Los Angeles’s Most Colorful Real Estate Agent Loves Cowboy Boots, Rainbow Hair, and Catsuits

Forget the sleek agents on Selling Sunset in their body-skimming bandage dresses and teetering red-bottomed heels—Nicole Reber looks different than your typical Los Angeles real estate agent. She sells those expansive Los Feliz and Beverly Hills properties decked out in plaid Charles Jeffrey suits (with a matching beret!), print-forward shift dresses by Richard Quinn, or catsuits by Maisie Wilen. More often than not, she wears cowboy boots, sometimes customized by her boyfriend, the equally colorful hair stylist Daniel Moon.

In addition to her already vibrant outfits, she regularly changes her hair color. Her rainbow hair is by Moon. “I always tell my clients that they’ll always remember me because of the rainbow hair. When I’m writing an offer, I’ll be, ‘Hey, it’s Nicole, the girl with the rainbow hair,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, I remember you.’ All of a sudden, I’ve opened up a window for rapport.”

Her career path was also focused on fashion and art. While attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York she took internships at Nylon and Vogue in the fashion closet, an experience that helped her with real estate. (“Nobody likes the person who asks a question before troubleshooting,” she says.) When she graduated, she worked at Gilt Group and Movie Pass at AOL. When she left that job, she backpacked in Europe, returned to New York, and started working in retail at Burberry. “Having that job, I got to collect a luxury brand because they had an employee sample sale,” she says. “I kind of got a taste for having a wardrobe that was all a luxury brand.” At the time, she also ran an art magazine, Packet, lived on a budget, and slept on an air mattress. (“I think I was the air mattress that did me in!” says Reber, joking about her eventual decision to move.) When her mother had a health scare, Reber decided to move back to Los Angeles, and closed the magazine in 2016, selling its archive to the Museum of Modern Art. Her next career move was to follow in her mother's footsteps in real estate. “I did have to kill the old me to make the new me,” she says.

Though Reber’s look is not traditional for real estate agents, she considers it an asset when selling homes. Her clothes are a conversation-starter, which can lead to a conversation that leads to a deal. “If they start talking with me, then I’ll get them to want to work with me. If I get them to want to work with me, I get my clients the houses they want,” she says. “So I use clothes and style as I have a weapon to help my clients.” Never has a strategy looked so good.