By Shannen Hill
Hundreds of friends, family, and reality television stars came out to celebrate the launch of VH1’s new show “Love & Listings” on Monday, July 29.
The show features a diverse cast of young real estate agents trying to make their way here in Los Angeles. These aren’t your typical real estate agents. They show homes worth millions to their celebrity clientele including Jermain Dupri, Jordin Sparks, Amber Rose, Ray Jay, Bandy Norwood, Laz Alonzo, and more. Along with their celebrity clientele comes some drama as the castmates battle through their love lives, business lives, and personal competition with one another.
Love & Listings features Suge Knight’s son, Jacob Knight, as one of the castmates. In Monday’s episode, he showed a house to Rev Run’s daughter, Vanessa Simmons, and the two connected on having hip hop royalty parents. Knight, however, is still trying to pass his real estate license test so he can’t make official sales without splitting the commission with a licensed agent. To help him pass his test, he introduces his friend, Taylor Schwartz, to the show. Schwartz is the fire cracker of the show. She has her real estate license and passed the test on her first try, but she is also only 19 years old on the show. Schwartz’s castmate, Ajani Scott, brings up her age as an insult almost causing a fight on the first episode.
Scott is new to the city and the other castmates are still trying to get a feel for her. On Monday’s episode, she shows a condo to Sean Kingston and he takes a liking to her outside of real estate. Scott turns to her friend Andrew Clinkscale to get advice on whether she should take the full commission on the Sean Kingston deal or split it with her mentor, Erik Miles. The other cast-members include former NFL player Zac Diles, his love interest Samantha Barretto who works with one of the most prestigious real estate agencies in Beverly Hills, celebrity broker Tai Savet, and real estate tycoons Sarah Scheper and Alexandre Anu.
“We’re all diverse, African American and other, real estate agents closing multi-million dollar deals every day and there’s nothing else on television that looks like or sounds like that. A lot of people tell me that they don’t even think about a diverse image when they think of multi-million-dollar real estate and they should because that’s what we do,” said Andrew Clinkscale. “With this show, there’s intrigue, there’s drama, there’s big money being made and lost, there’s betrayal, there’s a whole bunch of things that make life amazing and television even more amazing. ”
The launch party was full of drinks and laughter. Some rea1ity stars came out to show support. Mister Ray and Masika Kalysha of VH1’s “Love & Hip Hop Hollywood” were at the party, along with Tonya Reneé Banks of Little Women L.A. Model Slick Woods, was also in attendance. The party was catered by Chef Ryan Rondeno of Rodeno Culinary Designs. He cooked macaroni and cheese, short ribs, mashed potatoes, chicken croquette with soy red curry sauce, and grilled shrimp with lemon herb aioli.
As with all reality shows, we are promised drama for the rest of the season. The party, however, went very smoothly and the castmates seemed to get along. This is a young, diverse group with a lot of potential. Even though things can get a little crazy in their personal lives, they keep it professional in their business lives. Love & Listings airs Monday nights at 10 p.m. on VH1. For more information on the show ad cast, visit www.vh1.com.
This article originally appeared in The Los Angeles Sentinel.
