Jeff Hyland is an American real estate businessman, president of Hilton and Hyland, a real estate firm in Beverly Hills, California, and author of the book The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills. He is also one the founding members of Christie's Great Estates and serves on the Advisory Board.
Hyland was born and raised in Little Holmby in Los Angeles, California. He attended Cornell University. He became a real estate broker shortly after he graduated from United States International University. He is married to artist Lori Hyland.
During his early years in real estate, he became an architectural historian. He assisted in the publication of Paul Williams, A Legacy of Style by Karen Hudson and David Gebhard and Wallace Neff's The Romance of Regional Architecture In 1984 he co-authored the book, The Estates of Beverly Hills.
He has served as President of the Beverly Hills Board of Realtors, President of the Los Angeles County Boards of Real Estate, and State Director for the California Association of Realtors.
He co-founded Hilton & Hyland, a real estate brokerage firm in Beverly Hills, in 1993. The firm is a founding member of Christie's Great Estates, Inc.
The firm has 100 real estate agents and staff who handles the sales and leases of a wide variety of properties, from individual homes and commercial buildings to entire residential developments and multi-owner/tenant buildings. The firm specializes in properties in Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, the Hollywood Hills, and Hancock Park.
In April of 2006 Hyland represented the owner of a 16-acre estate in Malibu which was sold to Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, a highly controversial political leader and the quasi-prince of Equatorial Guinea. The $35 million sale was the largest in California in 2006. According to many anti-corruption organizations the Obiang family has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars away from the country's poor citizens and into their own pockets. Robert E. Williams, associate professor of political science at Pepperdine, criticized Hyland saying “I don’t think it is too much to ask realtors not to deal with dictators.” It is unclear from press coverage whether Hyland in fact knew with whom he was dealing, since he appears not to have dealt with Obiang directly.
Hyland is the author of The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills, a history of 50 estates in Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and Bel-Air (New York: Rizzoli, 2008; ISBN 978-0-8478-3162-3).The book includes photographs and historical images of these estates’ mansions, grounds, and gardens.
In each chapter, he describes the history of a single property from the estate’s original construction to the present day. For each estate, he discusses the visions of the owners, architects, and landscape designers for these estates, and how they designed and constructed these homes. He points out that families which created early 20th century estates encountered many of the same problems as today’s homebuilder: workers who didn’t show up on time, bad weather which delayed progress and, of course, unexpected increases in costs.
He discusses the planning and growth of Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and Bel-Air. He also explains that these communities have maintained their desirability for decades, because they pioneered enlightened development practices such as underground utilities, winding roads to follow the gently hills, and building lots which fit into the topography and provided the best views.
In the final chapter, “Gone But Not Forgotten,” he explains that some of the greatest estates were demolished during the mid to late 20th century, because the large mansions were too costly to maintain and the land was worth more money in house lots than one large estates. He covers estates like Rudolph Valentino’s hillside “Falcon Lair” and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Mary Pickford’s “Pickfair” which was known as the White House of Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s.
