From northern Italy to Los Angeles
I grew up near Milan, in a family that loved bringing old homes back to life. While the grown-ups restored arches and stairways, I was busy with the important decisions: picking tiles and sketching my dream bedroom in crayon. I didn’t know it yet, but I was learning that a house is more than walls. It holds a family’s story.
My own ambitions took me somewhere different.
Teaching Italian on a film led to an introduction to director Garry Marshall. In 1999, at eighteen, I moved to Los Angeles and spent two years as his intern. I came to work in entertainment, and Los Angeles became home.
A few years later, some of my friends in entertainment had made it big, and apparently the thing to do with your newfound fame was buy an apartment building. In 2004, at one of those cliché industry parties with paparazzi outside, one of them mentioned he had just bought one. My own fame, for my clever use of Post-it notes and filing cabinets, was enough to land me the job of managing the building.
Just like that, I started at the very bottom of the real estate ladder, as a resident manager. Eventually I worked for investors who owned buildings and homes throughout Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Echo Park. Those tedious years spent learning how to navigate the Rent Stabilization Ordinance and real estate maintenance would pay dividends years later.
Going west
Eventually I became a real estate agent and, like many agents in Los Angeles, earned my stripes at an office on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz. I learned the business through up markets and down markets.
Then one of my mentors gave me advice I still remember: “Go west, young man. Go west.” So I did, literally. I packed up the whole family, moved us to the Westside, and settled into my current office in Beverly Hills. The office moved. My map didn’t. I still work across all of Los Angeles County, East Side included.
Finding my calling
Some of the best things in life find you when you aren’t looking. Real estate found me at a party. Trust and probate found me at my desk.
One day, a veteran agent who had been selling probate real estate for 40 years, one of the first to work in the field, stopped by and asked, “Have you ever heard of probate real estate?” I hadn’t, not really. It was love at first sight.
She and her partner took me under their wing and showed me what this work looks like when it’s done right. That made the problems elsewhere impossible to miss. Across the industry, I saw how underserved these families were. Properties were underpriced, poorly marketed, or handled carelessly, often because the person who owned them was no longer there to object.
The real estate is only part of the situation. There might be a grieving family, an overwhelmed administrator, an occupant afraid of what happens next, or a fiduciary trying to make a sound decision with incomplete information.
Those circumstances deserve someone willing to do the unglamorous work: return the call, read the documents, coordinate access, explain the numbers, and follow through.
As the work grew, I grew with it, and took a step fewer than a third of California real estate licensees have taken: I became a broker.
Giving people somewhere to turn
As my name grew in the world of trust and probate real estate, people started calling me when they found themselves tangled up in probate court, a trust dispute or a conservatorship. Often, after a few minutes on the phone, I could tell they didn’t need a real estate broker yet. They needed an attorney or a professional fiduciary, and they didn’t know where to start.
So I started The Probate Realtor Show, bringing those professionals in to share what they know with anyone who needs it. Today it’s a resource people find online when they need it most, and I regularly hear from listeners thanking me for helping them make sense of it all.
This website exists for the same reason: to give people information they can use, whether or not they ever hire me.
