Rising Stars: Meet Brooke Renee of Mid City, Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brooke Renee.

Hi Brooke, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My journey has always been guided by a single principle: “Life is Service” — a phrase coined by E.M. Statler that has shaped everything I’ve done.

I began at the intersection of two world-class institutions, studying in the joint degree program at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration and the Culinary Institute of America. I went in thinking I wanted to be a chef — and came out with a much deeper passion for hospitality and the people it serves.

That curiosity led me into wine and spirits, where I spent over a decade building expertise across some of the most celebrated regions and brands in the world — from Bordeaux and Burgundy to Robert Mondavi, Penfolds, Pernod Ricard, and Bacardi — while working in Michelin-starred and James Beard-recognized restaurants in New York, California, and Texas. Along the way, I earned certifications from the Court of Master Sommeliers, WSET, and expanded into tea, cannabis, and coffee — always chasing a fuller understanding of hospitality and craft.

From there, I took one of the most ambitious leaps of my career: building Green Bonnet Co., a fully vertical cannabis company on 30 acres in Southern Oklahoma. We built our Dutch-style greenhouses from the ground up — literally from dirt to finish — and developed a sustainably-minded operation spanning cultivation, extraction, and retail facility design, development, and management. Green Bonnet became a true hospitality house, with house brands Green Bonnet Pharms, Green Bonnet Extracts, and Green Bonnet Pharmhouse. Our ethos: high as the mountains, grown on the prairie.

That farm also became the foundation for my next chapter in hospitality. I established a bed and breakfast and glamping experience on the property, became a highly rated Airbnb Superhost for nearly a decade, and that work caught enough attention that I was personally invited to Airbnb’s Co-Host Beta Program in Los Angeles in 2024. This transformed into managing more than 20 homes, from Malibu to Long Beach.

Today, I’m a licensed REALTOR® in California (DRE 02270991) with Coast & Canyon, a full-service real estate group serving Southern California. I help clients buy, sell, rent, and manage properties, focused on investment and vacation rentals — bringing the same hospitality-first mindset to every transaction. Whether someone is searching for their dream home or building an investment portfolio, I’m here to make the process seamless, personal, and stress-free.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Anything but smooth — and I think that’s actually what makes me good at what I do.

Early in my wine and spirits career, I was navigating the volatility of European markets at a time when the euro was deeply uncertain. Brand ambassadorship, for all its glamour, is an inherently unstable path — contracts shift, budgets get cut, and you learn quickly to build your value from the inside out rather than rely on the stability of any one role or relationship.

I moved to Dallas for love, and stayed — longer than I should have — because of love. What became a deeply abusive business partnership made an already complicated personal chapter nearly impossible to navigate. That experience shaped me profoundly, and not without a lot of pain.

Building Green Bonnet Co. was the hardest professional undertaking of my life. A partner who refused to acknowledge the partnership’s existence. Three contractors to get through before we could complete the build. Every step forward felt like it had to be fought for.

And underneath all of it ran a quieter, more personal struggle: work-life balance. Having lived with so much uncertainty for so long, I became terrified of losing whatever stability I managed to find. So I worked. Constantly. I skipped vacations, skipped meals, skipped holidays, skipped sleep. I took calls at all hours and missed moments I’ll never get back. The business always came first — not because I wanted it to, but because I was operating from a place of fear. When you’ve had the rug pulled out enough times, stillness starts to feel like a threat.

Relocating to Los Angeles may have been the most vulnerable moment of all. I arrived with less than $10,000, no plan, and no clear path forward. My mom was my biggest supporter — and in many ways, my lifeline. There were stretches where I genuinely didn’t know if I’d make it financially.

And then there was Sherlock. My best friend and dog of 13 years. While I found my footing in LA, my mom took him in for a year. We got almost exactly one year together after I settled — before we had to say goodbye to cancer last August. He had lived everywhere with me: New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Texas, Oklahoma, New Orleans, New Hampshire, and all over California. He was my constant through every chapter. The first iteration of my real estate company was called Sherlock’s Homes in his honor.

I carry all of it — the instability, the heartbreak, the rebuilding, and the hard-won understanding of what it means to actually rest — into the work I do today. When I tell clients I’ll be there through every step, I mean it in a way that only comes from having had to find your own way through.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
At the core of everything I do is hospitality — and real estate, for me, is just the most recent and most natural expression of that.

Los Angeles has genuinely rounded me out. It’s where the hospitality background, the farm-to-guest operations experience, and the people skills all clicked into a fuller picture. And a huge part of that is the village I’ve built here. My business partners are some of my closest friends — people who came into my life through the work itself. The partnership was built on honesty, vulnerability, and radical transparency, and that has shaped how I operate in every relationship, professional or otherwise. (If you haven’t read Principles by Ray Dalio, I cannot recommend it enough.)

Beyond real estate, I manage the Coca-Cola portfolio across Los Angeles — working with restaurants and events throughout the city, with a lot of exciting activations ahead for the World Cup. I’m also a scholar in the LSAC Plus Guided Program and will be applying to law school in the fall.

What sets me apart, I think, is that I’m not just a transactional person. I’m a storyteller. I invest deeply in self-development — through therapy, yoga and breathwork, oil painting, and shadow work that I take seriously as a practice, not a trend. Self-compassion has been the hardest and most important skill I’ve had to learn, and I’m still learning it every day.

I’m an avid surfer. I’m writing a book about the new era of Bay Street in Santa Monica and the extraordinary women — my tribe — who have shaped this chapter of my life. I’m completing my yoga instructor certification. I learned to skateboard through Babes and Boards, an organization I’m now deeply involved with — a sisterhood in its own right.

All of it, every thread, comes back to the same thing: storytelling. The belief that the more openly we share with one another, the more compassion we can build in the world. I hope that someone hears my story and feels a little more permission to pursue theirs — at all costs. Life is too short for anything less.

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
The variety and the weather — without question.

And honestly, LA has always felt like home. I grew up in New York, but my roots here run deep — my mom is bicoastal for work in entertainment, my father has lived here since 1991, and my uncle since the late ’90s. Coming here wasn’t starting over; in a lot of ways, it was finally arriving.

This year I did what I’d call the LA trifecta: skateboarded, snowboarded, and surfed all in the same day — and finished it with a yoga class at my favorite studio in Venice, Open. There is genuinely nowhere else on earth where that day is possible, and I don’t take it for granted for a single second. Add in the farmers markets — which are some of the best in the country — and the sheer range of food, culture, community, and landscape packed into one city, and it’s hard not to fall in love with it.

The hardest part? The transactional energy that runs through a lot of interactions here. The casual “let’s get together” that both people know will never happen. I come from a place of meaning what I say — if I suggest getting together, I mean it, and I’ll follow through. That culture of surface-level connection can feel lonely in a city this big, and I think it’s why building a genuine village here has meant so much to me.

And yes — the traffic. There’s no spin to put on it. It’s the tax you pay for living in paradise.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.livecoastandcanyon.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/tresch1c
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookereneegerstein/
• Other: https://instagram.com/livecoastandcanyon