Los Angeles Times Special Report : On the Fault Line : Southern Californians Take Stock of the Earthquake : Market in Motion : San Fernando Valley realtors believe they can still sell, sell, sell--even in shaky times

Mike Glickman, boy-wonder real estate broker, doesn’t believe in earthquakes. Or floods. Or typhoons. Or riots. Or devastating fires. Or even dry-gulch stretches in the Southern California home sales market, for that matter.

What he does believe in is the Market, that whimsical force of economic nature that can make a crafty realtor millions and millions, then take it all back in a heartbeat. He believes in lofty things like the American Dream, the perhaps misguided idea that Americans are just not content to rent, that they all want that suburban split-level or canyon-nestled estate to call their own--temblor or no temblor.

And so, as most Southern Californians spent a second straight day watching the gory, televised images of Mother Nature’s quaking destruction, Mike Glickman was all business, ready to sell, sell, sell.

He’s making wild predictions--such as that he can sell any reasonably priced home in the Valley in eight weeks or less, puckishly unfazed by the fact that he has a property listing on “virtually every street in the San Fernando Valley where something fell yesterday.”

In fact, this boyish-looking man who resembles a shorter-locked version of shock jock Howard Stern is prepared to look any would-be home buyers dead in the eye and, without even the slightest trace of a smile, tell them that:

This is “the time” to go house-hunting;

A killer time to close escrow;

An awesome moment to assume that new mortgage at rock-bottom prices.

No fooling.

“Because people go on. They dust themselves off from things like this and they don’t look back,” says the bespectacled, curly haired realtor, leaning back in a black leather swivel chair in his Encino office. “I live in Malibu. Remember the place where they had all those devastating fires just last year?

“As amazing as it may seem, the housing market there is back to normal, just like those fires never happened. It’s the same with earthquakes. Other things happen--the Menendez verdicts, the Bobbitt trial, the Olympic skater snafu, Michael Jackson. People forget. And then they go back to buying houses.”

He stops for a moment, his voice lowering an octave like a conspirator hatching a secret plan: “If I were a home buyer, I’d be out looking. Right now, you can get people who are freaked out. They’ll sell for next to nothing. In two weeks, they’ll be back to normal and the prices will go back up.”

Indeed, the 33-year-old Glickman spent much of Tuesday putting the jangled nerves of homeowners to rest, doing disaster control on many of the 40 homes he has in escrow throughout the San Fernando Valley, making sure that despite a cracked ceiling or crumbling foundation, a shaky deal is still a deal.

And, of course, he wheeled and dealed. He rocked and rolled. But what else would you expect from the onetime whiz kid of San Fernando Valley real estate, a man who before age 30 had an army of 1,800 agents and became the personification of the booming California housing market?

In many ways, the story of Mike Glickman runs parallel to the aftermath of Monday’s 6.6-magnitude quake. In 1990, when an inflated regional housing market crashed like so many aftershocks rumbling through a living room, Glickman buckled with it.

He filed for bankruptcy. He lost Mike Glickman Realty, the company he built from the ground up, starting in 1983.

Then he started over, taking a job for Jon Douglas Co., one of his former competitors. Like some fast-talking phoenix, he is once again marketing houses and condominiums and 10-story castles from Sylmar to Studio City, selling an impressive 170 homes in 1993.

On Day Two after the Northridge earthquake, the man known as the Comeback Kid is on the telephone, asking customers to do the same thing in the now shaky real estate market.

A broker representing a buyer informs him that, due to damage caused by the quake, they are canceling their offer on a Northridge home. He takes the news in stride, asking if they would accept the home at a lower price.

He covers the receiver. “They’re open,” he says. “See what I mean? We’re going to sell. We’re still going to sell.”

Across the Valley, inside a tree-shaded hillside home, broker Teri Young performs her own version of earthquake damage control: As a gesture of goodwill, she has stopped to console a couple who suffered extensive damage to the Woodland Hills home they bought just a year ago.

Gary and Shelley Hammer are nearly in tears as they race in and out of the eggshell of a home for which they paid $415,000, pointing out to the 14-year realty veteran the huge cracks that meander along their walls and foundation like a waterless river bed.

“I don’t know,” Gary Hammer says in despair, his voice breaking. “I’ve survived tornadoes, hurricanes and even wars, but nothing like this. Teri, my body is still shaking. My family is in shock. I don’t know what to do.”

Young, a robust 45-year-old dressed in purple shirt and slacks and white sneakers, offers a bear-hug embrace: “Gary, you’re OK. Your family’s OK. I know what you’re going through. My house was damaged, too. But like my husband says, all this stuff around you, they’re just things.”

Although Young has become friends with the couple, their anguish and anger surfaces uncontrolled, momentarily aiming at her. Outside, 53-year-old Gary Hammer levels his eyes at his realtor, wondering how he’ll ever unload his house now.

“Teri, this is the end. You’re a real estate broker. What are you going to do to earn a living?”

Her answer is swift and sure.

“It is not the end. All of us, we’re going to continue to do good work,” says the Jon Douglas Co. realtor. “Look at it this way, I was able to come over here and you didn’t throw me out. That’s a start, isn’t it? You’ve got to go on. This just cannot take over your life. I’ll tell you, I’m going on. Are you coming with me?”

Young has spent the last two days putting out such emotional fires, answering calls late into the night from sellers, their damaged homes now in danger of falling out of escrow, asking, pleading: “Teri, what do I do? What do I do?”

She has heard stories of the would-be buyer who, after entering into escrow on a Woodland Hills home, visited the house in the hours before dawn Monday, demanding to be let in for a white-glove foundation inspection.

Still, like many brokers trained in public relations and fueled by their own personal chutzpah, this realtor--who has sold more than 1,100 properties here--doesn’t buy the newest, earthquake-fueled bad rap on the Southern California housing market.

“Sure, we get earthquakes but, really, what bad thing can happen here that can’t happen back East? In Florida, they have hurricanes. In the Midwest, tornadoes whip out of nowhere. So why is California so different from the rest of the country? We don’t have the market cornered on disasters, you know.”

When the quake struck, Young recalled jumping to a few wild conclusions herself: “I started screaming ‘I’m getting the hell out of California.’ But my husband shook me for a while and forced me to get a grip on myself.

“Now I’m all better. And that’s what it’s going to take for everyone else who owns a home in this area. They’ve got to get a grip on themselves. I just don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

Mike Glickman has an idea.

Glickman was a schoolboy when the famed Sylmar quake hit in 1971. But Monday, in the midst of the chaos, he got on the phone to retired realtors and asked about how the real estate market fared after that disaster.

“To a person, they told me that the market was soft for about three months while people got their homes back into shape. Then the market went back to normal. Houses sold like hot cakes again.”

Glickman, the eternal optimist, sees history repeating itself.

“I give the market eight weeks to bottom out, tops, before it picks up again,” he says. “This summer, we’re going to have the best real estate market in the history of the San Fernando Valley, you can bet on it.

“That is, unless something unforeseen happens--like a fire or maybe another earthquake.”