Comeback Kid : Valley Realty Prodigy Glickman Rebounds From Bankruptcy

His open house is to begin at 11 a.m., but Mike Glickman is off showing another home to a “hot buyer,” so he calls in an emergency replacement--his mother.

Harriet Glickman hurries over to greet the trickle of real estate agents and curious neighbors who stop by to view her son’s new listing in Encino, a four-bedroom traditional on Valley Vista Boulevard with an asking price of $899,000.

“They’ve got it all baby-proofed,” she quickly points out when a young woman walks in the door towing a 1 1/2-year-old boy. But the woman brushes off any sales talk. “Just looking,” she says.

Finally, in bounds Harriet Glickman’s own son, the onetime whiz kid of San Fernando Valley real estate who before age 30 had an army of 1,800 agents and became the personification of the booming California housing market. Soon after he expanded into the Westside, going head-to-head with the real estate powers in the nation’s most lucrative housing turf, the market crashed and, with it, Mike Glickman Realty.

Now Glickman, all of 31, works for a former competitor, the Jon Douglas Co., seeking listings and searching for buyers just like any other agent.

For the next two hours, Glickman talks up his latest offering as agents parade through and reminisce about the good ol’ days, when many houses sold as soon as they were listed. Glickman and the agents commiserate about $3-million sales that aren’t quite happening in these slower times.

They also discuss colleagues who have left the business.

“How’s Bill?” Glickman asks.

“He’s playing his musical saw,” another agent relates.

“Really?”

“Yeah, at a funeral.”

“Well,” Glickman sums it up, “it’s been a tough year.”

Indeed, the California Assn. of Realtors estimates that 427,000 homes were sold statewide last year--6.7% less than in already sluggish 1990, and nearly 25% below 1988 totals. In Glickman’s target region, the Valley, the average price of a single-family house was down 2%, to $291,717.

For the flamboyant Glickman, however, times are tough only in comparison to his past heights.

Working with two associates, he recorded 97 sales in 1991, placing him “easily in the top 10” of all agents in the vast Jon Douglas Co., a firm executive said. When more than 1,000 Jon Douglas agents from 35 offices throughout California gathered in Los Angeles last week for a companywide conference to “Kick Off ‘92,” a featured event was a motivational seminar by Glickman, who told how he rebounded “from crashing defeat to soaring success” in the year and a half since he fell into personal and corporate bankruptcy.

“We couldn’t accommodate all the agents who wanted to come,” Jon Douglas spokesman Tim Salinger said. “As a salesman, he’s a natural.”

It’s an assessment that no one disputes. By 15, while a student at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, Glickman distributed flyers for any real estate agent who would pay him. By 18, he was a full-time agent. By 23, he had opened his own firm with his cousin and another partner, and he snared agents from other companies by promising them higher shares of commissions.

Promotion was Glickman’s trademark. He distributed pumpkins at Halloween, offered trips to Las Vegas as door prizes at open houses and arranged private trash removal in a community when there was a garbage strike. He also enraged the real estate establishment by allowing agents to offer homeowners reductions on the customary 6% commissions to get listings.

With his longish curly hair and open-collar silk shirts, Glickman’s image was a sharp contrast to the buttoned-down look of Los Angeles’ reigning realty kingpins, Jon Douglas and Fred Sands. So was his enthusiastic style, evidenced when he’d show up at one of his offices to announce that he was taking the agents to a movie or bowling.

He also shared sales tips that surprised even veteran agents: When meeting homeowners for the first time, put catnip or doggie treats in your pants cuffs--the family pet will fawn all over you.

Rivals, disparaging his company as the “K mart of real estate,” didn’t shed many tears when an overextended Glickman couldn’t keep up lease payments on his offices and was forced into bankruptcy in June, 1990.

“I made mistakes,” he says now. “I should never have gone to the Westside. I should have stayed in the Valley. If I had, we’d still be in business.”

But he doesn’t dwell on reliving “the days of Mike Glickman Realty.” It’s a new dawn for a still-young man who records a fresh phone message each morning (“Hope you’re enjoying a great Wednesday”) and, he notes, “I want to make money.”

So it’s on to the grunt work of his trade. During the recent rains, Glickman spent much of his time checking his listings for leaks and suggesting roofers to homeowners. (You can’t sell a house with water stains on the ceiling.)

“It’s a lot more fun having 2,000 people working for me than sitting open houses and fixing roof leaks,” he notes. “But this fits the economy.”

The Valley Vista home open this day, a Friday, is a reminder of the realities of that economy.

Glickman picked up the listing after another agent held it for six months but couldn’t sell the house, even though it is near Encino’s fashionable Royal Oaks neighborhood and is replete with high-end touches: bleached beams, a modernized kitchen and, in the back yard, a split-level swimming pool with a spa that spills over to create a waterfall effect.

An actor and his wife, with three children, scooped it up in 1989 for $875,000, but they decided last year that they’d like to get away from harsh city life and settle in Santa Barbara.

But first, they would have to sell this place, and that didn’t happen when it went on the market at $995,000, or even when it was reduced to $969,000. When the homeowners shifted the listing to Glickman, he persuaded them to lower the price again. Now, even if it sells at close to the $899,000 asking price, when commissions are figured in, “we’re going to take a loss,” the wife says.

Within minutes, though, Glickman is convinced that the price is right. “This house will definitely be sold!” he declares.

The cause of his optimism is the arrival of Rosalie Simon-Friedman, a stylish Fred Sands agent who announces that she has clients--the man’s a doctor--who would love the “Connecticut charm” of the house. She’s going to bring them by the following day.

She didn’t show it before because of the asking prices, she says, explaining: “If a house is too high, I can’t show it enthusiastically.”

At noon, several other brokers wander in.

“Longridge sell yet?” Glickman asks one of them.

“If it did, I’d be smiling,” the man replies.

Glickman greets Phyllis Zangwill as “the $4-million woman” because of a listing she has in Chatsworth, a 12,000-square-foot house with 10 fireplaces and 10 bathrooms.

“It’s reduced to $3.75” million, reports Zangwill, who used to work for Glickman and moved with him to Douglas, “but I have a second showing.”

The potential buyer, a man “who owns factories,” will come by for his second look later this month. She smiles at the prospect of a commission that would exceed even the one she earned a few years back on the old John Huston estate in Tarzana.

Zangwill also has a client who might be interested in the Valley Vista house. It’s another physician--the best customer you could have these days, the assembled agents agree.

“Two years ago, the lawyers were the ones you wanted,” Zangwill says. “Now they can’t make partner.”

Though $899,000 will still get you little more than a bungalow in certain areas of Los Angeles, brokers dealing in this price range generally are the elite of their profession. But they’re feeling the pinch as much as anyone.

Most sales now are to first-time buyers looking for homes of $200,000 or less. The trade-up market is languishing as people who already own houses are reluctant to assume more debt.

Zangwill recalls how her son recently paid a baby-sitter $25, and “I said, ‘There are people in my office who didn’t make that much last year.’ ”

While a Friday open house is primarily for agents, a few home shoppers and browsers--”looky-loos”--stop by as well. But none seems a serious prospect.

One woman spends time showing her tiny son the dog out back. “See the doggie. He’s sleeping. Night, night,” she tells him.

Another woman, in her 50s, comes in with a broker and says she’s looking for “a cozy little country cottage.” But when she tours the house, she is put off by the modest-sized bathrooms; her husband wants a huge one.

“So let’s waste another half hour here,” her broker says, and they break into laughter.

“No powder room,” the woman says to Glickman as they head out.

“We’ll put one in for you,” he pitches.

But she’s soon out the door just as a man enters with a “Hi, Mikey, how are ya?”

It’s Ben Eisner, another Douglas agent who once worked for Glickman. Glickman estimates that 20% of his former staff is “completely gone” from real estate, while 15% more have taken second jobs to get by.

Eisner’s concern at the moment is a client who “really wants” a $3-million house around the corner, but negotiations with the seller have broken down. “They’re $65,000 apart,” he reports.

Glickman perks up. “I have a new listing for $3 million you just have to see,” he says.

“Is it up a driveway?”

“Yes.”

Eisner shakes his head. Mansion or not, the client “wants to be able to play ball in the street with his kid.”

For many agents, one multimillion-dollar sale can make a year--or a reputation. Along those lines, Glickman boasts that he was “involved” in the biggest sales on the Valley’s prime hills each of the past two years.

In 1991, he was selling agent for a $3-million-plus Royal Oaks mansion with a racquetball court, two guest houses, a koi pond and a own beauty salon.

The year before, though, the big numbers were brought in by the pink 10,000-square-foot dream house he built for himself in Encino, which he’d lost in federal Bankruptcy Court proceedings. Ever upbeat, Glickman takes pride in the fact that it eventually sold for $3.05 million--$650,000 more than the initial bid accepted by the court.

“The highest sales price of 1990!” Glickman exclaims.

The profit provided much of the $2 million in assets being held by the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, who hopes to distribute the funds this year to settle some of the $9.3 million in claims against Glickman.

In the corporate bankruptcy case, also expected to be settled this year, there are $20 million in debts and only $1 million in assets, according to the trustee.

But the bankruptcy overseers are impressed with how Glickman has rallied.

“I’ve heard that he’s got a ton of listings,” bankruptcy administrator Mike Joncich said. “He’s a charismatic and dynamic sort of guy, and he’s shown it by . . . coming out like this.”

Though he lost his Encino mansion, Glickman kept his more modest Malibu residence--the bankruptcy papers call it a condominium, but Glickman insists that it’s rightly described as “my beach house.”

Image is crucial in a field where you’re always selling yourself. Glickman picked up his new Mercedes-Benz last week. And when a photographer arrived to take his picture in front of a listing he shares with another agent, Glickman removed the second name from the sign in front.

Last month, he used a client’s Encino home for the type of grand Christmas party that marked his reign as king of Valley real estate. About 1,200 agents were invited to enjoy refreshments, music and door prizes.

“The biggest real estate party of the season!” Glickman called it.

At the very least, it was an announcement, if anyone doubted it, that he was back.

Throughout the real estate community, the assumption is that it’s just a matter of time before there’s a new Mike Glickman Realty Co. That’s one topic, however, on which Glickman is circumspect, declaring that: “Jon Douglas has been very good to me. Right now, I’m happy to be selling homes for him.”

The 1992 goal of his small team is 200 sales, he says, though it’s been hard to maintain such a pace.

The weekend following the open house, for instance, the two doctors and three other potential buyers came by to look at the Valley Vista listing. But none made an offer.

Glickman decided later that the problem was January football mania--all the playoff games on TV kept people at home when they could have been out buying his listings. Of course, that distraction will end with the Super Bowl next weekend.

“We have one more big football day,” Glickman says. “Then, it’s real estate season.”