Jeff Hyland, who helped shape L.A.’s luxury real estate, dies

Jeff Hyland, a luxurious serious estate powerhouse who co-launched the brokerage Hilton & Hyland and assisted reshape the staid marketplace, has died at 75.

His brokerage declared the news in an Instagram article, stating he died Wednesday just after “privately battling cancer for the previous year.”

“I am thankful to all of you for sharing your wishes and prayers all through Jeff’s health issues. Your guidance and kindness has touched me deeply and I know you mourn with me now,” his spouse, artist Lori Hyland, wrote in the article.

An L.A. native, Hyland opened Hilton & Hyland with hotel scion Rick Hilton in 1993, and in excess of the previous three a long time the agency has grown into a single of the major luxurious brokerages in Southern California, overseeing billions of dollars’ worth of sales of iconic estates across the region.

“Thirty many years in the past, Jeff and I commenced on this journey,” Rick Hilton wrote in the put up. “Throughout, a terrific partnership and a deep friendship were being solid and Hilton & Hyland emerged as a power in the market. Jeff was a legend. His awareness about serious estate and architecture was unparalleled.”

When Hyland started marketing homes at age 28, serious estate agents were being viewed as staid professionals who handled advanced transactions with small fanfare for massive-identify brokerages that obtained all the cachet.

But Hyland has been credited with helping to renovate the field with luxury broker-stars whose personalized connections designed them rich themselves. Hilton & Hyland brokers turn out to be famed on their very own in the exploding planet of serious estate reality Television set, these kinds of as on Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.”

Over the many years, he mentioned and marketed some of L.A.’s most noteworthy estates. In 2019, he engineered the record-shattering sale of Chartwell, the Bel-Air mansion featured in “The Beverly Hillbillies,” for $150 million. It was the most highly-priced home sale in California background, while it has been topped various situations given that.

“He regarded as providing these legendary homes as Super Bowl rings,” said Hilton & Hyland agent Gary Gold, who labored with Hyland on the Chartwell sale. “From the commencing, Jeff experienced only a single goal: to promote the best houses in Los Angeles.”

The pair attended many serious estate conferences collectively, and Gold reported whenever Hyland walked in, it was like Elvis Presley entered the building.

“Every owner of just about every luxurious brokerage in the world preferred to be like him. He was the man or woman everyone aspired to be,” Gold claimed.

Never ever small on ambition, Hyland made headlines in 2019 when he stated the famous 40,000-sq.-foot Bel-Air mansion of financier Gary Winnick for $225 million — the priciest publicly mentioned residence in the state at the time.

In 2020, he marketed LeBron James a Mediterranean-type compound in the Beverly Hills Article Office spot for $36.75 million. Last week, he stated the Manor, a 56,000-sq.-foot chateau in Holmby Hills, for $165 million.

Not each individual transaction was a glamorous blockbuster, recalled Luke Anderson, who served as Hyland’s assistant for four years till 2019.

1 afternoon the two sat on garden chairs exterior an $11-million tear-down on Thrasher Avenue. The wind picked up, and Hyland quipped that “hopefully the wind will blow hard more than enough to knock the residence down and preserve the customer some revenue,” she explained.

“I understood him much more than most persons did. He experienced a coronary heart, a tender aspect. He cared about this city, the homeless, the brokers,” Anderson said. “If an agent was at the rear of on costs, he’d generate them a examine.”

Hyland grew into just one of the foremost authorities on L.A. true estate and grew to become an architectural historian and creator, with textbooks like “The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills,” which explores the record and architectural importance of the area’s most prized properties.

“He realized every little thing about each and every big estate. His wealth of information was unmatched, and so was his leadership,” said Linda May well, an agent with Hilton & Hyland.

Hyland grew up in Minimal Holmby, a Westwood community tucked between Holmby Hills and UCLA. A restless youth at Warner Avenue Elementary, he struck a deal with his mom that if he managed to continue to be in university until eventually 2 p.m. every working day rather of getting despatched dwelling for misbehaving, on Fridays they’d go seize a burger at Barney’s Beanery followed by a quit at C.C. Brown’s ice cream parlor.

He took entire gain of the California local climate in his teen many years, snowboarding in the mountains in the early morning and sunbathing and surfing at the beach front very well into the evening.

Following large faculty, he headed east to New York’s Cornell College, but California quickly named him back and he completed faculty at United States International College in San Diego. He acquired a degree in business enterprise administration but quipped to The Instances that he’d majored in browsing.

Hyland ventured into genuine estate in 1975, turning into an agent with Coldwell Banker and Mike Silverman & Associates prior to founding the brokerage company Alvarez, Hyland & Young in the 1980s — a time when his desire in legendary homes started to mature.

In 2020, Hyland teamed up with Bonnie Stone Sellers, a former chief govt of Christie’s Global Authentic Estate, and established Forbes World Homes, a type of Zillow for the ultra-abundant. The Beverly Hills-based mostly internet system highlights a curated selection of luxury households.

“I’ll shepherd this it’s been a lifelong dream,” he advised The Periods that year. “In all the factors that I’ve completed, this is probably the end result of 40 many years of one-relatives luxurious real estate.”

In a assertion, Forbes Worldwide Houses called Hyland the “guiding light” at the rear of the business.

“Jeff was a giant with boundless expertise and management,” Sellers claimed in a individual statement. “A pressure of nature, his passionate knowledge and inventive vision for Forbes Worldwide Houses are a lasting testament to his legacy.”