Sitting at a cluttered desk in a temporary shoebox-sized office in Pasadena, California, real estate agent Teresa Fuller picks up her cell phone.
“This is Teresa Fuller returning your call — what can I do for you?”
The stream of calls started around noon, and nearly every conversation was interrupted by another line ringing.
One caller, a mom of young children and renter in Altadena, California, is nervous to return to the town with her family after last month’s fires. Now, she hopes to buy her first house elsewhere in Los Angeles.
Another caller’s Altadena property has been destroyed. She doesn't have enough insurance coverage to pay for the cost of rebuilding and worries about being overwhelmed by trauma to live on her property again. She said she wants to sell her lot but is scared of backlash from her community.
The third caller is a landlord who owns and rents out two single-family houses in Altadena. After the fires, she wants to sell.
Fuller is more than a sympathetic ear. She is a victim of the fire as well; having seen it consume her office and damage her home. Working through the chaos is her new norm since a spate of wildfires tore through Los Angeles last month. Together, the two largest of those blazes charred roughly 40,000 acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
One of those fires, the Eaton Fire, destroyed more than 5,500 single-family houses valued at roughly $7.8 billion, exclusive data from Homes.com showed. The brunt of that damage, about $7.5 billion worth, was concentrated in Altadena. For Fuller, one of Altadena’s top-producing real estate agents, that’s meant dozens of existing and new clients who need help finding, or selling, properties.
That Wednesday, each call Fuller took gave way to a personal connection laden with apologetic tears and thank yous. They started with a muddled explanation from the caller about their wants and needs before transitioning to a personal story and recommendation from Fuller.
The professional turmoil is in addition to the personal upheaval Fuller is managing.
The 64-year-old's Altadena house since 2002, where she raised both of her daughters, is uninhabitable. Though it’s still standing, it’s surrounded by devastation and filled with the smell of smoke, toxic air and chemicals from the blazes that have contaminated its contents. At the same time, all that’s left of Fuller’s office building in West Altadena is a pit of rubble with some melted metal poking out.
“I have fire brain,” she said in between bites of her lunch as she furiously scribbled notes before making her next call.
Hotel living
Before January 7, Fuller had her routine down pat. She started her days in her four-bedroom, four-bathroom house with her dog Findlay. She’d walk to her downtown office building, passing through idyllic streets lined with towering Deodar trees and kitschy houses. Her time was split between her two office spaces in the commercial Mariposa Village.
“All my little eggs were in the West Altadena basket,” she said
Now, Fuller’s routine is all but non-existent. She starts her day in downtown L.A. in a cramped hotel room about 11 miles from her makeshift office in Pasadena. Her dog Findlay is boarded because, she explained, he was born blind, and it would be confusing for him to orient himself with another new space.
The hotel room includes a closet with a few dry-cleaned items wrapped in plastic. An open suitcase lies on the floor beneath a pile of clothes and a basketball. A plastic bag filled with personal protective equipment is tossed next to the door.
When she left her house in January, Fuller grabbed only the essentials. She had no idea how long she would be displaced. Since then, she’s had to purchase new, well, everything. Among the belongings she remembered to take from her house, though, is a framed photo of her daughter as a child that now sits on her bedside table.
Without a washer or dryer of her own, Fuller said she’s been relying on the dry cleaner or friends who will do her laundry for her. Later that day, she’d get a knotted plastic grocery bag filled with clean clothes delivered to her desk.
“They’re all new,” she said of the clothes in her room as she rummaged through her belongings for her laptop.
A destroyed town
When Fuller makes the rare trip back up to Altadena, it’s only with personal protective equipment. If she’s just going to be in her car, she’ll wear a hefty gray mask with pink respirators. But if she plans on spending more than a few minutes outside, she’ll don a full, white biohazard suit.
It’s a discombobulating scene, even as a 20-plus-year resident of the town.
“I can’t recognize the landmarks, so it’s hard to figure out where we are,” she said from behind the wheel of her Volvo, her voice muffled by her mask. “It’s very disorienting for me to be up here because I knew this town like the back of my hand.”
The tree-lined streets crowded with a combination of Spanish-style houses and colorful bungalows that once made up Fuller’s walk to work now resemble a warzone. On some streets, all that remains are piles of rubble dotted with towering fireplaces and chimneys. On the streets where houses are still standing, many properties still bear evidence of the holiday season, with lingering Christmas trees and strings of lights a reminder of how time has frozen.
Charred cars in driveways and on the streets are spray-painted to demarcate whether they are electric vehicles. On some properties, workers are doing cleanup. Others are marked by a stake with a sign indicating they have been cleared. Still others have a red flier with the word “UNSAFE” in big, black letters.
The cleanup process in Altadena is unfolding in two phases, according to Los Angeles County. Phase one, "Hazardous Material Removal," began on Jan. 28. During the first round of cleanup, residents were automatically enrolled and the Environmental Protection Agency cleared hazardous materials — such as batteries, paints, pesticides and more — from properties.
Once the EPA completes an individual neighborhood and residents complete forms to opt in to phase two, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will clear bigger debris, like chimneys and ash. As of Monday, one residential property had officially completed both phase one and two of cleanup.
"This first completed property represents progress," said Maj. Gen. Jason Kelly, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for Civil and Emergency Operations, in a statement. "Not just in debris removal, but in restoring hope for families who lost so much."
Even as clean-up is progressing, each visit to Altadena since January takes a toll on Fuller. Not only is it where she spent decades and raised her children, but she said she feels a connection to each home sale she’s been involved in.
“These houses have names to me,” she said, pulling out of a neighborhood near the top of the town. “That is the last time I’m going to do that for a long time. It’s very depressing.”
Professional responsibility
More than just clients, Fuller also bears the weight of running a business that includes her team of 25 agents and administrators.
What is normally a busy role has only gotten more hectic since last month’s fires. Half of Fuller’s team is displaced from their homes and two agents lost their residences completely.
It’s an added layer of responsibility. In between calls with clients, Fuller interacts with her agents, either in her office or over the phone. In fact, one of Fuller’s calls that Wednesday afternoon was a conversation with one of the agents whose house burned down.
Six weeks prior, as she rushed to evacuate her family from their home, the agent forgot to grab an extra pair of shoes. “I’m buying you a pair of boots,” Fuller commanded through the phone. “Go online a pick a pair you like, or I’m picking them for you.”
At the same time, Fuller is still managing her day-to-day duties: Scheduling social media posts, posting listings outside of Altadena, meeting with prospective clients, attending team meetings, hosting open houses and coaching her agents.
The hubbub of it all has made things confusing at times, like on Wednesday, when Fuller went an entire day without her computer.
“Without having a house and a routine, I’m constantly misplacing my laptop,” she said. “It’s a friggin joy.” (Fuller later found her laptop wedged into a bag in her trunk.)
Or on Thursday morning, when she woke up and fired off a series of stress-filled texts to her operations manager asking why he hadn’t prepared her Friday schedule. She soon realized: It was Thursday, not Friday.
Ultimately, it’s a balancing act that has required “having feet in a hundred different worlds,” she said.
New challenges
As the dust settles, Fuller has found herself facing a new challenge as she’s started listing fire-damaged lots in Altadena.
Already, some Altadenans have objected to residents listing their land. “Altadena is Not for Sale” signs are scattered throughout the town, and local leaders have issued warnings about outside investors looking for cheap buys.
Part of that objection is based on history. It’s not uncommon for land listings and sales to increase after a natural disaster like the Eaton Fire. And in some cases, that has resulted in outside investors lowballing homeowners or disrupting existing communities.
Take the Hawaiian island of Maui, for example. In 2023, after wildfires destroyed thousands of acres along the coast, residents said they received cold calls from investors and real estate agents looking to buy damaged property for cheap. Not only were Hawaiians disgruntled by the offers but many cited worries about their community if outsiders bought up land.
While Fuller acknowledged that she’d received “a couple of crude emails and calls” from buyers soliciting cheap land, for the most part, she’s been in contact with residents for whom rebuilding is just not a viable option.
“Some people just can’t weather that storm,” she said. “I’m seeing people, especially people with infants, they’re just like, ‘Wow, we just can have the first four years of this child’s life look like this.’”
When Fuller listed her first Altadena lot on Feb. 14, she was apprehensive but confident. She took a different approach than some other agents, she said, including photos and video of the property and highlighting the value of living in Altadena.
“They’re either going to kill me or love me,” she said of her community. “But I’m OK with that because it’s authentic.”
By Feb. 23, she’d received nine offers on the property, many from individual buyers who want to rebuild a home for themselves and family, and a slew of positive feedback on social media, she said. Two days later, she'd opened escrow with a buyer who wants to rebuild. The transaction is expected to close just about two weeks after the property was listed.
“I’m listing additional lots now,” she said in a text message after the Feb.14 listing went live. “The volume of calls is crazy.”
Next up is figuring out her own properties. Her house is a standing structure, but it’s unlivable, so Fuller is dealing with her insurance now. At the same time, she’s managing her office building, or what's left of it, and filling out small business loan applications, a task that is sometimes punted to Sunday afternoons when she has a break in her schedule.
“I am a 64-year-old woman who had planned maybe to work much less at 72, and my fear is I'll be an older gal pressured still to earn a living selling real estate into my 80s,” she said. "But I'm a strong presence in Pasadena and the entire Eastside. If there are not as many homes to sell in Altadena, I'll pivot."
All told, Fuller is hopeful for the future of her community, and she’s feeling positive about her role in Altadena as the town moves toward recovery and rebuilding.
“Altadena’s culture is not for sale, but pieces of Altadena will be, and we have to figure out how to let people do what they need to do and still keep our shape and our vibe,” she said. “And we will. I really believe that.”