The penthouse office at the Bank of America Building in Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle serves as an extension of Drew Fenton’s collections, housing his Billy Haines chairs (currently about $4,000 a set at one online auction house), vintage seating by Italian architect Gio Ponti and 500 design books.
Fenton, who runs boutique residential brokerage Carolwood Estates, rarely sits still long enough to enjoy the space, which has views over Holmby Hills, Bel Air and other tony neighborhoods and feels more like the luxury mansions he sells than the headquarters of a top brokerage.
“I’m not sitting in an office tower, disconnected from the community,” he said. He prefers to be out working in the “sandbox” — the real world.
But the office is his to run. Fenton, who spent more than 20 years making his name as an agent, is the chief executive officer of Carolwood, which he founded in 2022 with Ed Leyson and Nick Segal. The firm now has 164 agents and last year marked $1.6 billion in sales volume.
Carolwood is one of several boutique brokerages led by agents who dominated Los Angeles at other firms and are now trying out a new title: the boss.
Many motivated by a desire to ditch corporate life, these agent-entrepreneurs are already seeing success, although some also grapple with the mundane tasks of being top dog and the details of managing an operation.
On this year’s ranking of Los Angeles County’s top 20 brokerages by deal volume, boutiques make up nearly half the list; Carolwood, the Beverly Hills Estates, Nourmand & Associates, Westside Estate Agency and Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California — Aaron Kirman’s brokerage — are among them.
“It’s a rebirth of the boutique brokerage,” said the Beverly Hills Estates CEO Rayni Williams, who founded her firm in 2020 with her husband, Branden Williams. The two were previously with Hilton & Hyland for a decade.
“Too corporate”
Like Carolwood, the Beverly Hills Estates is trying to do away with corporate brokerage vibes. The firm’s office sits on Sunset Boulevard next to the Viper Room and steps away from music venue Whisky a Go Go. Inside the office, the sound system plays reggae and pop, and agents and guests order shakes, lattes, açai bowls and pastries from the in-house cafe.
“There’s autonomy, and a way for us to be our individual selves and not have to conform to very old ways of doing business,” Rayni Williams said.
Before they founded Beverly Hills Estates, their office life was “sterile,” Branden Williams agreed.
“I was so tired of walking in and being so uninspired, like, really, ‘This is my life?’” he said.
Aaron Kirman, CEO of Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California, was also bored in his previous role running a team and being in an environment that was “too corporate,” though he took a different path from Carolwood and the Beverly Hills Estates by starting his own brokerage with the aid of Christie’s.
“I think I was probably a little naive as to the intrinsic nuance to running a brokerage.”
He said that the name and the business offered him a sense of comfort and immediate scale that doesn’t necessarily come with being on one’s own. He opened in November 2022 after being at Compass for four years, and he now oversees a business with just over 200 agents.
Despite what Rayni Williams called an “antiquated system of cubicles and very corporate,” their previous experience with transactions and client interactions were exactly what helped prepare them for a leap into ownership, she said.
The two have amassed a team of 124 agents who view themselves as “global concierges” who, like the Williamses, are ready to guide clients on interior design and style, not just their real estate portfolios.
Spreadsheets, meetings and margins
Still, entrepreneurship wasn’t easy, Branden Williams said.
“It’s scary, when you put up all your own money,” he said. “We were, like, ‘God, maybe we should have just stayed on our own team at a brokerage.’ But we wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Leading a top brokerage has come with its fair share of surprises for others, too.
“I tell people owning a brokerage is not for the faint of heart,” said Kirman. He said that the learning curve, particularly for the financials, proved steep. “There’s a lot of liability to it,” Kirman said, adding the “margins are not that great.”
“I think I was probably a little naive as to the intrinsic nuance to running a brokerage,” he said.
Others agreed. Agent recruitment, marketing decisions and managing personalities were some of the toughest parts of the transition to leadership.
That’s why Josh Altman, star broker on the Altman Brothers team at Douglas Elliman, said that despite offers “to the tune of millions and millions of dollars” to leave his firm, he refuses to jump ship.
“In order to be truly global, you have to have a major brokerage behind you to help support you,” said Altman, who also stars on Bravo TV’s “Million Dollar Listing L.A.” “Running a well-oiled machine costs millions of dollars.”
Altman and his brother, Matt Altman, are the team’s real estate leaders, while Josh’s wife, Heather Altman, serves as CEO.
Many agents who start their own firms have similar strategies for division of labor, which can be crucial in a new venture. Several told The Real Deal they avoid spreadsheets and meetings as much as possible and instead do what made them successful to begin with: pounding pavement and closing.
Finding a fit
Nourmand & Associates President Michael Nourmand came into the business knowing he had to balance agent work with management.
Nourmand’s father, Saeed Nourmand, started the brokerage in 1976, and the junior Nourmand worked up to his current role.
During summers in high school, he took on administrative jobs, then obtained his real estate license after graduating from high school. By the time he finished college at the University of Southern California, he’d closed three deals and was taking on more management responsibilities.
At the end of 2007, Nourmand’s father retired, leaving him to take over the brokerage on the first day of 2008, when he was 26.
That was fine with Nourmand.
“My disposition naturally is much more of a management type than it is as a salesperson,” he said.
“The part of my job that I had to work harder to understand was the sales part of the job rather than the management part of it. Being an aggressive salesperson, having a killer instinct knowing when to close a deal, when to push and when to back off — that’s different from being a manager where you’re trying to help agents solve problems, explain to recruits why they should join you, looking at legal issues and figuring out how to solve them for the least amount of money.”
“Being an aggressive salesperson, having a killer instinct, knowing when to close a deal, when to push and when to back off — that’s different from being a manager.”
Other longtime independent brokers have also struck a balance.
For Altman, the trick was shedding administrative tasks.
“Way back in the day, when I was in the mortgage business, I went from being a top mortgage salesman to a manager,” Altman said. It made him realize: “That’s not who I am.”
When Westside Estate Agency founders Stephen Shapiro and Kurt Rappaport started the firm in 1999, they were intentional in how the business would operate. Rappaport would continue to go out and sell houses while Shapiro — who had been running businesses since the ’70s, when he opened a high-end home rentals company — would limit the number of listings he held to focus on business operations.
“I never have more than four to six listings and that’s what I can manage while managing the business without assistance,” Shapiro said. “My philosophy when you hire me is you get me. You don’t meet me on a listing and then I turn you over to someone less qualified than me.”
The model has worked for 25 years, an anniversary the team celebrated at Funke in Beverly Hills, a restaurant that Rappaport helped back.
Before Westside Estate Agency launched, Shapiro had tested market appetite for a different business model, he said. He wanted to gather the top eight to 10 agents in town, have them invest their own money as partners and then divide annual profits based on the books of business — sort of like a law firm.
But after two “long, intense meetings,” he gave up.
“I thought that would be an incredible business, but you have to have an entrepreneurial spirit,” Shapiro said.
Competing with Goliath
Back then, Shapiro discovered that not all top brokers wanted to strike out on their own.
“The agents were afraid to leave the belly of that big company that was protecting them,” he said.
That remains true today. Commission splits for powerhouse agents make such a business model even less likely to stick, he added.
For Fenton of Carolwood, launching his own brokerage was about building on an over 15-year working relationship with Leyson at their old firm to create a leadership trio that divides and conquers the work that comes with scaling a start-up.
“We all add different pieces to the structure that make it work,” Fenton said.
The independent brokerages still have to compete against the big players, and a successful brokerage of any size needs to understand the breadth of L.A.’s high-end market, agents say — they can’t just win on casual atmospheres or on-demand açai bowls.
“California is like its own country,” Branden Williams said. “We have big sales, so much diversity and different clients: the heads of content, tech and media. The way we do business is different from anywhere else in the world.”