Sandy Gallin: From managing careers to remodeling Hollywood homes

BEVERLY HILLS, California : "Lowell, who left these photographs out?" Sandy Gallin said to an assistant, pointing at a stack of pictures carelessly left near a fireplace. "They need to be taken to the garage."

It was a late March afternoon, and Gallin, who used to manage the careers of musicians like Dolly Parton, Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson, had just returned here from a week in the Caribbean to find his two-story Maine-style shingled cottage, which he was renovating, in disrepair. Eager to finish the year-old project, Gallin had hired 30 workers to plant trees along the stone driveway. And on a deck outside a glass-walled living room, workers stripped the plastic off two mattresses, both of which were taken upstairs to newly painted guest bedrooms.

"It's like producing a movie," Gallin said. He groused about foot-dragging by his architect and contractors, who asked for a month to do tasks he thought needed only a week. "I've done this so many times, they can't fool me," he said.

Since quitting his job in 1998 as a successful talent manager and executive producer of movies like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Father of the Bride," Gallin has reinvented himself. He leapt into a full-time career buying high-end houses, remodeling them and selling for a tidy profit. In the process, he has earned a reputation as a tastemaker among Hollywood's status-conscious real estate obsessives. Owning a Sandy Gallin flipped home is now nearly as prestigious as it once was to be managed by Sandy Gallin.

Jennifer Aniston was interested in hiring Gallin's longtime architect, Scott Mitchell, and she stopped by the house for a tour. (It turned out she needed an interior designer instead.) The chief executive of Oracle software, Larry Ellison, a friend, came to view the house and reflecting pool out of curiosity.

And when the finishing touches were at last complete, Gallin gave one of his famous parties there. Gore Vidal, Goldie Hawn and Barbra Streisand oohed and aahed over the white oak walls and antique mug shots that Gallin had bought at a local gallery and hung in the bar days earlier. The house was sold within days — furniture, mug shots and all — to a movie producer for about $20 million. It was the latest of nearly three dozen houses that Gallin has sold since he started buying property in the 1970s. In 2001 he sold a house on Carbon Beach in Malibu for $10 million. In 2005 he bagged his biggest prize when he sold a northern Malibu furnished estate he designed from scratch to Mark Burnett, the creator of "Survivor," for close to $30 million.

"I don't feel like a gypsy, but my friends always ask me that," said Gallin, who moved out of the Maine-style house in May. "I originally started redoing houses to deal with stress. I found that the hour I could go to a job site every day took my mind off the 24/7 of thinking about my clients. When my business manager said to me, 'You've made more money doing this than producing,' it really surprised me. So I thought, 'Why not just do it?"' In Hollywood, real estate is the easiest way to track who is moving up, breaking up and moving on.

"I go to these parties, and it's all anyone talks about," said Kurt Rappaport, a real estate agent who caters to the celebrity crowd. "All they want to know is what everyone else is doing." Gallin understands the rich. He has catered to them for years. He started in the entertainment business overseeing the careers of singers like Streisand. His closest relationship was with Parton, whose career he began managing in 1973 and with whom he shared an all-white New York apartment for nearly two decades. He is credited with steering her from a country singer into a mainstream star.

In 1998, Gallin quit the management business, in part because the casino owner Steve Wynn made him an offer to develop Broadway-style entertainment in Las Vegas. But Gallin hated the desert. He left within a year. The remodeling projects that had been a sideline became his sole focus, a vocation that appeals to him, he said, because, fundamentally, he likes to shop — for furniture, antiques, paintings, even marble countertops and flooring.

Besides, he added: "Being a manager is about getting into the minds of the people you represent. It's no different in real estate." There is, of course, one big difference, he noted. "The houses don't talk back."