Mike Glickman’s Post-Bankruptcy Life : Real estate: He’s now selling houses for another company. The asking price of his Encino home has been lowered from nearly $3 million to about $2.5 million.

The mansion has a pink exterior, covers 10,000 square feet, has a marble-laden interior, a large gourmet kitchen, spas, saunas and a ballroom-size living room. It also has a posh address in Encino, located in the Clark Gable estates area, just around the corner from convicted junk bond king Michael Milken.

The house belonged to Mike Glickman, the former San Fernando Valley real estate phenom who filed for personal and corporate bankruptcy liquidation in June. And, after five months on the market, the house still hasn’t sold. Glickman knows something about the problems of a slow housing market.

Glickman Realty’s bankruptcy filing was blamed in part on the declining real estate market, which couldn’t support his company’s high overhead and free-spending ways.

Now the increasingly troubled market is thwarting efforts to sell Glickman’s Encino estate and slowing the process of collecting assets to repay the hundreds of Glickman Realty creditors.

Donald Henry, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee handling the Glickman case, recently lowered the asking price for the Encino house from $2.995 million to $2.495 million.

A peek at Glickman’s personal bankruptcy papers shows personal debts of $3.45 million and assets of $3.06 million. But the asset total includes an estimated market value for the Encino property of $2.75 million, well above the current asking price. Glickman’s personal holdings also include a Malibu condominium with an estimated market value of $550,000 and an interest in two race horses.

Because Glickman was the sole owner of his company and personally guaranteed many of the company’s debts, most of the corporate debts are also part of his personal bankruptcy.

Glickman, 30, started Woodland Hills-based Mike Glickman Realty in 1983 and quickly built the company into the Valley’s largest real estate brokerage. At its peak, Glickman had seven offices and about 1,800 agents working for him. But when the real estate market started to soften last year, Glickman’s ambitious expansion into the Westside, high overhead and generous commissions to agents sent the company into a tailspin.

Since filing for bankruptcy, Glickman has been working for former rival Jon Douglas Co. as executive director of Douglas’ estates division in the Valley, which handles sales of million-dollar homes. But Douglas said that was “just a title,” and Glickman has been working mostly like anybody else, listing houses for sale and trying to find as many buyers as he can.

“It’s a whole different type of lifestyle,” said Glickman. “Six months ago I had a 10,000-square-foot house on a gated property. I had race horses running. I had a company.”

Although Glickman’s earnings this year will likely be a far cry from the $2.81 million he earned last year, according to court papers, he’ll hardly end the year penniless. Bankruptcy documents filed in August list Glickman’s take-home pay from Douglas at $6,667 a month, and his monthly expenses at $10,667. But that was before he earned any commissions on house sales.

Glickman has been busy since he started working for Douglas. He said he has listed 160 houses and condominiums in the Valley and on the Westside with prices ranging from $100,000 to $2.2 million. In the past month, he said, he has closed sales on 11 of them, and he has a sales-to-listing ratio about par with the Board of Realtors average.

The listing office usually earns half of a 6% commission on a real estate sale. Of that 3%, Douglas pays his sales agents 60% to 70%.

Now that the price on Glickman’s Encino estate has been lowered, White House Properties agent Michael McCall, who is handling the property, says interest in the house has picked up and he expects to present an offer to the bankruptcy trustee today.

If trustee Henry approves the offer, a waiting period would be assigned by the court in case there are objections to the sale, and a hearing would be held. If there are no complications, Henry said, it’s likely that escrow would close by mid-December.

Unfortunately, even if the house is sold, it would be little consolation to Mike Glickman Realty’s unsecured creditors. That’s because Wells Fargo Bank, which holds a $2-million first trust deed on the property, is first in line to get its money back.

Wells Fargo has already made initial moves to try to foreclose on the property. According to bankruptcy documents, the mortgage on the estate costs $1,000 a day in interest alone and Wells Fargo has received no payments since the bankruptcy filing.

After Wells Fargo is repaid and other costs of the sale are covered, said Encino attorney Jeffrey Slott, who is working on the bankruptcy, “it’s not likely there would be much” left.

A final decision has not yet been made about whether Glickman will be able to keep the Malibu condominium where he has been living. However, Henry said the preliminary determination was that there would not be enough equity in the property to make a sale worth pursuing.

According to bankruptcy documents, the Malibu condo has a market value of $550,000. Columbia Savings & Loan, which holds a first trust deed on the property, is owed $274,117. A second trust deed on the condo of $200,000 is held by Glickman’s parents.

Meanwhile, the troubled real estate market is also slowing efforts by the trustee to collect Glickman Realty assets. There are 157 unsecured Mike Glickman Realty creditors listed in the corporate bankruptcy papers, who are owed a total of $3.9 million, against total assets of $2.8 million.

Of those assets, a majority are commissions owed to Glickman Realty, both for properties that were in escrow and for houses that were listed with the company at the time of the bankruptcy filing.

“We’re trying to round up as much money as we can in commissions due,” said Slott. “It could take a year or two” to collect all the commissions, Slott said.

Corporate bankruptcy papers list total commissions due at $1.76 million. But Henry said that estimate could be overly optimistic. “Unfortunately, the real estate market hasn’t been good,” he said, making it likely that the original estimate of the company’s assets “will prove to be a little high.”

Besides real estate, one of Glickman’s lifelong passions has been horse racing, and in a strange twist to the bankruptcy proceedings, that passion could now benefit his creditors.

Glickman has a share in Success Stables Ltd., a partnership that owns interests in two race horses. When one of the horses, Truly Naughty, won a race Oct. 26 at Santa Anita, Glickman’s approximately $2,000 share of the winnings went to his estate. Although the other horse is injured and has no value, Truly Naughty has a market value of about $50,000, Glickman said, although his share would be worth something less.

Trustee Henry said he is trying to sell Glickman’s interest in the horse and hopes to have a deal ready at the same time the sale of the Encino house is announced.

Henry said he has also looked into Glickman’s sale of various rental properties that he transferred to his father late last year for $250,000. It was part of a last-ditch effort to help keep his failing company going. So far, Henry said, there have been no improprieties found in sales. In each case, he said, they were sold for “adequate value,” and the proceeds were put back into Mike Glickman Realty to help keep it afloat.

Though life has changed for him since his bankruptcy filing, Glickman said he hasn’t given up on some of the attention-getting promotions that were a hallmark of Mike Glickman Realty. As he has for years, Glickman was busy last week handing out free Halloween pumpkins to school children. But, he noted, “I didn’t hand out as many as last year.”