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They infest the industry's hottest parties, hang with the town's most rarefied crowds, they're rich, and they often wear lovely suits while trying to siphon millions from celebrity bank accounts. We know what you're thinking: It's another post about agents. Well, you're half-right! Welcome to another fascinating, enormous commission-generating part of the high-level service sector, the world of real estate agents. Peruse in gape-mouthed horror these excerpts from a Details profile of Hollywood's Century-21-but-with-better-blow set:

“The successful real-estate agents now are suave, hip go-getters,” says Gail Hershowitz, an L.A. escrow officer for over 20 years. “There are so many agents out there that if you’re going to be successful, you really have to have that extra bit of charisma.” [...]

“The only celebrity I haven’t met is Princess Diana,” he says. Then, perhaps realizing this might sound offensive, he adds, “But I’m not star-struck—I look at people’s spirit.” [...]

“When it comes to real estate, I have no ego,” he says. “I sold a mobile home last year for $500,000, but I also have a $65 million listing right now.”

In other cities, real-estate agents are seen as a necessary evil—motor-mouthed hucksters who push you to close so they can cash their commission. But in Hollywood, they have made the unlikely leap to equal footing with the famous names they serve.

Ehrlich’s best friend is Jason Bateman, who sees his buddy as nothing less than a modern Hollywood paragon. “Richard floats in the crowd that ends up setting the trends in this town,” says the Arrested Development star. “He organizes the parties that people want to go to, wears the clothes that everybody wants to wear, and lives in the houses that everybody wants to live in.” Jonah Wilson has black-and-white photos on his office wall taken by his close friend Stephen Dorff. Lawyer makes a cameo in a spoofy behind-the-cameras video Mel Gibson threw together. The layers of fame and reflected fame pile up so quickly you wonder if a mere television show could ever do them justice. What narrative conflict could possibly be concocted that would dramatize so ideal an existence? “The tagline for our show,” says one of Westside’s producers, Steve Pearlman, “is, ‘Can you sell the American dream without selling your soul?"

We fully expect for the offices of the storied Wilshire Boulevard Ten-Percent Corridor to empty as yesterday's flavor of the agent vocation rush out to buy colorful blazers, plaster their names and likenesses on signs, and plant them on lawns in Beverly Hills in a desperate rush to get a piece of the new, hotter action.