A., THR considered sales volume, MLS-listed sales to Hollywood clients and media visibility to make its selections. (Info on celebrity sales and clients is sourced from public records unless otherwise noted.)
FRED BERNSTEIN
A Westside Estate Agency partner, Fred Bernstein is helping casino mogul Steve Wynn find a buyer for his $100 million Beverly Hills estate. He also just sold a Beverly Hills estate that once belonged to power broker Lew Wasserman’s daughter for $35.5 million. Bernstein also was one of the brokers who worked with DJ and music producer Zedd on his $15.2 million purchase of Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s mansion in Encino last fall and represented Participant’s Jeff Skoll in the $33 million sale of two side-by-side homes in Beverly Hills to Byron Allen.
KURT RAPPAPORT
Since co-founding Westside Estate Agency in 1999, Kurt Rappaport has helped grow it into the largest privately held brokerage on the West Coast, with offices in Beverly Hills and Malibu (plus Miami). Rappaport’s sales are consistently stratospheric, and his client list has recently included Ellen DeGeneres and Portia De Rossi, Guy Oseary, Adam Levine, Sylvester Stallone and Patrick Whitesell. In October, he repped both sides of the deal in billionaire Marc Andreessen’s $177 million purchase of a Malibu compound (the second-biggest sale nationwide in 2021), and earlier this year worked with Paul Allen’s estate to sell off a pair of the late Microsoft co-founder’s Beverly Hills properties for $65 million and $45 million. His listings include Mark Wahlberg’s $87.5 million Beverly Park manse and Michael Eisner’s $225 million Malibu compound.
