What a music video shoot taught me about real estate
It was a music video shoot with Mark Pellington in New York City. Night exterior, a crowd that kept gathering; the kind of controlled chaos that's expected on a production like that — until it wasn't.
We had a circle of dolly track set-up in the courtyard of the Grant Houses project. Our talent was in the middle, and at first there was just an occasional bit of trash being thrown from the windows. Then a bottle hit our motorhome. Before we could get on the radio we heard shots: the generator truck was on fire.
In that moment you find out very quickly what you're made of. You find out whether you're someone who freezes, or someone who starts solving.
I started solving.
Twenty years of shooting and producing taught me that nothing goes according to plan. The location falls through at 6am. The talent is late. The breakfast burritos are cold. The Key Grip forgot to say he's afraid of flying.
You learn to have Plan B ready before Plan A starts. You learn that calm is not the absence of problems; it's having seen enough problems that none of them feel new.
That's what I bring to a real estate transaction.
When a survey issue surfaces two weeks before close, or an inspection report comes back with a surprise, staying calm matters. The worst thing I can do when something goes wrong is make you feel it more. My job is to absorb the pressure so you don't have to.
We're going to work around that burning generator truck.
Pattern recognition doesn't only come from volume. It comes from the quality of the situations you've navigated.
Twenty years working behind the scenes for Amazon, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and being shot at on music video sets will do it too.
Photographer's eye. Producer's instinct. West LA Realtor.
Salt-n-Pepa on a different shoot that same year in Battery Park, New York. They had nothing to do with the chaos in this story…