Fred C. Sands, founder of Fred Sands Realtors and Vintage Capital Group, died unexpectedly on Friday. He was 77.
Sands built his eponymous brokerage, Fred Sands Realtors, from an office in Brentwood the size of a two-car garage to the second-largest real estate and financial services firm in California and the seventh-largest in the country. Then, in 2000, he sold it for more than $100 million to Coldwell Banker, the same firm where he started his 30 year career in real estate.
After graduating Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, Sands studied real estate and business administration at UCLA. In 1968, he became Coldwell Banker’s top-producing real estate agent. He told the Los Angeles Business Journal in April that he was drawn to the business by inefficiencies in the market.
“Who’s to say what a piece of real estate is worth?” he said. “That inefficiency fascinated me and I’ve stayed with the industry for three decades.”
Less than a year after rising in the Coldwell ranks, he opened his own shop, the first Fred Sands Realtors office, in a cozy space on Barrington Court.
His firm owned and operated entities in title insurance, home warranty, mortgage banking and escrow. It grew to employ 4,000 people throughout its 72 offices across California and Nevada, as well as its franchised operations, generating $9.4 billion in sales a year at the time he sold it to Coldwell.
The year after that sale, Sands left residential real estate behind. He started the Brentwood investment firm Vintage Fund Management, pursuing a new thrill: acquiring shopping centers and regional malls throughout the United States.
“I like the action,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 2013 interview. “I can’t see myself retiring.”
Sands was invested in the arts in Los Angeles. He founded of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and served as president of the board of directors and chair of its investment committee. He was appointed by former President George W. Bush to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts and liaison to the Kennedy Center. He was also appointed to the California Arts Council by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A known philanthropist, Sands endowed the Fred Sands Institute of Real Estate at Pepperdine University earlier this year, creating a new enterprise within the university’s Graziadio School of Business and Management.
Sands is survived by his wife, Carla, chairman of the Blue Ribbon of the Los Angeles Music Center; his son, Jonathan; his daughter, Alexandra and his brother, William.
In interviews, including a recent one for the Los Angeles Business Journal, Sands stressed that knowing the micro-markets was the key to understanding real estate. In 2013, the Los Angeles Times asked him how you learn about local markets.
“You ask questions,” he said. “When you think you are the smartest person in the room, that’s when you are going to go broke. If you talk to people, they will tell you.”
