Pyramids and Crystals Take Real Estate Firm Into ‘New Age’

Some real estate agents might promise their clients the moon, but Nick Cariglia offers the entire cosmos.

“Where else,” asks one customer, “can you walk into a real estate office to list a property, conclude your business and then sit back and ask the broker, ‘Well, what do you think of reincarnation?’ ”

Where else do brokers routinely carry to closings not just a briefcase full of documents but a pocketful of crystals reputed to draw beneficial forces? Where else is business routinely conducted beneath pyramids hung from the ceiling? Where else is the breakdown of a copying machine blamed on a caprice of the planet Mercury? Where else are exorcists summoned to halt business reverses?

Going to Other Worlds

Only, apparently, at Cariglia’s Rubicon Realty, headquartered in Van Nuys, where the bottom line frequently crosses into other worlds.

Rubicon might be the first real estate agency to embrace the so-called “New Age”--a grab bag of beliefs touching on past lives, astral travel, herbal remedies, the intelligence of dolphins, the power of shamans and other metaphysical phenomena.

Although many restaurants, schools, art galleries and a profusion of healers administering everything from massages to enemas have assumed the New Age designation, real estate people have generally tended to business.

“Some buyers and sellers come in here, and they can’t stand this place,” acknowledges the goatee’d, rotund Cariglia. “They leave very angry. One person from Gribyn Von Dyl came in and saw one of the pyramids and got very, very nervous. She thought there was some sort of religious connotation. It’s a funny situation, what goes on here.”

Cariglia, 47, has laughed all the way to the bank. He has merged the two quintessentially Californian preoccupations of acquiring property and attaining enlightenment, and the marriage has worked.

Net Worth: $10 Million

With branches in Van Nuys, Canoga Park, Sylmar and Lake Tahoe, Rubicon’s brokers complete transactions valued at $3 million to $13 million each month, says Cariglia, who pegs his own net worth at more than $10 million.

And if his New Age approach sounds to some like just so much hocus-pocus, Cariglia also has garnered his share of admirers.

“I’ve immortalized him in my book,” says Robert Bond, chairman of the business administration department at Valley College and author of “California Real Estate Practice.”

Bond says Cariglia’s office manual commands such efficiency that he reproduced it in his text’s newest edition.

He said he does not hesitate to recommend Cariglia’s services. “Of the 360,000 licensees in this state, I can count on two hands the ones I’d refer to,” he adds.

Off-Putting Trappings

Still, the timid might be a bit put off by Rubicon’s trappings.

The exterior of the main office in Van Nuys is festooned with welcoming signs in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish and one in English that says “Free Real Estate Classes, How to Make Big Money.”

Inside, the desk tops are cluttered and the men tieless. The listings on an office blackboard are mainly for houses in low-income areas, although Cariglia says his office has listed property ranging from shopping centers to a French chateau.

A few skeletal pyramids--”They function as cosmic antennae,” explains Cariglia--dangle over the middle of the room. There are no fine oils on the walls, but here and there a quartz crystal looms from a welter of papers.

“They’re relaxing,” says Cariglia. “Your eye can drift and look at them. They help you feel better, maybe because of this electrical field around them. Crystals at some point will be one of our most important tools for modifying behavior.”

Following a Regimen

Salespeople are not required to meditate beside crystals as Cariglia does, but they are encouraged to follow a regimen.

“People forget,” Cariglia muses, “that their jobs are the matrix through which they spiritually evolve. That’s exactly what’s happening at Rubicon.”

Spiritual evolution for many of Rubicon’s 25 full-time and 35 part-time salespeople starts the minute they get up.

“Every morning, we begin with a self-hypnosis session, where we go over our goals,” says Cariglia. “There are five, just like the five sides of a pyramid: health, development of mind, economic, social and spiritual.”

Breathing exercises relax them for a low-stress, high-efficiency workday. “When the breathing stops, the mind stops,” says Cariglia. “That’s straight from the Bhagavad-Gita,” he said, referring to the Hindus’ ancient manual of spiritual discipline.

“Creative visualization” also helps.

“We have our people actually draw pictures of, for instance, themselves standing on a mountaintop with a sack full of money,” Cariglia says. “I’m not coming from some prayer tower with divine messages--they’ve done research at UCLA on cancer patients visualizing the good cells eating the bad cells, and the effect of this on the immune system.”

Cariglia, a New York native, was a biochemical researcher until 1965. Then there was an epiphany.

“One day in the lab, when I was working with some exotic compounds, it was like a leaf turning in a windstorm,” he recalls. “It was like the Ghost of Christmas Future coming to Scrooge and saying: ‘Mankind is your business!’ ”

Cariglia left the lab, became a marketing specialist for a biochemical firm and, eventually “began to see the great arena of real estate.”

“I thought, ‘What are wars fought over? Where does the Catholic Church put its money? Real estate!’ ”

He and partner Leon Schrier scraped up the money to build a small apartment building in Van Nuys and, in 1965, founded Rubicon, named after the river crossed by Julius Caesar to conquer the known world.

“Now everything we touch turns to money,” Cariglia tells prospective salespeople at one of his free seminars. “It’s like a reflex!”

To be sure, there have been bad times.

Prestige Escrow, a company owned by Rubicon, has suffered financial setbacks, high turnover and tragedy among its staff.

On a particularly frazzled afternoon at Prestige, Cariglia recalls, he calmed everyone down with doses of pantathenic acid, a B vitamin. Now, he said, he is thinking of calling in Jesuit exorcists, much as he once called in Buddhist shamans to help correct the course of another errant venture.

“Nick feels there’s the possibility of a cleansing of the kinds of feelings that have been going on,” said Claudia Gates, an escrow assistant at Prestige and a researcher into the use and effect of crystals.

“I’m not sure exactly what the psychological and social effects of an exorcism will be,” she said, “but I know it’ll be something.”