When Lauren Shortt started at The Oppenheim Group’s nascent Newport Beach office, she knew the deal. She had seen Selling Sunset. “I said, ‘I’m going to be eaten alive if I don’t have at least one friend,’ ” Lauren recalls to Tudum days before the premiere of her Sunset spin-off, Selling the OC. Plus, having a pal in a business as relationship-obsessed as real estate would be a win, no matter what. So she turned to Brandi Marshall, who had also just entered the possibly shark-infested waters of the new O Group office.
“I immediately just felt this authenticity from her. It drew me to her,” Lauren says. Brandi was happy to have a new friend in an environment that had the capability to be “dog-eat-dog.” “Lauren was like, ‘I was just looking for who’s real in this room.’ Then we just hit it off from there,” Brandi tells Tudum. Quickly, the pair were door knocking together, and Lauren was helping OC newcomer Brandi “acclimate” to the area.
It’s this “soul sister” connection that led to one of the most revealing scenes in Selling the OC — one that adds real-world stakes to the glamorous squabbles and relative privilege seen on reality TV.
In Episode 6, Brandi reveals her mother, who lives in Arkansas, is battling cancer. (We eventually learn she has a brain tumor.) Brandi now reveals she initially didn’t tell production about her family health crisis, but hiding the painful truth from cameras became “nearly impossible.” “I just laugh when I start getting dragged into drama because I’m like, ‘Y’all don’t have a clue. I don’t care about this,’ ” Brandi says in the episode to a supportive Lauren.
Lauren, who’s been sober for more than 10 years, will admit that she actually likes to hear the gossip. “But as far as actually being a part of it... I’m not here for it,” she says. “In the program of recovery I work, it’s important for me, in order to maintain my sobriety, to be completely honest at all times and to be loving and kind.” The old Lauren would have been “up in the mix,” but this Lauren has “worked way too hard” on her recovery to embrace “petty” problems.
Instead, in Episode 6, Lauren and Brandi bond over growing up in the school of hard knocks, and Lauren says she came from nothing. “No one’s going to hand us a $20 million listing. We have to go fight for it,” she continues.
Brandi is a Black woman trying to bring her “true, authentic self” to work every day after growing up in San Bernardino, California. Lauren comes from a Filipino and Mexican background (along with “a bunch of different white stuff”) and describes herself and her family as the United Nations. Either way, as Brandi says, they know their prospective rich, white clientele in Orange County doesn’t see someone who “looks like their daughter” when either agent knocks on their door for a real estate call. Brandi’s first listing was a $200,000 property in Victorville — not a multimillion dollar beachside mansion owned by a family friend like some of her OC real estate peers have.
“It overwhelms us sometimes when we go to meetings and it’s just so easy for some people. Because that was not my experience at all coming here. It was doors slamming in my face, [people] hanging up and getting cussed out,” Brandi, who moved to the OC a year ago, says. “All my life, I’ve realized that I’ve had to work twice as hard as other races, just because if I mess up, I might not get a chance of redemption. This is just the world we live in right now. You have to be twice as smart, twice as good.”
Brandi is comfortable sharing her feelings since she’s had a lot of time to discuss these hard subjects with Lauren. They agree that nothing has been handed to either woman.
“We talk about just how much more difficult things are for people who’ve had adversity in their lives and who are not organically from Orange County — whose parents are in the business or whose family buys and sells real estate here,” Lauren says. Neither Brandi nor Lauren is from the OC. Lauren was raised in Hawthorne, south of LA, and used her uncle’s address to go to school in the more “affluent” neighborhood of Palos Verdes. She still remembers crying to her father about being hungry.
“There’s some people here who have never had that experience,” Lauren says. “And I don’t want that experience for my future children. So for me, I will do whatever it takes to succeed.”
Brandi, a wife and mother of two, is equally determined to thrive in the OC for her own family. As she says in Episode 6, “[I’m] hustling to give my children the future most Black little kids don’t get.” That’s why Brandi and her retired basketball player husband, Sean Marshall, moved to the OC in the first place. After all, Brandi is meeting potential clients who plan to pass down $5 million houses to their “third nephew.”
“Sean and I were strategically like, ‘We have to be the one to break the cycle, to show our children different ways to manage their money, different ways to grow generational wealth,’ ” she explains. “I want to set up the futures of my children’s children.”
Luckily, both Brandi and Lauren (who just married Andrew Shortt in June) are well on their way. “Don’t let me make it seem like it’s just terrible. Like I’m just getting hosed down. It’s not that bad,” Brandi says with a laugh. “It’s just proving yourself. Showing that you have the credentials — that I’m just as capable, and even more qualified, than some of the people that [clients] have hired previously to sell their house.”
Lauren agrees. “I do also think that in any location, any city, any county — there are accepting, loving human beings,” she says. “We just have to find our people, because the other people who may not think that way, guess what? I don’t want to work with you anyway.”
