Home Flipper to the Stars

Beverly Hills, Calif.

PEEKING OVER THE BUSHES The home of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, top, sold for .5 million when they split up. Courtney Cox’s house, above, is on the market for .5 million. (Neither belonged to Sandy Gallin.)

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 Mr. 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 on the yacht of his friend David Geffen to find his two-story Maine-style shingled cottage, which he was renovating, in disrepair. Eager to finish the year-old project, Mr. 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," Mr. Gallin said of the hectic activity, as he rearranged a vase of white hydrangeas and lilacs. 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," Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Gallin gave one of his famous parties there more or less as he put it up for sale. Gore Vidal, Goldie Hawn and Barbra Streisand oohed and aahed over the white oak walls and antique mug shots that Mr. 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 million. It was the latest of nearly three dozen houses Mr. Gallin has sold since he started buying property in the 1970s. In 2001 he sold a 6,000-square-foot house on Carbon Beach in Malibu for 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" and other reality shows, for close to million.

"I don't feel like a gypsy, but my friends always ask me that," said Mr. Gallin, who moved out of the Maine-style house in May to make way for the movie producer. "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. Brad Pitt and Ms. Aniston sold their Wallace Neff-designed home for .5 million when they split up. Robert A. Iger bought a new estate in Brentwood for about million after he was named the Walt Disney Company's chief executive two years ago. And the producer Brian Grazer has put his Pacific Palisades home on the market for .5 million and is contemplating buying an apartment in Manhattan.

"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. Some A-list actors, directors and producers have made more money buying and selling homes than with their first careers."

The interest is not surprising, given that so much else in Hollywood - pounds gained, weekly box office receipts - is hawkishly tracked. "In Hollywood it's all about keeping score," said Kit Rachlis, the editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine.

But there is also a voyeuristic appeal in seeing how friends, competitors and sometimes enemies measure up. "You get to see what's in people's homes, on their desks," said Laurence Mark, a producer, adding that some of his industry friends spend Sundays visiting open houses.

Mr. Gallin understands the rich. He has catered to them for years. Born in Brooklyn in 1940, he started in the entertainment business overseeing the careers of singers like Ms. Streisand. His closest relationship was with Ms. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.