Mauricio Umansky Discusses Rick Hilton Rift, How He Met Wife Kyle Richards in New Book
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Mauricio Umansky says he wasn’t looking to settle scores in his new book, The Dealmaker: How to Succeed in Business & Life Through Dedication, Determination & Disruption. In his first book, which is out today, April 11, Umansky — the founder and CEO of The Agency real estate brokerage, star of Netflix’s Buying Beverly Hills and husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards — dives into the period in his life when former boss and brother-in-law Rick Hilton and his wife Kathy Hilton stopped speaking not only to him but also to his wife more than a decade ago.
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It all stemmed from when Umansky worked at L.A.’s Hilton & Hyland real estate agency. At one point named the No. 1 agent in all of California, Umansky went to Hilton & Hyland co-founders Rick Hilton and Jeff Hyland (who died last year) requesting to be made a partner. While the answer was no, Umansky was offered “a percentage of top-line revenue, not equity in the company,” he writes. Later, according to Umansky, his bosses reneged on the deal during the recession in 2008 — and again declined to make him a partner. During this time, contends Umansky, his sales accounted for “approximately 20 percent of their revenue.”
Umansky credits what went down at his former perch with setting him on the path to creating his own brokerage, telling The Hollywood Reporter that he’s never fully addressed the situation before writing his book. “I had never talked about my stuff before. No one has ever known the actual reason,” he says, stressing that he feels a sense of “thank you” to Hilton today. “I tell it from the perspective of, if that didn’t happen, if he [Rick Hilton] didn’t do that, I never would have had the balls to go out on my own. I needed for that to happen to be able to go off on my own.”
In The Dealmaker, Umansky also details Hilton’s response to him decamping to start a rival agency. “Rick stopped speaking to me, which extended to Kyle and our whole family. And of course his wife, Kathy — Kyle’s sister — did the same. … They cut off all communication and no longer invited us to Thanksgiving dinners or other holidays. The only reason I can come up with, because they always hosted clients and friends, is that they didn’t want me to poach anyone. I never would have stolen a client from Rick, though maybe he didn’t believe my motives were pure. He and Kathy held tremendous anger toward us, which is not the way I choose to live my life.” (THR has reached out to Hilton for comment.)
While these details in The Dealmaker add further context to tensions between the two families — conflict between Kathy Hilton and Richards boiled over in the most recent season of RHOBH — Umansky says that everything is now fine between him and Rick Hilton. “That’s gone. It’s past. Kathy and Kyle have their own issues that are separate form me. Rick and I today, if we see each other on the street, we stop, we talk, we’re friendly. I wish him love and success and I hope he wishes the same to me. That’s past,” Umansky says.
Since Umansky went out on his own, The Agency has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding in 2011, now counting more than 2,000 agents in 80 real estate markets both in the U.S. and internationally, including Mexico, Canada, Portugal, Spain and the Bahamas.
Throughout The Dealmaker, Umansky — whose big transactions over the years have included selling the Playboy Mansion and the Walt Disney Estate — peppers anecdotes about his work and personal life with a running list of what he calls “Mauricio’s Mantras,” which encompass his advice on success in business. (One example: “When you’re not selling, you’re losing money. Learning to be efficient is a lifestyle.”)
“It’s meant to be a super easy read,” says Umansky of his book. “I didn’t want to write a how-to success book. It’s really meant to be through storytelling and life lessons that have shaped me to be an optimistic successful human being and hopefully people will have the same takeaway. For me, it’s about sharing back what I’ve learned.”
He tells THR that he didn’t share the book with anyone close to him prior to publication. “Nobody got a chance to see it beforehand, not Kyle, not my kids, not anybody. I wanted to just let it go out there,” says Umansky, whose daughters Farrah Brittany and Alexia Umansky work at The Agency and star with him on the real estate reality series Buying Beverly Hills, which was just renewed by Netflix for a second season. (Umansky hopes to eventually launch versions of the show based in other cities, envisioning shows titled Buying London and Buying Miami.)
In his book, Umansky recounts everything from his early years growing up in Mexico City — he suffered from neutropenia (a shortage of a certain kind of white blood cells) as a young child and was also diagnosed as legally blind in one eye — to his career working in the fashion business (at the brands 90265 and Carole Little, from which he was fired) before entering real estate.
With his fashion background, Umansky, who grew up in Bel Air, writes that he pays careful attention to what he wears for different meetings and house showings. “If I’m meeting an older, more conservative buyer, I’ll stick with the suit and tie. If it’s a young twentysomething tech guy, I’ll probably opt for jeans and a T-shirt.” He even sometimes dresses “to the design of the property, because I want prospective buyers to feel like they’re entering a very specific lifestyle. Let’s say I’m representing a beach house in Malibu, then I’ll go for white jeans and a flowy linen shirt.” He recounts ruefully that he once lost out on a $150 million property sale because the client considered him underdressed. “I was in all Brunello Cucinelli, the most expensive stuff you could buy,” recalls Umansky, “but I wasn’t wearing a suit and tie. Go figure. I screwed that one up. But you can learn a lot more from your mistakes than you can from your successes sometimes.”
There are also anecdotes about selling the former home of Michael Jackson, a property he believes was haunted the late pop star; winning Lady Gaga as a client after Kyle appeared in one of her music videos; working with an unnamed “well-known ’80s TV star” who once ranted at him, “Mauricio, I think you are the lowest piece of shit on this earth. You’re scum”; and the time that he and client Nick Lachey got paid with stock in the Citizen app when the CEO of the company bought the singer’s house.
In the book, he also shares his thoughts on rival brokerage company Compass (“I’d equate them to the dark side in Star Wars,” he writes); says that he’s looking at taking The Agency public “sooner rather than later”; and reveals that powerhouse real estate agent Jade Mills almost joined The Agency at its inception but that “at the end of the day — I think she got scared to leave Coldwell Banker,” he writes. (THR has reached out to Mills for comment.)
For readers who aren’t into real estate but who watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Umansky also recounts plenty of backstory on his relationship with his wife, including how they met when he was 24 and invited to her birthday party — “Everybody would tell me that she was Demi Moore’s sister (which she was not!),” he writes — and how they moved up their wedding date after they learned that she was pregnant “so Kyle could fit in her dress.” After Umansky lost his job at Carole Little, Richards “suggested we get our real estate licenses together … we both passed our tests and got our licenses, although Kyle never put hers to use, because she was only doing it as a show of support for me,” he writes.
As for why The Agency has grown so considerably, Umansky credits a few factors: company culture, innovative marketing and a focus on back-end technology. “You know, The Agency kind of started through the idea of disruption and when I talk about disruption, originally it was really disrupting in the way we market properties. We were the first company and first office to do the mega-open house with Lamborghinis and a party and the whole thing and experiencing the lifestyle of the property. Obviously, today a lot of people are copying that now and we’ve got a lot of different reality television shows. That’s become the way to do open houses. We were the first one to do that. And from the tech side, we obviously get deep into the efficiencies and how do I make agents more efficient If I can create tech that allows me to sell one more property per week, that’s four more per month and 52 more per year, that brings a lot of value to my agents,” says Umansky, who recalls in the book letting go a top-producing agent whose personality didn’t fit well into the company.
“Culture is everything for me. That’s what keeps me up at night — maintaining the feeling of family, openness and transparency as we’ve grown to 80 offices today. Culture is about open communication and hiring the right people and letting go of some of the assholes. It just has to do with what is your north star and what’s important to you.”
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