Residential Buying Agent
Mercedes Van Pelt
Compass Real Estate
Mercedes Van Pelt was born at South Bay Hospital in Redondo Beach — the building that now houses the Beach Cities Health District — and has spent her entire life in the communities she sells. She has lived in nearly every South Bay city at one point or another, and that depth of local knowledge, she’ll tell you, is not something you can fake or replicate.
“Unless you’ve got local boots on the ground,” she said, “buyers get caught up listening to the national news about real estate. They’ll say, ‘Isn’t the market really soft right now? Can’t buyers offer significantly below asking?’ And I have to say — well, if you look at Redondo Beach, the last 10 homes, eight out of 10 sold for $50,000 over list price. El Segundo right now has almost no inventory, and everything is selling for 10 percent over asking.” The difference between what the headlines say and what is actually happening on a specific street in a specific South Bay city, Van Pelt says, is exactly where a great buyer’s agent earns her keep.
Van Pelt came to the business nineteen years ago by way of necessity. Her second child was born with disabilities, and she needed a career flexible enough to block time for physical therapy, speech therapy, and whatever else her daughter needed — while working the hours around those blocks. But real estate was never just a practical choice. She had been watching what property ownership could do for a family her entire life.
Growing up in a lower-middle-class household in West Torrance — seven kids, three bedrooms, one bath — she watched her parents scrape and save to buy that first home, build equity over a decade, pull cash out, and buy an investment property in Lawndale. Then two more. Property by property, they built what she calls “a little rental empire” that changed their lives entirely.
“It really, I don’t say it lightly, absolutely changed their financial future, their trajectory,” Van Pelt said. “And I watched it happen. Real estate changes your financial future — I’ve seen it happen time and time again with my own eyes. Usually three or four years into owning a home, clients will call me and say, ‘Mercedes, now I get it.’ Having that belief at my core, because I lived it, just lands differently with people. I walk the walk.”
What also lands differently is her directness. Van Pelt is not in the business of telling clients what they want to hear. She is in the business of telling them the truth — about a neighborhood that isn’t right for them, a house that doesn’t fit their actual goals, or a deal that isn’t what it appears. She will remind a buyer who has gotten swept up in the process what they told her they wanted in the first place.
“When people get to know me, they know I’m going to tell them the truth whether they really want to hear it or not,” she said. “I’m not in this to make a quick sale and move on. I’m literally welcoming them into my real estate family for the rest of my — or their — life. I attract my people, and my people really find the value in that.”
Buying a home, she says, a very practical endeavor, and an undertaking that is not just for the wealthy. “It’s really meant for everybody, and it makes a tremendous, tremendous difference.” Mercedes Van Pelt has believed that since she was a kid watching her parents prove it.
Mercedes Van Pelt
Compass
