About Wayne Willbur | Partner

Wayne Willbur

Partner

Email Address

wwillbur@dppre.com
Primary Phone

(213) 500-0254
Secondary Phone

(310) 275-1000
License Number
#01716358

While raised primarily in Southern California, Wayne A. Willbur graduated from Seoul International High School in Seoul, South Korea, learning just enough Korean to scare waitresses in Korean BBQ restaurants (which continues to this day). Between his junior and senior year in Seoul, Wayne was a film extra in the movie “Inchon,” starring Lord Lawrence Olivier, Jacqueline Bisset and David Jannsen. The movie was nominated for 5 awards and won 4. Sadly, the winning awards were Razzie Awards for worst film, worst actor (Lawrence Olivier), worst director (Terence Young) and worst screenplay, and, thus, any potential acting career (not that one was hoped for) was nipped promptly in the bud. (Fortunately, Wayne was spared a Razzie nomination as Worst Extra.)

After graduating high school, Wayne returned to Southern California and attended the University of California at Riverside where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science (otherwise known as BS) in Economics with a minor in International Relations. During one college summer, he managed to get a scholarship to study business in Tokyo, Japan where he was flogged and beaten by a petite Japanese language teacher into learning enough Japanese to order sushi and to ask directions to the WC.

After graduation from UCR, he worked his first full-time job as Resident Director in charge of a 200+ room dormitory on the campus with 8 resident assistants and over 400+ college-aged residents under his wing. Luckily, he was still young enough and without the proper experience to realize that he shouldn’t have survived.

The following year, Wayne had the choice of attending an MBA program at Boston University or the Post-Graduate Business Studies program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. With no disrespect to Bean Town, Wayne chose London and managed to actually graduate with his diploma despite being forced to memorize British commercial law precedents and tortured to properly balance tedious rows of debits and credits (and despite several Guinness parties in Mick Jagger’s old dorm room in Passfield Hall).

After returning to Los Angeles, Wayne worked a few years in the entertainment industry in various capacities; he worked in the legal department of a production company reviewing contracts for the above-the-line talent for compliance with DGA, WGA and SAG rules and regulations. From this position, he began working as Assistant to the Producer on a number of film projects in pre-production where his responsibilities included development, property acquisition, budgeting and casting.

After the novelty of bouncing from one film project to another wore off, Wayne decided that the entertainment industry was not the most stable of environments in which to make a long-term stake, and turned his attention to the possibility of attending law school. With knowledge of databases and computers, Wayne started working in several large law firms, streamlining and computerizing the collection, searching and distribution of information involved in complex civil litigation cases during the course of which he wrote several articles and gave presentations on such fascinating topics as “sharing costs of automated litigation support among both plaintiffs and defendants.”

Finally, deciding against law school and grateful that he hadn’t consigned himself to a life of billable hours and memorizing more case law, Wayne pursued one of his major interests: real estate.

As a long-term resident of Downtown Los Angeles, he began working as a real estate agent under Broker Stephen May of Downtown Residential Real Estate who, as it happened, was his real estate agent years before. Not wanting to focus entirely on Downtown LA, Wayne joined DPP real estate in its infancy and has been with the firm ever since, picking up his broker’s license in the interim.

While Wayne has a particular interest and focus in Downtown, he has worked throughout the LA area from Brentwood to West Hollywood to Silverlake and into Pasadena and beyond. Wayne still makes his home in Downtown (not in a cardboard box) with his Persian wife, Seppy, and two Persian cats.