A Tough Sell : Laguna Beach Realtors Assess Clients’ Options in Fire’s Aftermath

When Bill and Kathie Gray put their Tahiti Avenue home on the market during the summer, the biggest barrier to its sale was the decidedly soft real estate market bedeviling Southern California.

The Grays’ property--a second home in the hard-hit Mystic Hills neighborhood of Laguna Beach--survived Wednesday’s inferno with remarkably little damage. But the couple pulled the home off the market Friday and instead will lease it to a couple who lost everything when their home nearby was gutted by flames.

For hilltop homeowners, the fire came less than a year after unusually heavy winter rains washed several homes here off their foundations. Now those whose houses escaped the flames are warily looking at the denuded hillsides and wondering whether they will be landslide victims when the rainy season arrives.

Real estate agents who work the Mystic Hills neighborhood are having to face the fact that many of the beautiful bluff-top homes they have sold over the years are gone.

Experts agree that long-term, the effect of last week’s fires on the local market will be minimal. But the short-term picture is murky, if only because the fire destroyed 360 homes--about the number that have sold in Laguna Beach so far this year.

Bill Gray, a Redding lawyer who used the Laguna Beach home when he was in Orange County for long trials, said: “You don’t really know what to do as far as the market goes. It’s a tough situation.”

Lee Schapel, the Coldwell Banker real estate agent who had listed the Grays’ home for $349,000, recommended that the couple take the house off the market and lease it for now. “It was a buyers’ market to begin with,” Schapel said, “and this will only increase the number of people out looking for deals.”

Leasing the Grays’ property “killed two birds with one stone,” Schapel said. The home will remain off the market until prices improve, and the couple will have time to have work done on the property before the rains come.

Once fire damage to electrical wiring and the roof is corrected and the soot is cleaned up, the home will be leased to a couple who will be able to use it as a command post for supervising the rebuilding of their own home less than a block away. The Grays are turning over everything--including silverware, bedding and some clothing--to the new tenants.

Schapel and Charlene Ragatz, who work the Mystic Hills neighborhood for Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate, on Monday described the fire’s destruction as mind-boggling. Coldwell Banker’s Laguna Beach office lost nine homes either listed for sale or in escrow. The combined list prices on the homes totaled $8.6 million. The nine included a hilltop home offered for $2.6 million.

A Monday-morning tour of the burned-out area proved to be tough emotionally on Schapel and Ragatz, both of whom live in Laguna Beach and together have 35 years of sales experience in the close-knit Mystic Hills neighborhood. Each street--Skyline Drive, Anacapa Way, Coronado Drive, Coral Drive--brought memories of beautiful homes the agents had sold in the past.

“This was the most beautiful home I’d ever been in,” Schapel said as she passed a pile of ashes on Anacapa. “It was a work of art. A true piece of art. Oh, Jesus, look at it.”

Ragatz, standing in the burned-out rubble of what had been a home on Skyline Drive, one that she had recently listed for $349,000, said: “I still have beautiful brochures for this home. This was the deck--those posts coming up there. . . . It’s unbelievable. You have to see the brochures back at the office.”

“I can’t even find my lock box,” Ragatz said as she surveyed the ruins of a client’s home on Tahiti. “Here’s where the front door was. . . . Here’s the fireplace. . . . This would have been the master bedroom, and here’s the Jacuzzi.”

Little was left of the hilltop home of a Walt Disney Co. executive that went on the market several months ago for $2.6 million. “This was a huge home, a beautiful view lot,” Schapel said softly. “Nothing but the best was used to build it.”

Agents now are assessing fire damage and piecing together marketing plans for clients who will be selling in the coming months. “I guess what we need to do is become experts in what happened in Oakland and Santa Barbara during those fires,” Ragatz said. Schapel and Ragatz said their own homes were spared in the fire but that business will be slow. “I’m virtually out of business as far as what’s in my pipeline for homes to be sold,” Schapel said. “My future business is all burned down. That’s enough trauma for one day.”

* RELATED STORIES: A1, A17-18