LARRY KANTER

Senior Reporter

Sipping a glass of Cabernet in a crowded banquet room at the Business Journal’s real estate awards last week, Christopher E. Maling, a 33-year-old retail broker in the downtown office of Marcus & Millichap, smiles as he describes a stereotypical L.A. broker:

USC graduate. Fraternity brother. Serious sports fan. Super-competitive. Jonathan Club member. Born into a real estate family. Eats breakfast at the Original Pantry, has drinks and dinner at Engine Co. No. 28. Drives a Mercedes.

And how many of those traits does Maling himself possess?

He barely hesitates. All but one: the car. However, he quickly adds that he intends to exchange his Volvo sedan for a new Mercedes S-Class soon.

“I guess I’ve just described myself,” he says.

Standing in a room full of Los Angeles real estate brokers, it’s hard not to wonder: Is there some kind of assembly line cranking these guys out?

All industries, of course, tend to attract distinct personality types. But if the typical accountant is quiet and methodical, the average retailer cheerful and optimistic, and the stereotypical reporter cynical and sour, L.A.’s real estate brokers can seem almost eerie in their uniformity.

“We used to joke that there was a mold you had to walk through” to become a broker, says Kathy Schloessman, who was one of L.A.’s rare women commercial brokers for more than a decade before becoming president of the L.A. Sports and Entertainment Commission. “You had to be a USC or UCLA grad. You had your blue or black or gray Brooks Brothers suit. The perfect hair. The perfectly polished shoes. A nice belt. Everybody joked that all brokers looked the same.”

That image persists today. In one of the world’s most diverse cities, at a time when other traditionally male professions have long ago become well populated with women and minorities, the world of commercial real estate has somehow managed to retain its insular, clubby atmosphere of yesteryear.

Overwhelmingly white and predominately male, L.A.’s brokers possess any number of other characteristics that tend to render them a breed apart. Even physically, the broker seems different from the rest of us, larger in stature than your basic white-collar worker perhaps a reflection of the fact that they all seem to be former high school or college athletes. Most are clean-cut to a fault. And to call them extroverted, even swaggering, would be something of an understatement.

“There’s definitely a common denominator” among real estate brokers, says Gary Weiss, senior managing director of Julien J. Studley Inc. in Westwood. “Everyone is like everyone else, to some extent.”

Weiss, 41, fits the bill on any number of counts. He played intercollegiate baseball as an undergraduate at San Diego State, and like many brokers, got his first taste of sales as an office-equipment salesman after graduating. Gregarious and self-confident, he speeds around L.A. in a silver Mercedes SL500.

And then there’s golf. Weiss, a member of North Ranch Country Club in Thousand Oaks, plays about twice a week (seldom on weekends), either with fellow brokers or clients. “There are so many of us who are members of country clubs. It’s almost like a fraternity,” he says.

John Bertram, an executive vice president at Westmac Commercial Brokerage Co., also has noted the similarities between himself and his peers. It was especially striking at a recent industry event, when he was handing his keys to the valet and noticed that every car around him was the same a BMW 740i.

“Of course, I have one, too,” the 39-year-old former college volleyball player admits. “It’s pretty funny. The stereotype is definitely true.”

So what gives? A lot of it has to do with the type of people who are attracted to the industry in the first place. If any sales job requires self-confidence and highly developed people skills, it’s the super-competitive world of commercial real estate, where deals routinely run into the millions and brokers work on a straight-commission basis.

“They do a lot of cold calling and get a lot of ‘no thank yous,’ ” says Sam Vilgiate, an industrial psychologist who has been doing pre-employment screening for commercial real estate firms for almost 30 years (and whose son, Nico, is a broker at Cushman Realty Corp.). “You have to sell yourself in addition to the deal. You can’t be too thin-skinned or too concerned about what other people think.”

Such traits, Vilgiate adds, may show up more routinely among athletes and fraternity members which helps explain their preponderance in the industry.

“I look at what they go through and it looks more ruthless and competitive than any business that I know,” says Michael Meyer, a real estate attorney with Pillsbury Madison & Sutro. “There’s a brashness that is more commonplace among brokers than among other people.”

As for the USC connection, the school has been a real estate training ground since the early ’60s, when Preston Martin who later served as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board taught some of the first courses in the industry. Several of L.A.’s leading real estate moguls including Arden Realty Inc.’s Richard Ziman and Majestic Realty Co.’s Ed Roski Jr. (both of whom participated in intercollegiate athletics, by the way) attended USC.

Hunt Barnett, a senior vice president at CB Richard Ellis Inc., works alongside six of his USC fraternity brothers in CB’s Century City office, and dozens more are scattered throughout other local brokerages. “You run into a lot of people with connections to USC,” he says.

Such clubbiness is particularly shocking to outsiders trying to break into the industry.

“It frightened me when I first got into the business,” says Susan B. Goodman, a vice president at Cresa Partners, who has been a broker in L.A. representing general office and entertainment tenants for more than two decades. “I’m a woman. I was from New York. I wasn’t like them at all. The ‘SC guys definitely have their contacts and that helps them.”

But those days may be drawing to a close. As the top ranks of the corporate community grow increasingly diverse, the real estate industry is having little choice but to follow suit.

“My classroom is populated by a wide array of personalities and cultures and both genders,” says USC real estate Professor Rocky Tarantello. “As the gender gap is closed in corporate America, then the gender gap in professional services also will close.”

Meanwhile, the increasing dominance of large institutions in the industry is making it more difficult for brokers to behave as in the past.

The entire industry is moving toward a more corporate, collaborative model, and more and more brokers are actually paid salaries rather than commissions, says Steve Marcussen, senior vice president at Cushman Realty.

“That pushes out the lone wolf,” Marcussen says.