Sharona Alperin “sold” her first home while still in her late teens.
At the time, Alperin was several years away from gaining her Realtor’s license, and both the circumstances and the client were a bit unique. Doug Fieger, the lead singer of the rock group the Knack, was looking for a home base in Los Angeles. While actual Realtors searched for listings, Alperin was the one who showed more than a dozen properties.
She had what might be considered a stronger-than-average interest in this process. Alperin was Fieger’s girlfriend, and they were planning on living in it together. (That never happened — there were issues with the house and then they ended up breaking up — but she is that Sharona, the one immortalized in the Knack’s 1979 No. 1 song, “My Sharona.”)
Picture, then, a young woman in denim, sunglasses and a black motorcycle jacket being picked up by real estate professionals and driven around to million-dollar homes. Even as a teenager, the yeshiva-educated Alperin had a talent for going room to room and conveying a property’s possibilities.
“I grew up in sales,” said Alperin, who now lives by Hancock Park. “I was in my father’s furniture showroom when I was 13 and 14. I sold clothes [on Third Street as a high-schooler]. And it wasn’t just that I had the art of selling. I think I had an affinity for architecture, for a house being a home.”
The Realtors who accompanied her noticed Alperin’s skill and urged her to consider home sales as a career. She agreed, eventually falling under the mentorship of Alan Long, founding partner of Dalton, Brown & Long Realtors, which later became DBL Realtors. More than two decades later, she is routinely one of the top-selling agents for Sotheby’s International Realty, which acquired DBL in 2004. A few times a year, she teaches a training class titled “Sharona’s Street Smarts.”
“Everything has changed,” she said, “except the true soul of real estate, which is finding a home.”
One of the basic tenets of being a successful Realtor, she says, is the ability to listen to your clients, to hear what they want rather than to impose your vision upon them.
“Sometimes as an agent, we’re there to facilitate and to open their minds to possibilities, but we need to hear what they’re really asking for, what they’re identifying with and what’s really important,” she said.
When not out in the field, she can be found at Sotheby’s Sunset Strip office or through the Web site mysharona.com. Not only was she the namesake of the hit written by Fieger and Knack guitarist Berton Averre, but her image — wearing a white tank-top and jeans and clutching the album “Get the Knack” — adorns the single’s cover. Through the song’s longevity, her name has become her professional calling card.
“I want to say 90 percent of my life over the last 30 plus years, when I say my name, someone says, ‘Oh like ‘My Sharona’? Even if they don’t say it, I can tell in my head that they’re humming it,” Alperin said. “I don’t always say, ‘Yes, that’s me. I’m “My Sharona.” ’ I don’t always engage, but many, many times, of course, I do.”
Many of Alperin’s clients are celebrities, and her experience with Fieger and in the rock world helped her get in tune with the unique needs of her clientele. Perhaps a client may need a special media room, a secluded backyard or extensive space for entertaining. Privacy can be needed as well.
“We can have paparazzi issues,” Alperin said. “I could be showing a property on the Sunset Strip, and in the final moments, security comes up and points out a building on Sunset that could be looking into the bedroom or yard and it nixes the whole thing. Some very famous clients may need an egress gate in the back or a way of getting from their garage into their house without having to walk through the front door. They all have different needs, and not just the stars.”
The daughter of Marvin and Miriam Alperin, she grew up near the Fairfax District. Educated at Hillel Hebrew Academy, she jokes that she followed the usual path of a young Jewish girl, going from yeshiva to sites around the world for four years with a rock ’n’ roll band.
Now married to Jason Aizenberg and the mother of 14-year old Eden and 10-year-old Adam, Alperin still loves to travel, but maintains, “I live and breathe real estate.”