Finance Veteran Vicky Schiff’s Home Partially Burned Down in L.A. Fires

As of Thursday afternoon, the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County have killed at least 27 people and damaged or destroyed upward of 12,300 structures, most of which are single-family or multifamily housing. Vicky Schiff’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood was one of the first areas to be engulfed by the flames last week.

Schiff is a Southern California-based real estate veteran; in 2015 she co-founded Mosaic Real Estate Investors, serving in various roles before exiting Mosaic in late 2021. In 2023, Schiff founded Avrio Real Estate Credit, which offers financing for upper-middle-market deals across all asset types, though it focuses on multifamily. She is also the global chair of the real estate industry network for YPO, an international nonprofit support network of business leaders and executives; serves on the board of L.A.-based Wedbush Capital; chairs the board of Dream Residential REIT; and serves as an adjunct professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. 

After quickly fleeing the rapidly approaching fire with her family, Schiff was able to secure a rental home the day after her neighborhood burned and her property severely damaged. Safely settled in Hancock Park, Schiff spoke with Commercial Observer on Tuesday about her experience, the love and support she’s received in the days since the disaster, what rebuilding the Palisades community could look like, and what the fires could mean for L.A.’s housing situation writ large. She also offered her advice for the thousands of Angelenos, and Pasadena and Altadena residents, navigating similar situations at the moment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: First of all, how are you doing? What have the past few days been like for you and your family?

Vicky Schiff: We saw the fire coming and at first we didn’t think it was going to hit our neighborhood. But it came really fast. When we got out of our house, we had about 15 minutes to pack whatever we could take, and our dogs, and 10 minutes after we left our neighborhood nobody could get out. 

We are so incredibly fortunate that we have amazing friends who offered a safe place to go. Right after the fire, we went to a friend’s home in Santa Monica, who welcomed us, and then a few hours later they got evacuated. So we traveled an hour to another really dear friend’s home in Thousand Oaks, where we stayed for a week while we were waiting to move to Hancock Park.

The morning after the fire — I think this is my real estate training [kicking in] of just getting stuff done with transactions — but the next day I was immediately looking. I toured homes, and I secured a lease. We have good insurance and I took massive action immediately. What I’m trying to do is get my mask on first, and then turn outwardly and see how I can start helping other people. But we’re settled, we got a house. We’re settling in today [Tuesday]. 

The community in L.A., whether it’s our school, or church, or a business community, I’ve never seen anything like the kind of compassion happening right now. Even when you’re talking to the Department of Water and Power, the amount of compassion that’s outpouring, even from people on the phone when you call the switch over your power who were almost crying themselves … I just want to say that there’s really a lot of good to human nature, despite all the stories you’re hearing about looting and people intentionally setting fires. This community is really coming together.

What has the process of finding temporary housing been like? I’m sure there are thousands of people going through something similar right now. 

This is 1,000 percent the timing of my action, that has everything to do with it. By the time I was out looking the morning after, maybe 20 hours after it happened, brokers were telling me that they’re starting to get hundreds of calls. Agents are just all over every house. 

There’s some landlords in L.A. that are kind of under the radar, and they own or manage 100 or 200 higher-end homes that are fully furnished. They didn’t know this was going to happen, but they were set up for this. So you could move in right away, but prices are very high, and it’s ultra competitive. 

People had to figure out what was going on for many days, deal with insurance and finances, and in that time, a lot of activity started in the background with housing … this is such an insurance-dependent situation. I’ve talked to friends and neighbors who were totally underinsured. I’ve talked to neighbors whose insurance got canceled right before the fire, but the cancellation didn’t take effect until Feb. 1. I’ve talked to neighbors who don’t have insurance at all. 

Is there an aspect of all of this — of losing your neighborhood, the stress of trying to pick up the pieces in the immediate aftermath — that you think hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should?

It’s unexplainable, what it feels like to suddenly drive through such destruction. My husband was just saying that one of our friends lost their home, too. He said that our life was just such a certain way a few days ago, and it’s just a completely different situation now. 

It’s like when you see war on TV — and I’m not saying it’s the same, nobody was shooting bullets at anybody — but it’s like when you see war correspondents and they’re reporting from some war zone and you see things happening in the background. But nothing could describe actually being in that situation, with your feet on the ground. Nothing could describe what it emotionally feels like to be in that situation. 

There were some veteran firefighters from Cal Fire that came to our house as they were searching for more embers in our neighborhood a few days after the fire, during a very short period of time we were allowed to try to salvage a few things. They were, literally, almost crying while helping my husband move some things out. These guys are exhausted. I think they’re all trying to do their best, but they’ve also never seen anything like that. So I just think the human shock element is something that can’t be picked up in an article or even on TV. 

And then there’s the divergence of personal experiences. One person could’ve saved their house, but everything around them is gone. The air quality, the amount of poisons in the ground now — like my insurance adjuster said, you don’t realize the amount of toxins that are on the grounds, in the ashes, all the asbestos, the formaldehyde, toxic materials and the lead paint. And I think the other thing that nobody’s focusing on is all the animals, the deer and mountain lions and owls and all of the other wildlife that just got wiped out. If they didn’t die immediately, where do they go? It’s just so tragic.

I know that it’s still so soon, the fires are still not fully contained, but have you thought about rebuilding and what that looks like? Both for you and the Palisades community as a whole? Could it ever be the same?

You know, it really was such a special place, it was almost like Mayberry R.F.D. There’s also a combination of people that live in the Palisades. And I want to make sure that you’re readers don’t think that everybody that lives in this neighborhood is super wealthy, or a celebrity, or anything like that. Some of these people have owned their homes for 50 or 60 years, or they inherited them. Or they happened to buy them at exactly the right time, and it was the biggest asset that they will ever have, and they were underinsured because premiums got out of hand. So how can someone without insurance or the resources rebuild? 

And that’s not a small part of the people here, that is probably a meaningful part of the community. It’s not just a bunch of wealthy people whose $20 million houses burnt down. I mean, my house wasn’t worth tens of millions, you know? 

I would absolutely love to rebuild, but I just don’t know how long that will take. In a neighborhood where there’s hundreds of homes that are burned down, you might have an empty lot, and then you might have somebody that rebuilds next door … what’s going to happen to land prices? To construction costs? To labor demand? I’m sure that some real estate developers who see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity are going to come in because there’s a significant number of people — I think, I don’t have any statistics — that can’t afford to rebuild.

If you zoom out and think about L.A.’s housing situation in general in the wake of these fires, what do you see happening within the next few months, few years? Does something like this change L.A.’s housing investment ecosystem?

I think that it depends on what the land is worth in the short and long term. Do I think there’s just going to be apartment building after apartment building built in the Palisades? No, I don’t. But I don’t know what’s going to happen with land prices. That’s the big question I’ve been talking to my real estate friends about, “is your lot still worth what it was before when there’s now so much land?” and that whole dynamic of people just simply not being able to rebuild. So, are some of the homebuilders going to come in and buy land cheap and rebuild homes? Is it just going to be in some areas that are more like the flats? Is it going to be more apartment buildings? 

But even if you build an apartment building, rents are still going to be high. I don’t think it’s going to be a massive amount of low-income housing because it’s still some of the best residential land in the country. So it’s so difficult to say what’s going to happen. 

A lot of it is going to depend on how fast-track permits work and who’s building. Is it an owner who’s building, or will the owner decide to just take whatever insurance proceeds they can and move? I just don’t know.

You’re the global chair of the real estate network for YPO. Can you talk a bit about what YPO has meant to you and the support you’ve received from them over the past week?

It’s been an absolute game-changer. This is an example of business people coming together and being extraordinarily proactive and very, very, very fast. 

There’s a couple of elements to it. One is just the comfort in knowing that there’s a community that’s communicating with the people that have been affected, in offering homes and clothes and just anything they need from their companies. CEOs are asking, “What can we give you from our company? All of us are in business, we manufacture X, Y and Z, what can we provide this community?” The emotional support, the WhatsApp groups, the calls, just all of that. But also, just the example of how to basically almost run like a military organization in getting resources together extraordinarily quickly and responding is really incredible. 

In YPO, we have something called forums, and these are small groups of people within a chapter that gets broken down, and it’s usually around eight people, and they meet every month — sometimes for decades. So these are your people that know you the best. And it’s that energy that gets brought to the whole organization … this is your support system, this is your personal board of directors. It’s an unbelievable organization. 

And because I’m the global chair of the real estate network (of over 6,000 real estate members) — I was elected to a two-year term starting in July of last year — what I’m trying to do is work with the construction network and the retail network to bring more resources to our members so that we can help people that are not YPO-ers, and we can also help each other in rebuilding.

As a real estate professional and as an Angeleno in a similar position, do you have any advice for people wading through all of this uncertainty?

I think that people are incredibly more generous than you may think. I had an experience with a friend who lost everything, and another friend of ours said that [the friend who lost everything] is just afraid to ask for help. 

And I think people actually want to give you help. They want to help each other. So asking for help is actually helping the other person, too. Because people that weren’t as affected feel so helpless, they want to do something to help others, and, in a weird way, you’re actually giving it to them by asking them for help. 

So I would say lean on others and ask for help, and you will be surprised. People that you hardly know will help you. And by the way, if you have a son or daughter who can’t decide what they want to do with their life, tell them to learn a building trade!

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.