Flames Can’t Snuff the Desire for Malibu
After days of runaway brush fires, you might be thinking this a less-than-ideal weekend to hold an open house for your “OCN VU, 2 FP, WOODSY” Malibu home. True, the smoky scent backs up that “rustic” billing, but how to peddle a vista of hills that are charred gray?
Here’s how:
“It’s just a reversal,” said Pamela Witham. “This spring the wildflowers are going to be so magnificent.”
Witham is a member of that breed of incurable optimists known as real estate agents--a group for whom the cup is always at least half full. And when it comes to Malibu, that cup runneth over.
One agent, Susan Monus, said she found evidence for hopefulness on her answering machine--even as helicopters continued to drop water on the stubborn blaze.
“My clients want to know if the house on Lookout [Road] is still standing,” the message said. “They’re still very interested.”
However, the owner of the Corral Canyon home--a “3-sty-Contemp” on sale for $439,000--seemed less than optimistic Thursday about the prospects of a quick sale. Ellen Johnson, an attorney, said it might take until the hills are green again, adding that she is reluctant to even show off her home while stark signs of the fire were all around.
“I’ll wait till the firemen leave,” Johnson said. “I think people will feel better if there’s no firemen.”
Johnson added that she and her husband decided to sell the house after the 1993 wildfire scarred canyons to the east. “I really didn’t want to be here again,” Johnson said. But the house has not sold, even though the couple has dropped the asking price more than $100,000.
This week’s blaze comes at a particularly dicey time for Malibu’s real estate market. As with much of Los Angeles, the local market had been in the dumps for years and was only recently showing signs of a rebirth, several brokers said.
But while visitors may fixate on the bad news this week, real estate agents in this glamorous rural enclave choose to see opportunity. Along Malibu’s fabled coastline, where a property advertised as an “E quake + fire damage” fixer can still be listed as a “steal” for $1 million, the “For Sale” signs resolutely poke up from the ash as the cleanup goes on.
One agent Thursday called the fire a “godsend” because it cleared away a dangerous carpet of underbrush--possible fuel for future fires--with far less damage than the 250-plus homes destroyed there during the 1993 wildfire.
Others said buyers seem eager to take advantage of what they perceive as anxiety among sellers.
And still other brokers crow that Malibu’s mystique, battered over the years by mudslides and floods as well as fires, is surviving round-the-clock coverage of yet one more disaster.
*
Witham, who sells real estate for Fred Sands Realtors, ticked off some of Malibu’s assets--the idyllic weather, ocean views, smog-free air--and shrugged off the community’s latest calamity.
“Fred Sands says you’re always shaking hands with God when you live here,” Witham said. “You’re always dealing with Mother Nature.”
Monus, of Prudential-Jon Douglas Co., said four prospective buyers have called her this week to let her know they still want to buy in Malibu.
One signed off: “I hope you did OK in the fire!”
“Maybe it’s just a way of life,” Monus said. “Malibu is such a great place to live. The camaraderie is so strong. Once people live here they just love it.”
Monus said she was cheered at the continued interest in Johnson’s Corral Canyon property--just blocks from where the wildfire exploded out of control and injured half a dozen firefighters and damaged a house.
“It’s a great setting,” she said. “It’s one of the hot properties up there. No, don’t use that word.”
Other agents declared that despite this week’s blaze there is little chance Malibu’s real estate market could decline more than it already had in recent years.
“I think we’ve hit our bottom,” said broker Glen Meyers, who represents celebrity clients selling homes in the $2-million to $7-million range.
Susan Fertman, an author who is trying to sell her Mediterranean-style home on Bayberry Lane, near Pepperdine University, spent Thursday cleaning up the soot. She said she was not worried that the fire would ruin her chances of eventually selling the 4,000-square-foot house.
“It’s not going to help,” Fertman said. “But by spring everything will be green and beautiful again. For people who live here, a fire isn’t going to make us move.”
Next weekend, Witham said she plans to show a client several properties in Latigo and Corral canyons. The man, who lives in Pacific Palisades and is looking for “something kind of spiffy,” knows firsthand the unpredicabilities of Malibu--from brush fires to mudslides--because his parents live there.
In fact it is Malibu’s very reputation for, shall we say, rugged living that makes it bulletproof to the kind of disasters that would sink other neighborhoods, boosters say.
“It takes a unique person to live up here--someone who wants seclusion and privacy and doesn’t mind the drive,” said Mark Kulper, a 42-year-old advertising executive who is trying to sell his home in Corral Canyon. “If you really want to live up here you just put up with whatever comes your way.”
