Ben Bacal has rocketed to the upper tier of residential real estate agents in Los Angeles, selling homes for the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Matthew Perry and AEG Live Chief Executive Randy Phillips in recent years. His meal ticket is the “pocket listing,” an increasingly popular way of selling celebrity homes by word of mouth instead of through the public Multiple Listing Service.

But a dispute with a former partner-turned-competitor has turned up accusations of illegal tactics and highlighted the fierce competitiveness of this high-end corner of the real estate world.

Bacal claims that pocket listings were responsible for most of his $135 million in home sales last year. But he has been accused by Hillel Sanowicz, another real estate agent to the stars whose clients include Mark Wahlberg, of stealing away deals. Bacal, in turn, has accused Sanowicz of posing as a former client and publishing defamatory reports about him on the Internet in order to damage his reputation.

Pocket listings are favored by celebrities and other high-profile sellers who might not want the general public waltzing through their living rooms – or bedrooms – during open houses. In a pocket listing, a home seller enlists a real estate agent to show the property to only a few other well-connected agents, keeping it out of view of the general market. The method has been around for a long time, but agents say it has become more popular because sellers might want to give an aura of exclusivity.

“All the stuff I’ve been showing lately are pockets,” said Stacy Gottula, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Previews International who has seen pocket listings shoot to more than 25 percent of her sales this year, up from about 10 percent three years ago. “There’s low inventory right now and very specific things that buyers are looking for. They want to look at all the housing, things they’ve never seen.”

But pocket listings can also engender cutthroat sales tactics. Sometimes an agent has only an informal agreement, not an exclusive contract, to sell a home. That means others can swoop in and close the deal.

Also, such word-of-mouth listings leave room for agents to create deals out of thin air – some have been accused of going door to door to tell homeowners a celebrity is interested in their home, then going back to the celebrity or another buyer with the home as a pocket listing.

In response to the rise in off-market listings, the California Association of Realtors issued an advisory against using pocket listings in June, warning that they might not result in the best market price for home sellers.

Cash in on cachet

Bacal has gained a reputation for aggressive tactics. One agent who knows both Bacal and Sanowicz said that pocket listings can give rise to conflicts among agents.

“It absolutely provides more opportunities for shady dealings,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The agent would only show a pocket listing to “a half-dozen agents that I trust not to attempt to convert it into a listing of their own.”

Bacal declined to comment. His attorney, Ronald Richards, denied that Bacal stole clients or used celebrity names to make sales, attributing attacks to professional jealousy and competition.

“Ben has made a lot of buyers and sellers very wealthy in Los Angeles,” Richards said in an email. “Unfortunately, as life and work goes, Ben works hard and probably harder than most and his competition must not like that attribute.”

The Canadian-born Bacal entered the real estate market in Venice in 2004 with one eye on online ventures, later telling a Canadian publication that his real estate career was inspired by the need to make money to start dot-com companies. In 2006, at 28, he launched website DareJunkies.com with a friend from the bottom floor of his West Hollywood townhouse with more than $500,000 in borrowed money and personal savings. The website, where users could upload videos of themselves doing “Jackass”-style stunts, did not catch on and is no longer in service.

But he found success as a real estate agent, quickly rising up the ranks with pocket listings as his niche. While at Keller Williams Realty in 2010, he sold an unlisted $20 million home in Beverly Hills to a company owned by James Jannard, founder of sunglasses maker Oakley Inc., and sold another home in the Hollywood Hills for $7 million.

Bacal left Keller Williams in the spring of last year for Sotheby’s International Realty in West Hollywood, where he continued to raise his profile. He sold a $20 million Beverly Hills home to DeGeneres last year and a $15.5 million Beverly Hills home for AEG’s Phillips through a pocket listing the previous year. He told the Los Angeles Times last year that 70 percent of his sales were from pocket listings.

Pocket listings have become so important to his business that he is developing Pocketlister LLC, an online directory of off-market listings set to launch next year.

By establishing himself as a go-to source for such listings, however, Bacal might have become a target.

Sanowicz, who worked at Keller Williams at the same time as Bacal and who has reportedly done deals involving stars such as Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio, has sued Bacal for allegedly stealing commissions.

Commission split

According to Sanowicz’s lawsuit filed last year in Los Angeles Superior Court, the two agreed to split commissions on the sale of a home on Sarbonne Road in Bel Air after Sanowicz brought in the homeowner as a client. But when Bacal left the agency, Sanowicz alleges Bacal took the home as a pocket listing for himself and sold it. Property records show it was sold to a company owned by Gateway Inc. co-founder Ted Waitt for $14 million.

Bacal got a commission of $210,000, according to Sanowicz’s complaint. Sanowicz alleges he is entitled to one-half of Bacal’s share.

“It’s not a secret he had a deal with Bacal and Bacal took off with the listing and took off with the entire commission behind his back,” said Sanowicz’s attorney, Jonathan Chodos.

Sanowicz further claims that Bacal used celebrity names to gain entré into deals.

“Bacal regularly called upon (Sanowicz) to express to potential sellers the fact that his celebrity client was looking to potentially purchase a property like theirs. … But for the prospect of possibly selling their property to a celebrity client, these potential sellers would not have been interested in cooperating with plaintiff and Bacal,” the complaint states.

Another agent who knows Bacal said he has a reputation as an “envelope pusher,” but that his methods are effective.

“He’s clever in finding ways to put deals together,” the agent said. “But he does do business.”

Bacal’s attorney accuses Sanowicz of “using his short-stinted association with Ben to get to Ben’s earnings.”

Bacal, for his part, filed a defamation lawsuit against Sanowicz last month, accusing him of publishing false reports on the website RipoffReport.com. One of the postings, by a purported homeowner, said of Bacal that “he will show up at your door saying he has a celebrity buyer for your home when in fact he is just trying to get you to sign a listing contract and mislead you.” (A complaint with that exact wording has also been lodged on the same site against Sanowicz.)

Deborah Drooz, an attorney specializing in defamation lawsuits who reviewed Bacal’s case for the Business Journal, said that the posting clearly met the standard for defamation if untrue, but that it would have to clear a higher legal standard for malice since Bacal is a limited public figure.

Gottula, meanwhile, credited Bacal for innovative dealmaking and said pocket listings represent something of a cultural difference among real estate agents, in which younger agents are more willing to try creative methods.

“I’ve done deals with him and never had a problem,” she said. “He really hustles to get pocket listings. He’s really doing it in a different way and it’s working. It takes somebody who thinks outside the box and isn’t just waiting for a listing to come up on the marketplace.”