'Selling Sunset:' 70+ facts about 7 seasons of stilettos, sales, shade

Go behind the scenes with Inman’s Dani Vanderboegh to get the answers to all your burning questions on the newest releases. Stay tuned to Real Tea, the intersection of real estate and reality TV.

This post was last updated Nov. 2, 2023.

Selling Sunset‘s Season 7 dropped on Netflix today, and the new season isn’t short on drama, beefs and new offices. While last season saw cast shakeups, this season dawns the era of the $1.5-ish million LA office, with more seats for more competition.

Here’s everything you never knew you needed to know about the series, its cast and The Oppenheim Group.

Bre Tiesi

• Born and raised in Calabasas, California, Tiesi has grown up in “the industry.” After falling into modeling at a young age, she’s also been in TV (WAGS, Love & Listings, Wild ’n Out) and film. 
• Tiesi has some high-profile relationships. In 2018, Tiesi married football player Johnny Manziel, but they separated in 2019.
• Tiesi describes her relationship with Nick Cannon as an open relationship. You might know Nick Cannon from Wild ‘n Out, Drumline, as the host of various competitions on TV, for his ex Mariah Carey, and for having 12 children with six different women since 2011. He and Tiesi had a son, Legendary Love, in July 2022.
• At age 31, she decided to pursue a longer-term career and switched gears to real estate. She previously held her license with Keller Williams Beverly Hills, but didn’t actively use her license, she told Inman. She has been with The O Group for about a year and has two seasons of Selling Sunset under her belt. 
• Tiesi told Inman that she’d actually been approached to be on the show in an earlier season, but the timing wasn’t right. 
• This proud Mompreneur also has her own YouTube channel and a 12-week fitness program that is available on her website, Body by Bre.
• In July 2023, Tiesi hit her million-follower mark on Instagram.

 

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Inman sat down with Bre Tiesi earlier this year to get the Real Tea on her first season, who she is (and still isn’t) friends with, and what she’d say to her haters. Read the full article here.

Nicole Young

• The other newbie is fresh to the cast, not the brokerage. In fact, Nicole Young has been with The Oppenheim Group since 2014, according to her LinkedIn. 
• “I have $100 million in sales and counting. If someone were to get in the way of that, there’s going to be an issue,” Young says. (And by the looks of it, Chrishelle Strause and Young have some beef pretty early on.)
• She dated Jason Oppenheim. Cast member Amanza Smith dished to Us Weekly in August 2022, “[Nicole] dated Jason [10 years ago] — she was the first.” Young has been married to Brandon Young since 2017.
• But there’s no bad blood between her and one of Jason Oppenheim’s other in-office exes, Mary Fitzgerald. In fact, in the Season 2 finale, Young performed the wedding ceremony between Fitzgerald and Romain Bonnet.

 

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Fun fact: Selling Sunset beat out Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta, Summer House and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, to win MTV’s coveted golden popcorn for Best Docu-Reality Series at the 2022 MTV Movie & TV Awards.

Chrishell Stause

• Before getting her real estate license in 2016, Chrishell Stause was an actress in TV shows like All My Children, Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless.
• Once upon a time, Stause was engaged to Glee’s Matthew Morrison — the pair dated in 2006, and after about a year, made their promises to tie the knot. By December 2007, however, the pair split. Morrison later told Cosmopolitan in his heart, it “wasn’t right.”
• For two years, Stause was also married to This Is Us star Justin Hartley who, according to Stause (and as chronicled on the show in Season 3, Episode 6), let her know about their divorce via text message. “I found out because he texted me that we were filed. Forty-five minutes later, the world knew,” Stause said about the news-breaking TMZ article.
• In Season 5 of Selling Sunset, Stause and Jason Oppenheim started (and finished) dating. Ultimately, Jason Oppenheim doesn’t want to have kids, which was a deal-breaker for Stause.
• The reunion was full of tears on both ends of the relationship. But also, Stause announced that she’d found a new love. Non-binary Australian musician G Flip and Stause were settling into a new relationship, after meeting while filming a music video in which Stause acted.
• The week before Season 6 launched, Stause and G Flip married in a small ceremony in Las Vegas. Stause’s pearlescent white gown by Gemeli Power fell to the floor, and she carried a bouquet of white roses, while G Flip wore a suit by Melbourne designer E Nolan.

 

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Amanza Smith

• Amanza Smith goes way back with the twins. She introduced Mary Fitzgerald to Jason Oppenheim. 
• Smith was married to NFL player Ralph Brown from 2010 to 2012. In 2019, her ex, Brown, dropped the kids off for school one day “and never came back,” according to Smith. 
• As a single mother, Smith cleaned houses, walked dogs, worked retail and babysat to make ends meet.
• In December 2022, Smith went public via an interview with Mr. Warburton Magazine about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child from her stepfather and step-grandfather.
• Health issues show up on Season 6. During a conversation with Mary Fitzgerald, Smith reveals that she’s undergoing further testing after her doctors noticed something during a scan of her uterus. “There’s a wide array of things that it could be, and then the one thing that we pray and hope that it’s not,” Smith told Fitzgerald.

 

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Fun fact: Season 5 had the only reunion, thus far. But it looks like Season 7 will also get a chance to fill the audience in on what’s going on since the series wrapped and group therapize on the season’s drama with host Queer Eye‘s Tan France. “Watch the REUNION EVENT you won’t want to miss — streaming WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15 at 6pm PT/9pm ET only on Netflix!” reads Amanza Smith’s Instagram.

Chelsea Lazkani

• Chelsea Lazkani had beef with the new girl as soon as she found out Bre Tiesi has an “open relationship” and a child with Nick Cannon. In the Season 6 trailer, we hear last season’s newcomer Lazkani say, “As a Christian, I find Bre’s relationship rather off-putting.” To which Tiesi later claps back, “Who I have children with is my business. I don’t need a judge and jury.” This beef doesn’t seem to go away in the new season (not really).
• Lazkani is originally from Britain and graduated from the University of Buckingham with a degree in economics.
• Before joining The Oppenheim Group, Lazkani had a nearly three-year stint with Rodeo Realty.
• Lazkani also has a master’s degree in international oil and gas management from the University of Dundee in Scotland.
• Dirty 30 is Lazkani’s vibe in Season 7, and she looked stunning on this milestone birthday.

 

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Emma Hernan

• Thirty-one-year-old Emma Hernan joined the Selling Sunset cast in Season 4. 
• According to the Season 5 storyline, Christine Quinn called one of Hernan’s clients and offered him $5,000 not to work with Hernan. This was one part of the fray in Quinn’s relationship with The Oppenheim Group. 
• But that wasn’t their first beef.
• Hernan and Quinn had big-time beef over Quinn’s ex cheating with Hernan, which Hernan says is untrue because she didn’t start seeing Quinn’s ex until their relationship was over.
• In Season 5, Hernan and property developer Micah McDonald have a steamy hot tub date after closing the deal (or before?), with promises of more deals in the future. 
• Hernan is a great swimmer. In Season 5, Hernan says she took up swimming at age six and was so good at the backstroke, she qualified for the Olympics, though some people doubt these claims due to the lack of receipts. But she gave it all up at 16 to become a model, PopBuzz reports. 
• Hernan is the CEO of a plant-based food company, Emma Leigh & Co., known for its empanadas.

 

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Mary Fitzgerald

• Mary Fitzgerald stepped into more of a managerial role at The O Group during Season 5, and in Season 6, Jason Oppenheim actually stepped away from the office for the first time, leaving Fitzgerald to further take charge. She’s seemingly always caught between castmates in every season. 
• Husband Romain Bonnet used to be a pastry chef.
• Fitzgerald has a 26-year-old son named Austin Babbitt from one of her previous relationships. That makes him just three years younger than Bonnet.
• Fitzgerald recently opened up about a septic miscarriage she suffered following her and Romain’s honeymoon in Bali. “The reason why I’m speaking out now is because I do realize how common this is and how many people go through this, and it is not easy,” the star said on Instagram. “I needed a minute because there are so many eyes on me and everyone judges and everything, and it has been rough to say the least, but there’s still hope.”

 

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Jason and Brett Oppenheim

• Jason Oppenheim practiced law for about four years before getting into real estate, working at O’Melveny & Meyers LLP in Los Angeles and representing clients in major cases like the Enron Corp. criminal trial of the early 2000s.
• Brett was a lawyer, too. “As a former securities litigation attorney at two of the world’s largest international law firms, Skadden, Arps LLP and Latham & Watkins LLP, Brett spent years defending a consortium of investment banks against liability in excess of ten billion dollars stemming from the MCI/WorldCom corporate bond default,” Brett Oppenheim’s bio reads.
• Jason has dated several of his agents, including Nicole Young, Mary Fitzgerald and Chrishell Stause. He also has been linked to several models, including former girlfriend, German model and brand influencer Marie-Lou Nurk, who cameos on Seasons 6 and 7. The couple split in May.

 

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“There’s no fixing Compass. It’s unfixable,” Jason Oppenheim told Inman’s Real Tea back in November 2022. Read the full interview here.

Heather Rae El Moussa and Tarek El Moussa 

• After getting engaged in 2020, Heather Rae married HGTV’s Tarek El Moussa at the end of Season 5 in a gorgeous on-screen wedding ceremony. 
• You probably know Tarek El Moussa from the many HGTV shows he’s done, including Flipping 101 and Flip or Flop or his cameos on Selling Sunset or the pages of Inman. He used to contribute in 2015. 
• On their wedding day, Rae added the El Moussa to her name and legally became step-mom to Tarek’s son, Brayden James, age 7, and daughter Taylor Reese, age 12, a role Rae fiercely protected well before the wedding. Tarek’s children are with ex-wife and fellow HGTV star Christina Meursinge Hall (née Haack, formerly El Moussa and Anstead), of Flip or Flop, Christina on the Coast, Christina in the Country fame. 
• In 2020, Tarek El Moussa launched The Agentcy, a team with eXp Realty based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which snapped up a 50-agent indie shortly after launch.
• The Flipping El Moussas dropped in 2023. Similar to Tarek and Christina’s show in format, Heather Rae and Tarek El Moussa buy and flip homes for profit (but the dynamic is cuter, more newlywed). 
• After fertility issues, a journey that the couple chronicled publicly in the press and on their social media, they welcomed baby Tristan in February. Season 6 chronicles the end of Heather Rae’s pregnancy. The couple told ET in May that there are still embryos on ice, so a sibling for Tristan isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
• Heather Rae El Moussa returns for season 7, but only after her maternity leave. Considering that filming lasts about 12 weeks, in March, Heather Rae El Moussa told E! News that she had initially not started filming because she was on maternity leave, but was ready to get back to work and hadn’t heard anything about filming.
• Heather Rae El Moussa was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease, which she revealed in October 2023. In an interview with People, Tarek’s previous wife, Christina Hall, also revealed her own Hashimoto’s diagnosis.

 

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Former cast member fun facts

They might be gone, but they’re definitely not forgotten. In the world of real estate, you never know when someone might boomerang back to a brokerage (like Vanessa Villela to The Agency). Plus, we wouldn’t be where we are today without their foundation, fashion and fights.

Maya Vander

• In May 2022, Maya Vander launched her own team, the Maya Vander Group, and in June, she announced her move to Compass. 
• After some fertility issues, including stillbirth and several miscarriages, in May 2023, Vander and her husband, Dave Miller, welcomed daughter Emma Reign to their family of four.
• Although no longer on Selling Sunset or at the brokerage, Vander and The O Group are on good terms.

 

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Christine Quinn

• After some controversy over whether Christine Quinn offered another agent’s client $5,000 not to work with them, casually “joking” about various castmates sleeping with the boss (although it’s true that Jason Oppenheim has publicly dated several officemates) for listings and other questionable behavior, Jason Oppenheim confirmed at the reunion that there wasn’t ‘a place for her’ at the brokerage anymore. Quinn’s absence from the reunion was heard by all. 
• One of the reasons Christine decided to exit the show was to focus on her new work with her husband Christian Dumontet on the crypto real estate business RealOpen, she told Just Jared. 
• Quinn’s book, How to Be a Boss B*tch, was released earlier this year in May. The part how-to, part manifesto aims to help women “own their power” in business and relationships to live more authentically.

 

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Vanessa Villela

• Vanessa Villela was the somewhat struggling newbie on Seasons 4 and 5 of Selling Sunset, but the Mexican-American actress started her professional career in Mexico City in roles on TV shows, including El Señor de los Cielos and Una Maid en Manhattan.
• Villela met her now-husband Nick Hardy (who’s a photographer and creative director of Lascivious, a UK-based lingerie brand) on Raya during COVID-19. 
• The couple had a “magical and cinematic” wedding at San Diego’s Fairmont Grand Del Mar on Sept. 3, 2022, People reported. 
• Villela started her real estate career in 2020 at The Agency and was with the brokerage for about a year before moving on to The Oppenheim Group and Selling Sunset.
• On May 16 (yes, the week her former show launches), The Agency announced Villela is back at The Agency. And with a $25.8 million co-listing with Santiago Arana, who you’d recognize from Buying Beverly Hills. (Did The Agency just ring the bell … ?)

 

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Cameos to look for in Season 7

Jason Oppenheim’s former girlfriend, Marie-Lou Nuerk, Legend Love, G Flip, most of Selling the OC‘s cast, and celeb clients like Nikki Glaser and Saweetie. 

Fashion

Fashion and glam are next-level on the Selling Sunset franchises. The cast actually arranges — and pays for — all their own hair, makeup and designer wardrobe. Sometimes they have to bring three or four outfits to ensure that they don’t clash, which is probably why both Gio Helou and Bre Tiesi shared with Inman their gratitude for their stylists who keep them looking fierce, professional and on-trend.

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