Randall Fox was the attorney for my family's trustee. He and the trustee tried to sell our family's property in Montecito for $2.5 million, way under market value. It was a perfect property, very isolated, with a fruit orchard, and part of a larger forest (see photos below). They worked with a real estate agent who gave my family a list of properties he had sold for under $5 million. I researched this list, and found the real estate agent consistently sold below the list price, and only one listing of his sold above the asking price, by around $5000. This real estate agent devalued the property, described it in horrible terms, while other real estate agents loved it, raved about it in their proposals, and gave a value of around $4 million. I had to hire an attorney at great expense to get a decent sales price. This cost me somewhere around $100,000. I had to borrow on my property up north. I kept emailing the trustee to fix the roof. In court, Mr. Fox said he never heard of a roof leak problem (his words are on the transcript). The trustee stood by and smiled. My attorney mentioned that I had notified the trustee about the roof leaking, and that my letters were included in the petition we filed. Thanks to my attorney, the judge insisted the roof be repaired, and it was still like pulling teeth to get it protected just before the big rainstorm (in early 2023) that dumped about 11 inches in one day, and would have destroyed the house. The trustee and Mr. Fox seemed to regard the house as a teardown, and on that matter there's a disagreement with my attorney in the court transcript. Thankfully, the house wasn't torn down when it was finally sold--the new owners remodeled it. After many months of the attorneys going back and forth, wasting the estate, the trustee's real estate agent resigned, after we brought up in court the matter of a possible illegal referral fee to the trustee, who is also a broker. Then Mr. Fox and the trustee brought in another real estate agent who valued the property much closer to what it was worth. She did a satisfactory job. Thankfully, we got a somewhat decent price for the property, about $3,736 million, thanks to the efforts of my attorney and myself. We would have gotten a bigger price if the trustee and Mr. Fox had sold the property earlier when the market was much better. This nightmare happened after my mom passed away. I took care of her. It seems to me they probably were planning to tear the wonderful 1970's home, and put in a mansion. The neighbor's mansion next door was valued at over $8 million, and our actual property was nicer and more secluded. A developer who was renting our garage wanted to tear down our house and build a mansion and make my family money, but I told him it was out of my hands. I believe the trustee and attorney were taking advantage of family disunity and dysfunction to make money for themselves. I don't believe my siblings were able to understand what was going on. Thanks to me, my siblings got hundreds of thousands of dollars more. Still, in my opinion, the estate was significantly depleted by the trustee and Mr. Fox.
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