Selling Rare Earth

"There's no such thing as an undiscovered paradise," says a California real estate man named Karel van Haefton. "There is only a paradise that someone has found and wants to sell." He should know. At 29, Van Haefton is founder and owner of a most unusual realty company. Operating out of a handsome houseboat on Sausalito's waterfront, it is called Rare Earth Realty, and it sells the kind of land that some people consider, well, paradise.

For those who want their own secluded beaches badly enough, Rare Earth offers 2,700 acres of Caribbean frontage in Colombia (asking price: $1,700,000), 454 acres on a Fiji island ($1 million) or 30 acres in Tahiti ($150,000). Mountaintop retreats? Van Haefton has 20 of them. Also an Indian burial ground in California, a 1,400-acre canyon in Mexico, an obsolete ICBM base in New York State. As for whole islands, Rare Earth lists 400 for sale, including, Van Haefton says, "one in Nova Scotia for $16,000 and another in the British Virgins for $8 million."

The firm prides itself in finding what the client wants, usually by asking the target area's Chamber of Commerce, realty groups, press and political organizations for help. If that fails, Van Haefton turns to maps, marine charts, atlases --anything that shows property to fill the need--or even occasionally slogs through the countryside himself. Right now he is searching California for a "Tibetan-type monastery" for the Hare Krishna sect and has no doubts that a reasonable facsimile will turn up.

Four months ago, a man came to Rare Earth with a request to be sovereign of an island. After some work, Van Haefton found that the Fiji government owned uninhabited islands that were so remote that it would consider selling them, sovereignty along with the deed.

The son of a Dutch diplomat, Van Haefton lived in Europe, Asia and Africa before entering the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. After graduating, he went into real estate in the Bay Area. Dealing in property appealed to him, but he soon decided that "selling houses in San Francisco was no fun." So he broadened his view to encompass the world and opened his esoteric firm in 1974.

Brisk Business. "It took us a while to get known," he says. But business is now brisk; whereas Rare Earth had to sell 20 properties in 1975 to gross $700,000, just three of the ten properties it has sold this year brought in the same amount. Still, profit margins are thin because overhead runs about $5,000 a month. That includes base salaries for Van Haefton and his wife (six other employees work on straight commission), heavy advertising expenses and a lot of travel.

Abroad, Van Haefton has had to learn to measure in carres in Costa Rica and manzanas in Colombia. Harder yet is researching property deeds to make sure that the land's seller is also its legal owner. But now that Van Haefton knows foreign realty, he plans to appeal to foreign buyers. He hopes eventually to open a branch office in Europe. What German industrialists, Greek shipowners and perhaps oil sheiks want, he believes, might just be a trout farm nestling in California's Lassen National Forest, a fly-in ranch in lush green Montana or a splendid 240-acre swamp in Florida.

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