Servicing a rich niche
The mega-mansions of Los Angeles require huge teams of staff to run and keep them looking pristine, and many more workers to spruce them up when they go on sale
In Southern California, a mansion is a micro-economy.
Every luxury property has a developer who envisioned it, an architect who built it, an agent who sold it and a deep-pocketed buyer who had to have it. And us mere mortals can now catch a glimpse of this eye-opening ecology through reality TV shows like Selling Sunset and Buying Beverly Hills on Netflix.
To run these places – to have the guests greeted, drinks poured, floors polished, windows washed, cupboards stocked, the perimeter secured, meals cooked, children supervised, lawns manicured, ponds algaecided – typically requires a staff akin to a modern-day Downton Abbey.
And whenever these prized properties surface for sale, many dozen more workers enter the fray – tasked with elevating the home to its most beautiful state, keeping it in pristine condition in hopes of luring a buyer willing to spend a fortune to acquire it.
They include maids, gardeners, handymen, pool techs, interior designers, limestone specialists and aquarium cleaners. They work behind the scenes, sweating through hot summers to ensure that every crack is cleaned, every leaf is trimmed and every pool has the perfect PH balance.
In the end, the developer gets the profits, the agent gets the TV show and the rich person gets the house. But these workers – critical cogs in Southern California’s rarefied lifestyles and its extraordinary real estate market – make it all happen.
“I take pride because I’m a part of the project,” says Deisy Flores, a maid and owner of Casa Fantastic Cleaning Services. “The architect, the contractor, the stagers and us. We’re a part of it.”
Flores founded her company with the help of her mother in 2013, and the work has evolved from cleaning modest homes in West Covina to scouring mega-mansions on the Westside.
She employs 15 professional cleaning technicians – she prefers that term over maids, which feels restrictive since the company also handles commercial projects.
While smaller projects need only one or two people, larger ones require the entire squad. On hectic days such as these, Flores oversees it all like a quarterback executing a well-oiled offence.
She communicates with the homeowner and dispatches teams across the house.
Certain towels are used for delicate surfaces such as marble or chandeliers. Backpack vacuums often feature, as wheeled ones might scratch the floor.
Her team takes on any job, from small homes that take a few hours to hillside castles that take days. Often, they’re not the only ones there. “We’re always working around people: contractors, floor polishers, furniture movers, stagers, people installing appliances. There’s lots of traffic,” she says.
It’s hard labour – so much so that Flores doesn’t let her team work more than eight hours at a time. But at the top of the market, cleaning contracts are lucrative.
Her crew is currently cleaning a 20,000-square-foot mansion in Bel-Air that hit the market two months ago. The agent has been scheduling showings every week and weekend, so Flores’ team has been tidying up the place three times a week since it listed for sale.
The current tab is US$17,000 and climbing with each visit.
For the owner, those bills can add up quickly, especially when a property sits on the market for months or even years.
In April, former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner offered up his Malibu compound for US$225 million but hasn’t yet found a buyer.
Another, called The Manor, a famous 123-room Holmby Hills mansion once owned by Aaron and Candy Spelling and featuring rooms dedicated to gift wrapping and flower cutting, hit the market in February for US$165 million. No takers.
In Beverly Crest, a US$100 million mansion has been listed since January 2021.
To show off such luxurious estates, some sellers will hire marketing teams to throw wild parties at the homes with other agents and potential buyers on the guest list. These events require that caterers, cooks, entertainers and influencers are added to the staff. Everything’s bigger with a mega-mansion: not only the cost, but the cost of selling it.
Kevin Stein is a district supervisor with LA Elite Window Cleaning, which cleans the windows of 1,000 houses every year. Stein and his team often work for luxury clients – most notably agents for The One, the 105,000 sq ft behemoth that traded hands for US$141 million earlier this year.
While small flat jobs can cost just US$250, glass-loaded mansions such as The One can cost roughly US$10,000 to clean.
“I’m numb to it now, but seeing the opulence and insane wealth we’re surrounded by in this city is crazy,” Stein says. “It’s shocking the upkeep and staffing required to clean these places.”
Armed with either a squeegee and mop or a water-fed pole – a 60-foot-long device that uses deionised water to clean glass spot-free – Stein keeps properties looking glistening.
It’s a less common service than maids, but he says he’ll typically service a home twice a year – save for those in coastal communities like Malibu and Laguna Beach where ocean air forces owners to seek his services every other week.
“I work on homes that are on the market all the time,” he says. “Realtors always want the windows clean for potential buyers, and they want them clean when they photograph the home.”
Like Flores, he’s one of dozens of workers at a home on any given day. “You go to properties that have 30-40 landscapers tending to gardens that look like Buckingham Palace,” he says, adding that the biggest properties have a pecking order. The homeowner, then the homeowner’s assistant, then the estate manager, then the estate manager’s assistant – not to mention the internal hierarchies among the maids, landscapers and other service staff.
“There’s a full hotel staff at some of these places,” he says.
And that’s just when the house is on the market. When it becomes occupied, different -or additional – workers fill the halls, such as nannies, chefs and butlers. Someone to service the bowling alley. Someone to refill the candy room with confectionery.
Some compounds require so many bodies that they come with “staff quarters”, or guest houses where full-time workers can stay.
Beneath the glitz and glamour of The One, there’s an entire level of bedrooms for staff – with a decidedly lower level of luxury than the rest of the estate.
Steve Sheftel works at these types of homes all the time. As the founder of Beverly West Pool, he and his two employees service 170 pools per week, handling repairs to upgrades to `maintenance.
He deals in every type of pool: kidney-shaped installations behind a bungalow to extravagant oases with grottos and fountains in the hills. Needless to say, the latter require a bit more work.
“With hillside pools, you can double or triple your costs because of all the footings and beams. There’s a lot more engineering required,” says Sheftel, who’s been servicing pools for 45 years.
He is not a huge fan of the infinity pools that most developers insist on adding these days. Water cascading over the edge makes for a lovely scene, but behind the facade is a complicated system of catch basins, water-level controllers, filters and pumps.
They’re attractive in theory and en vogue at the moment, but if not properly constructed, constant repairs will cost owners a small fortune, he says.
The One takes the concept of the residential swimming pool and lets it mutate into something akin to a planned community. The property features five of them, including a pool out back, a pool inside, a floating pool that’s perched outside a second-storey bedroom, and a moat-like pool outside the nightclub complete with lounges and fire pits.
They look immaculate from afar, but a closer look shows that some have foundations that are already cracking. When the estate was still on the market, three or four pool guys would come to service them every single week, according to Ted Lanes, who served as the property’s courtappointed receiver in 2021.
The pool staff was one team among many. Even though the house was unoccupied, service staff included a full-time handyman, two security guards that patrolled the property 24/7, and three or four housekeepers who cleaned once a week.
For these services, the monthly bill was roughly US$40,000.
We’re always working around people: contractors, floor polishers, furniture movers …
DEISY FLORES, OWNER OF CASA FANTASTIC CLEANING SERVICES
[Some] properties have 30-40 landscapers [for] gardens that look like Buckingham Palace
KEVIN STEIN, LA ELITE WINDOW CLEANING