When photos of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s $60 million Beverly Hills mansion went up on Zillow earlier this month, the Daily Mail declared the couple as good as divorced. There were already rumors that the marriage was on the rocks, with Lopez and Affleck attending high-profile events separately and J.Lo canceling her summer tour, but the real-estate listing seemed to clinch it. Whether or not this turns out to be true for the resurrected Bennifer, brokers say shared real estate is usually the first thing to go when couples decide to split. “We are often the first people to know,” says Lisa Lippman, an associate broker at Brown Harris Stevens.
The first step is usually finding a rental. (Affleck has one in Brentwood, for what it’s worth.) This is what you might call the separation soft launch — nothing is permanent, there’s plausible deniability if the client needs it, and it allows all parties involved space to think. “They’re in the process of telling their children, figuring out how to tell the world, if they can salvage it, what they’re going to do with the home,” Lippman says. In some cases, couples reach out to a broker before they’ve even really decided themselves, says Holly Parker, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman. “It can go back and forth several times, where they are and then they aren’t and then they are,” she says. “They really need to understand, ‘How are we going to live? Do we have enough money to go into two homes? How much is this person bugging me? What is my living space going to look like?’”
Frequently, couples in the process of splitting reach out to the broker who put them in their current home. They want someone they already have a relationship with, someone they trust. But this can be fraught when neither of them trust each other and everyone is in battle mode. “They want you to take sides, but you can’t,” says Marisol Banuelos, an agent at Keller Williams. “You have to keep everything professional.” Lippman agrees it’s a balancing act. “I once worked with a couple where both were trying to befriend me,” says Lippman. “I kind of ended up in the middle of things, but I was able to stay fine with both of them. One of them often said to me, ‘The only thing we do agree upon is you.’”
But it doesn’t always work out that way. Another couple she worked with both decided on her as a broker — that, too, can be a point of conflict, apparently — but at some point, the spouse still living in the apartment decided she was more aligned with the other spouse and tried to sabotage the sale. “I asked if some things that were out before a showing could be put away and the person got very upset, didn’t want to show the apartment, and made it look bad,” she says. “You try to explain that it behooves everyone to make the apartment look good and get the most money you can get, but there can be tense moments.”
And you never want a divorce to be obvious if you’re trying to sell. “You don’t want to advertise it’s a divorce,” Lippman says. “Buyers assume sellers are desperate. It’s not always true, but there is often a timeline imposed by the court, like two years.” She tries to make sure that if one half of the couple moves out, they leave enough behind to disguise it, especially in, for example, the closet. Buyers might notice that the wife in all the family photos doesn’t have any clothes in the apartment. She adds that she also looks in the closets when she’s representing buyers. At the very least, a divorce means that the owners aren’t just looking to see if they can get a good price. They really do need to sell.
A lot of couples never list their apartments, though, and brokers say it’s often the right decision not to, especially if there are kids involved. And the timing of divorces doesn’t always correlate with the best market, either. (Now, for example.) But that doesn’t really tell us anything about Affleck and Lopez’s attempt to offload their home of a little more than a year. The buyer pool for $60 million Beverly Hills mansions isn’t so focused on interest rates. “I don’t know; she’s known to love buying real estate,” says one broker I spoke with, indicating that the listing could mean anything. Lopez reportedly thought the house was too big — it’s 43,000 square feet with parking for 80 cars, so it’s plausible — and Affleck didn’t like being so far from his kids, who live in Brentwood with ex-wife Jennifer Garner (currently playing the role of reasonable adult in the saga).
More damning than a Zillow update, however, is Affleck’s Brentwood rental, and the couple’s respective, reportedly solo, property viewings. There are rumors Affleck has been house hunting alone, and in May, Lopez was photographed, without Affleck, looking at properties in Beverly Hills with her long-time producing partner. A source later told “Page Six” she was “merely searching for an investment property.” Right.
