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Not every real estate agent can say that rapper Wiz Khalifa comes to them for investment advice — and also collaborates with them on music projects.
But Akash and Krish Chandani of the Chandani Group at Compass are two exceptions.
“Our parents kind of went crazy with that,” Krish acknowledged, referring to Deepak and Karishma Chandani, the husband-and-wife team that founded Bay Area brokerage Anthem Group in the late 1980s. “They were like, ‘What is this? Who is this guy?’”
The twin brothers grew up in the Bay Area and at a young age developed an affinity for technology and engineering, the siblings told Inman in a joint interview last month. After high school, they went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and graduated with engineering degrees, but stumbled on a passion for music. In 2020, they also decided to go “full-steam ahead” into real estate, joining their parents at Anthem Group, then later moving to Compass with their father in the summer of 2021. Karishma Chandani remains president and broker of Anthem Group, while frequently mentoring the twins in all things real estate.
More recently, Akash (who also goes by “Kush”) and Krish (who also goes by “Luv”), made their first foray into reality television, starring alongside nine other sets of identical twins in the Amazon Prime series Twin Love, where they were split up for an extended period in a social experiment to determine if, in separate places, they’d be drawn to the same family of potential romantic partners.
Now, the brothers have become a triple threat spanning luxury real estate, the music industry and reality TV. Listening to them describe their path, it sounds like the last few years have been a whirlwind of hard work mixed with fun, but their moves have also been entirely strategic.
Bit by the music bug
“It just started with being in the Bay Area,” Akash told Inman. “Everything starts here in terms of technology. So being here, it got our minds thinking on engineering from a very young age. And obviously, since our parents have been Realtors for about 40 years, that got us thinking in that lane as well. So originally, we went to college for civil engineering or architecture and developed a passion for music over time. The thought process of engineering plus real estate was already in our system, and we developed a passion for music along the way.”
While students at RPI, Akash and Krish started devoting a lot of their free time to creating music, forming the R&B duo THEMXXNLIGHT. Once they had about eight original songs up on SoundCloud and gained a bit of traction there, Wiz Khalifa took notice of their work.
The brothers ended up moving to LA for about a year-and-a-half and were featured several times on Khalifa’s “Rolling Papers 2” album, something Krish described as “a miracle.”
Although their musical connection to Khalifa has not yet translated into them representing him in a real estate transaction, the brothers have certainly got his attention when it comes to investment advice.
“He would ask us about the market, and we would just go on an hour-long discussion with him about the LA market, the Bay Area …” said Akash.
“He has a lot of money,” Krish chimed in. “A lot of our clients … are top execs and founders of the biggest tech companies. So because we are very used to dealing with people who have money, it was very easy for us to talk to Wiz about, ‘OK, you have this massive net worth, you should be investing in these locations. And don’t be restricted to only LA — the Bay Area has the biggest appreciation in the nation …’ and all that. So we’re giving him the rundown.
“We have yet to represent him in a transaction,” he added, “but the day he wants to invest in the Bay Area, I think we will be the first guys he talks to.”
These days, the brothers spend about 75 percent of their time working on their real estate business, and reserve some hours in the late evening to work on music. Even though not much of their day is allocated to music, they have about 200 unreleased songs in reserve, they told Inman. So for now, it’s about mixing those tracks and strategically releasing them.
The Chandani Twins in their THEMXXNLIGHT apparel | Credit: Highcloud Studios
Falling into reality TV
After their brief stint in LA, Krish and Akash moved back to the Bay Area and got into real estate alongside their parents full-time. Shortly thereafter, they were contacted by producers for Twin Love, and after a long casting process, were chosen to appear in the reality show, which was released in November.
“The main piece was that this was an identical twin show and an opportunity to represent our South Asian culture, which is pretty rare to do on a global network like this,” Krish said. “Then another [opportunity] was to represent our real estate brand and our music brand all at once, and be together as twins.”
But the experience was pretty different from others they had gone into together. Throughout the entire filming process, they, along with the show’s other sets of twins, were separated from each other, and that briefly threw them for a loop.
“We thought we would be together in the house, and that since we’re used to empowering ourselves and being one entity as twins, that we were going to go into this house with a ton of power and no one’s going to stop us,” Akash said.
But not so — it was the first time the brothers had been separated for more than a week at a time, which made them both feel a little unsettled.
“The whole time, we were a little nervous, because we had never been apart for that long,” Krish said. “But it was a fun experience and we would do [television] shows again.”
An advertisement for “Twin Love”
The luxury real estate backbone
On the real estate side of things, the whole family is hustling all day long across all nine Bay Area counties, a rare market spread among Bay Area real estate teams.
Oftentimes the brothers will tackle showings in the North Bay while their parents triage deals in the South Bay. Sometimes at the end of the day, the twins will look down at their phones to realize they’ve been on an 11-hour call with their parents all day, they told Inman.
The team, the Chandani Group at Compass, clearly has a very dedicated core group of agents in the Chandani twins and their father, Deepak, as well as six additional agents. But they’re also looking to add about half a dozen more young and tech-savvy agents to their ranks soon, the twins said, some of whom will be based out of LA.
As it stands, the twins have closed more than $200 million in sales volume in their still-young career, while Deepak, has closed more than $3 billion. The senior Chandani is also the developer of a real estate solution called REEZ.com, which he ultimately sold to Fidelity National Information Systems and was later adopted by Alain Pinel Realtors, which is now part of Compass. He also developed Chandani Connect, an app for luxury real estate and concierge services.
Even though their various endeavors may sometimes seem like totally separate worlds from the outside, the brothers said that their music, real estate and budding reality TV careers feed into one another.
Their connections made within the music industry are gradually seeping into their real estate careers, and publicity events from Twin Love also brought out many of their real estate clients in support — and connected them with plenty of potential future clients.
“It gives everyone a reason to connect the dots to other things,” Akash said, “from music, to real estate, to reality TV.”
“I think the way that we convert all our music fans and all our event attendees and all our friends into real estate clients is very unique,” Krish added. “And the way that we know our finances so well that we’re able to advise everyone of all ages and of all backgrounds … we’re even able to advise people in the music industry about how they should manage their finances in real estate. I think that’s pretty big.”
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Email Lillian Dickerson
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