Ode to Ed

Ed Van Straten on the left; circa 1975.
(photo from Highland Park News Herald)

Every day about 7:00 a.m. Ed Van Straten would pick up the two newspapers that had been tossed onto his driveway, climb into his Cadillac, light his first cigarette of the day, stuff three packs of Marboro Red above the driver’s side visor, and ride down the hill to the Jack In The Box drive-thru for his morning coffee.  Ed was phenomenal when it came to real estate.  He enjoyed every minute of the fourteen hours he put in nearly every day.  Before he passed away Ed bought and sold more houses in northeast Los Angeles than anyone, then or now. 

In 1972 Ingrid and I hoped to become first time home buyers and were in deed fortunate to make friends with Ed.  We had no savings, a pitiful income and poor prospects - none of which discouraged Ed in the least.  He took us out looking at houses twice a month for nine months until we finally found something that we could qualify for and wasn’t condemned.  The place was a run down fifty-year-old, wood-frame house with two bedrooms on the eastern slope of Mount Washington that we bought for $15, 950.  It was a small house set at the back of the property a good fifty feet above street level as the entire lot was on a twenty degree slant.  It was on a corner lot surrounded by eight-foot-high hedges.  I remember sitting on the front porch where although the hedges blocked one’s view, you could still listen to the endless stream of neighborhood teenage drivers screeching around the corner on two wheels along side where I parked my car since we had no garage.   

We would often hear friends that worked with other realtors complain about having to run errands involving a notary, an inspector, an assessor, or the title or escrow companies.  Ed did everything.  The only thing we ever had to do was sign documents.  The Mount Washington house was the first of four houses we bought and sold with Ed’s help.  From 1970 to 1980, the median price of houses in Los Angeles increased an average 14% per year.  During this period the typical homeowner’s equity rose by as much as 700% and toward the latter half of the decade, houses in Malibu doubled in value every year.  Ed showed us how to ride the wave.  Eight months after we moved into the Mount Washington house Ed found us our next house and eighteen months later we moved into a third where we actually stayed for a few years before moving on. 

Ed was gay, just over five feet tall, usually with a lit cigarette and had a peculiar habit of repeatedly placing the tip of his tongue in one corner of his mouth and then flicking it across to the other like an iguana.  In those days Cadillac would offer a new model midyear and Ed never drove a leased Cadillac that was over six months old.  Ed and his partner lived on Poppy Peak Drive at the top of a hill overlooking the San Rafael area that borders Pasadena.  His partner was an interior decorator and had a store on Foothill in La Canada.  The inside of their home was an incredible showcase.  They were both workaholics and an occasional trip to Vegas was their only diversion.

Every few months, even when we weren’t looking to buy a house, I’d ride along with Ed as he checked out the new listings that had come on the market that week.  Prior to the internet new listings were mailed to brokers each week as a packet of paper sheets.  Each sheet had a photo of a house on one side with details spelled out on the reverse.  The sheets were three-hole punched and brokers hauled them around in a binder.  Ed would flip through the sheets with a running commentary that never disappointed.

 “Good God, not again; if I remember right, I’ve sold this one four times…we (he and his partner) hold the second on this one…sold this one twice…here’s one I’ve never been in, let’s go there first…we’ve got a second on this one also…Jesus!  Look at that!  What a bomb!  What a holy bomb!  This has to be the ugliest house in L.A.…it’s not bad enough that it’s perched on top of a garage built for a Model T…the whole house is covered with Rocky Mountain Stone!  I‘ve never seen it before, probably because until now no one had the balls to try to unload it …hell, in this market somebody’ll buy it.”

There wasn’t a street in all of Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Cypress Park or Mount Washington where Ed hadn’t bought or sold a house.  While on an outing with Ed one day I noticed some binders stacked on the backseat filled with computer printouts.  I asked about them and was told that part of his responsibilities as President of the Northeast Los Angeles Realty Board included making quarterly reports available to realtors at the monthly meetings.  Having seen the success Ed was enjoying I was toying with the idea of selling real estate.

I said, “Ed just out of curiosity, how many realtors are working this area?”

Ed said, “There’s about eighty that have a license but not all of them work fulltime.”

I said, “How many houses were sold in Eagle Rock during the last quarter?”

Ed said, “Fifty-three.”

I said, “That’s a lot of agents that came up empty.”

Ed said, “It’s worse than it sounds when you consider I sold forty-one of them.”

I said, “You’re shitting me.”

Ed said, “No I’m not.  This is my thing, I love doing it and I’m very competitive.  There’s one other realtor that I always try to out do, he had eight this last quarter.”

I said, “Ed, you’re a beast.”

Ed said, “Don’t I know it.”

Ed helped us qualify for houses that were out of our price range each time we bought a house.  He always managed to get the sellers to accept low-ball offers that Ingrid and I were embarrassed to sign and considered a waste of everyone’s time.  With each of the four houses we bought, once the seller had been waterboarded by Ed and accepted our offer, they immediately hired him to help them buy their next house.  This seemed odd to me and I asked him how he had pulled this off. 

Ed said with a laugh, “Simple, they wanted me to do to the seller the same thing I did to them.”