Jeff Hyland, a luxury real estate powerhouse who co-founded the brokerage Hilton & Hyland and helped reshape the staid industry, has died at 75.
His brokerage announced the news in an Instagram post, saying he died on Wednesday after “privately battling cancer for the last year.”
“I am thankful to all of you for sharing your wishes and prayers during Jeff’s illness. Your support and kindness has touched me deeply and I know you mourn with me now,” his wife, artist Lori Hyland, wrote in the post.
An L.A. native, Hyland opened Hilton & Hyland with hotel scion Rick Hilton in 1993, and over the past three decades, the firm has grown into one of the top luxury brokerages in Southern California, overseeing billions of dollars’ worth of sales for iconic estates across the region.
“Thirty years ago, Jeff and I started on this journey,” Rick Hilton wrote in the post. “Throughout, a great partnership and a deep friendship were forged and Hilton & Hyland emerged as a force in the industry. Jeff was a legend. His knowledge about real estate and architecture was unparalleled.”
When Hyland started selling homes at age 28, real estate agents were seen as staid professionals who handled complex transactions with little fanfare for big-name brokerages that got all the cachet.
But Hyland has been credited with helping to transform the industry with the broker-celebrity. Hilton & Hyland agents become famous on their own in the exploding world of real estate reality TV, such as Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.”
Over the years, he listed and sold some of L.A.’s most notable estates. In 2019, he engineered the record-shattering sale of Chartwell, the Bel-Air mansion featured in “The Beverly Hillbillies,” for $150 million. It was the most expensive home sale in California history, although it has been topped multiple times since.
Never short on ambition, Hyland made headlines in 2019 when he listed the legendary 40,000-square-foot Bel-Air mansion of financier Gary Winnick for $225 million — the priciest publicly listed home in the country at the time.
In 2020, he sold LeBron James a Mediterranean-style compound in the Beverly Hills Post Office area for $36.75 million. Last week, he listed the Manor, a 56,000-square-foot chateau in Holmby Hills, for $165 million.
Hyland grew into one of the foremost authorities on L.A. real estate and became an architectural historian and author with books including “The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills,” which explores the history and architectural significance of the area’s most prized properties.
In 2020, Hyland founded Forbes Global Properties, a sort of Zillow for the ultra-rich. The Beverly Hills-based internet platform highlights a curated selection of luxury homes.
“I’ll shepherd this; it’s been a lifelong dream,” he told The Times that year. “In all the things that I’ve done, this is probably the culmination of 40 years of single-family luxury real estate.”