Residents of the Chelsea Mercantile knew their celebrity neighbor was getting divorced long before the tabloids found out.
Photo: Compass
The rumor we heard goes like this: A married A-list actor was looking for a “writing studio” somewhere in the city but was touring three-bedrooms. That’s a lot of space for a screenplay, so we leaped to the obvious: Divorce? While trying to report out the tip (no luck), a different story emerged about the funny little dances agents have to do while looking for a post-split apartment for a high-profile client.
“I tell my billionaire and celebrity clients that it is very hard in today’s world to keep anything under wraps,” says Aaron Kirman, a broker with Christie’s International Real Estate. There is currently an entire cottage industry of internet detectives reading Architectural Digest looking for divorce clues. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s split was covered almost entirely as a real-estate phenomenon: Lopez’s team insisted that she was looking for an “investment property” when she was spotted house hunting with her longtime producing partner. Ben Affleck’s $100,000-a-month Brentwood rental didn’t help matters much. Hugh Jackman and his ex, Deborra-Lee Furness, listed their Hamptons estate as a rental property just months before announcing their separation in September 2023, and records of how the pair split their Manhattan penthouse posted weeks before they finalized their divorce. On the same point, Sutton Foster’s 2024 sale of her $2.2 million Tuxedo Park estate — which she had only bought in 2021 — was taken as a tell on her split from screenwriter Ted Griffin.
So how does a broker keep what they know a secret when there are multiple parties, apartment tours, paparazzi, and sneaky little Reddit sleuths involved? Off-market listings help, per Douglas Elliman’s Steven Cohen, who has found everything from new-build condos to stately townhouses for well-known and “very private” clients before their divorces made the tabloids. A pocket listing often means the buyer and seller are looking for privacy. “It’s controlling the paper trail,” he says.
And then there’s controlling the photo evidence. Brokers might FaceTime clients from the property during an exclusive showing to save them from having to turn up in person, or a business manager might be sent out on their behalf. This may also be the name listed with the LLC behind the purchase. (That manager, or the name of someone else on the payroll, may be listed with the LLC behind the purchase. This kind of secrecy, it turns out, is quite easy to pull off.) And if the famous person in question insists on going themselves? Corcoran’s Philip Tabor has used fake names when organizing private showings: “Something that there could be 500 of them if they were Googled, like John Sullivan.” (A few brokers mentioned clients wearing disguises during tours, which seems far-fetched but possible.)
Tabor once represented the famous husband in a celebrity couple’s divorce. He had already taken all the other precautions while scouting for a new place — “I’m always very protective and stealth, but it became even an extra-crazy layer of pseudonyms, of previews, of videos, of FaceTimes with pseudonyms,” he says — but he was also quite choosy about who he let in on the transaction. “There was one listing I wouldn’t take him to because I knew that that other broker couldn’t be trusted.” Tabor did manage to help his buyer find a prewar loft in Tribeca, which he believes to this day has yet to become widespread public knowledge. “I didn’t even tell my mother,” he says. (Chatty neighbors, though, are a perennial liability: In 2012, residents of the Chelsea Mercantile told the New York Post that they had known about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise’s divorce weeks ahead of when it was announced. “I’ve seen her every day for three weeks,” per their source.)
Sometimes keeping a client’s identity is easy work, since even the broker doesn’t know. Christie’s Kirman recalls one buyer a few years back who was going through a divorce and wouldn’t disclose their identity to him or the seller’s agent. He was basically talking to a nesting doll the whole time. “The buyer had a representative going to look at properties for them, so they obviously trusted the taste of the rep,” says Kirman. “To this day, I don’t exactly know who it was, and we never were able to figure it out.”
A good cover story is also a must. (It’s not impossible, for example, that an actor-director really is just looking for an oversize writing studio.) Molly Franklin at Corcoran says that a top-tier client checking out listings uptown could be explained away by the fact that they’re looking for a place for their parents to stay when they’re in town, or because they want an easier commute for a Broadway debut. “They’re going to be using the space, but nobody needs to know why,” says Franklin.
If this all sounds complicated or a little over the top, there is, of course, a straightforward, tried-and-true path to remaining quiet, brokers say. “It’s very simple,” Michelle Griffith at Douglas Elliman tells me. “You have an NDA signed. They’ll sue your ass.”