Josh Altman walks on to the stage nodding and smiling as though he’s just heard the funniest thing and he can’t wait to share it.
He introduces himself as “real estate-a-holic”. He explains: “See, I’m addicted to real estate.” He asks who of the audience shares his addiction, and about 100 hands go up of a crowd several times that size.
“Are there many real estate agents here?”
“Too many,” mutters a woman behind me.
“How many of you have the real-estate dream?”
I put my hand up. But my real estate dream – it quickly becomes apparent, then is relentlessly hammered home over the course of 90 minutes – is very different to Josh Altman’s.
The star of the reality television show Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles, he purports to be the world’s most successful real estate agent. He has sold more than US$2bn in real estate, including the most expensive one-bedroom house in history for US$20m.
At any time, he says, he has more than US$350m in listings. His clients include Kim Kardashian West, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, Wes Craven, Denise Richards, and Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis.
Altman has the “greatest job in the world”, he says: “I get to be part of the American dream.”
On Tuesday night he shared the secrets of his success with ticket holders at The Star events centre in Sydney. The city has one of the most inflated property markets in the world, where the median house price is upwards of seven figures and about 12 times what the middle-income Sydney household earns in a year.
My real estate dream is to, one day, own some. Josh Altman’s real estate dream, as he tells it, is a literal night-time hallucination about making 5% commission on a $200m mansion. “I was going to sell it, I was going to make $10m – then my wife woke me up,” he says.
Tickets for the event, sponsored by Rolls-Royce, ranged from $49 to $199. The “rockstar experience” package, including a selfie and a handshake with Altman and a pre-event champagne reception, was limited to 30 spots for $997 each.
From a cursory inspection of the premises, more people had taken advantage of this deal than I’d expected. I had expected zero.
But Altman is a rock star among real estate agents, all the more aspirational for his humble beginnings, which he labours over: renting a couch to sleep on in a frat house, skating to his job at a mailroom.
With his older brother Matt – his business partner, who later joins him on stage – they each saved US$5,000 and went in on a $400,000 condo. Once upon a time in the US, there was something called 100% financing, he says. “And people wonder why the economy collapsed!”
The condo sold for $600,000. The first thing he did was buy a Jeep.
“But for me, I wanted to make more money,” he explains, a recurring theme of the evening.
He studied for his real estate licence. He failed twice. Then he got it. That’s what counts for adversity in the Josh Altman story. Later he talks about the selection process for Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles: he was one of 200 potential candidates. “My chances were great,” he says with sarcasm. He got it.
At 26 Altman became a mortgage broker, set up his own firm and hired all his friends. “At lunch we’d all go to the gym and play basketball, and then we’d come back and close deals,” he reveals. Before long, they’d traded their Jeeps for Ferraris, he says.
It sounds like Entourage, I think derisively.
“You know that movie Entourage?” says Altman. “It was kind of like that.”
Then the economy collapsed. While the good times had been rolling, he says, he’d stopped paying attention. He’d just bought a $2.5m castle. “I was a millionaire by the age of 26 and I was broke by the age of 26 and a half.”
He likens it to the Seinfeld episode where Jerry takes the offer of a seat in first class because Elaine hasn’t ever been and so doesn’t know what she’s missing out on. “That was my life. I knew exactly what I was missing,” he says.
This was Josh Altman’s rock bottom: making a $800,000 loss on his castle, having his luxury cars taken away, a brush with depression. Then comes the redemption, almost biblical in his retelling: the soles of his shoes wearing out from his pounding the pavement, evenings spent icing his knuckles after days of door-knocking.
Hard work pays off is the lesson here, one of several Altman has for the gathered Australian real estate agents. The first is: “Get a reality show. It helps.”
He’s joking, but what does help is selling luxury properties worth many millions of dollars to people with just that to burn. Mansions of between $1m and $5m are “flying off the shelves”, says Altman; his clients are among the richest celebrities in the world. (No wonder they “love what they do”, his No 1 rule for success.)
How hard can it be to sell them a house?
I’d imagined that for the super rich, property was a negligible expense like the gum or discounted chocolate bars that you chuck on to the conveyer belt while in line at the supermarket – yeah, thinks Kylie Jenner, Mom won’t notice a $6m six-bedroom house in the Hidden Hills. (Just kidding, she bought it herself!)
To hear Altman tell it, that doesn’t seem so far from the truth. He convinced the actor Tyler Perry, net worth $400m, to sell his house after he got on to the treadmill next to him at the gym. Perry told him he hadn’t been to the house in more than a year.
Altman made more than half a million dollars, he says, on a day when he had nothing to do.
Another time, Altman sold a property to an NBA star he introduced himself to while in line at Starbucks, who volunteered that he was at that moment in the market for three: for himself, his family and his entourage. (Altman offered him $1,000 to get in his car there and then.)
For all their earlier reluctance to identify as real estate addicts, the audience is well and truly warmed up by the time it comes for questions and answers, grilling the Altman brothers on the finer points of their success as though it could be replicated to scale. One man asks if they’d ever invest in Sydney.
They should have, says Matt Altman: “I’m still angry about Barangaroo.” They were advised to invest in the waterfront property complex (a controversial development still under way) on their last visit to Australia. “The answer is yes, and I should have done it last year.”
Josh Altman remarks on the “extremely cool, sexy houses” in Sydney, just like those in vogue in Beverly Hills. “I’d totally buy them – except yours are way too overpriced.”
Just about the only concession made to the school of thought that there might be more to life than closing deals and making money comes in the last five minutes. As much as he wants “to sell every house in the world”, Altman says he wouldn’t be able to take 5% to the grave with him.
He then turns his iPhone towards himself with the crowd in the background. He’s going to take a video, and he wants a little bit of audience interaction. “What do you guys do?” he asks the camera.
“I sell the dream!” the crowd shouts.
- The article was amended on 16 June 2016 to correct the figure in Josh Altman’s dream. His 5% commission on $200m would have been $10m, not $1m.
