Lethal Salesman Randy's A Ghoul's Best Friend

Eric Ellis, Los Angeles

12/05/1997

Randy Bell, "Mr Disaster" to his colleagues and competitors, is the man you call when you have a problem with a difficult-to-sell property.

That's not the difficult you have because of price, concrete cancer or nearness to a train-line.

It's more like the difficult you get because 39 people have suicided in it or because Nicole Brown Simpson and friend have been murdered by the front door.

Los Angeles-based Randy Bell's speciality is what he delicately calls "detrimental conditions" - valuing properties that might be described as having "a little bit of character". Operating from Price Waterhouse's offices in suburban Costa Mesa, 34-year-old Randy and his two-man team roam the US at $US295 an hour assessing seemingly unsellable properties.

His job is to focus on the bright side of properties with a dark side by de-emphasising death and the strange truth that high-profile crimes often occur in high-profile neighbourhoods and refocusing on, say, the jacuzzi with the sea view and how hard it is to get 10 bed-rooms for under 2 mil these days.

"The last thing I am is a ghost-buster," he told the Financial Review. "I'm not going to pretend whatever it is didn't happen. It, whatever it is, happened, but we should never lose sight of the practical side of any tragedy -that life does go on afterwards."

Where the mantra of conven-tional agents is "location, location, location", Randy's is "perception, perception, perception".

"The emotion gets me too, but I can try and erase if not all, then some of the stigma by pointing out the property's strong and positive features."

Proving there's a niche for everybody in the US economy, Randy handled the Nicole Simpson condo in Brentwood, LA, where she and friend Ron Goldman were slashed to death by the doorstep, the nearby mansion of her freed ex-husband O.J. Simpson, and the property of the Heaven's Gate cult in San Diego, where 39 devotees "Hale-Bopped" off to another universe last March in a cloud of barbiturates and vodka.

"Some of these houses are very beautiful and excellent value, but some are a difficult sell for old-fashioned reasons that they are simply not very nice houses.

"O.J.'s house would fall into that category. It's a poor design, not very comfortable and the work that has been done there is not of a very high standard. I think he overpaid when he originally bought it.

"The O.J. house is at the luxury end, and at the end of the day people with money tend to be practical. Someone is not going to spend $US3-4 million just to show their dinner guests where the trail of blood leads or that Kato Kaelin hung out there."

Other "profile properties" include the LA house where the Manson "family" murdered Sharon Tate and friends in 1969. "The Tate property took more than two decades to sell and it was virtually razed when it did," Bell said.

He also consulted on the Mil-waukee apartment building where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer killed and ate his victims before his 1991 arrest, and the Oklahoma City federal building that was bombed in 1995, killing 168 people.

He's also done work on the area around the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown site in Pennsylvania and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Randy has a salability scale detailing case histories and the factors that effect ongoing ownership, such as the Nicole townhouse - "big ghoul factor", alluding to the carloads of tourists.

Some properties are beyond saving, such as the Oklahoma City site and the Dahmer building, which was vacated the year after his arrest by the 23 other residents.