'Million Dollar Listing LA': Who Is Josh Altman's Wife, Heather Altman?
They met on the show.
kathy hutchins / shutterstock Million Dollar Listing LA is back and the cast of realtors is showing off spectacular properties as well as bringing the personal drama to the screen. Josh and Healther Altman are preparing for a big addition, and not the construction kind: the real estate power couple is getting ready to welcome their second child.
While Heather Bilyeu Altman, 35, has never been a featured realtor on the show, she's actually a powerhouse in the real estate industry. She works at her husband's firm and actually has more experience in the real estate field than he does. She has been selling homes since she was just out of high school.
Who is Josh Altman's wife, Heather Altman?
She's a realtor as well.
Fans of Million Dollar Listing know that Heather Altman is just as good an agent as her husband. The couple has been together since 2011 and married since 2016. They even work together. Josh and his brother started their own firm in 2013 and, while he was initially hesitant to combine his professional and personal lives, eventually Heather joined the company as an agent. Her husband bragged that she sold over $60 million in real estate in 2018.
Where is Heather Altman from?
Heather Altman grew up in Las Vegas and got interested in real estate as a teen. She and her mother used to enjoy going to open houses in new developments. She decided to pursue her real estate license and began selling homes after she finished high school. In an Instagram post, she recalled, "I started working at the age of 12, graduated high school a year early, had my real estate license by 17 and running my own business by 18."
When she got started, the market in Las Vegas at that time was really hot and she was doing well until the bottom fell out. "It was 2003/2004 when the market was it’s craziest, with houses selling sight unseen, over asking by $20-50k (note…these houses were only $180k-350k so those are huge numbers)," she recalled in an interview. "It was great while it lasted but then the market tanked and I had to take on a 2nd and 3rd job to float myself."
She moved to Los Angeles for the bigger commissions.
Heather Altman decided that she needed to leave town to find a more profitable real estate market. She picked Los Angeles but didn't want to strike out on her own right away since the market there was so different than what she was used to. She signed on as an assistant to Malibu-based realtor Madison Hildebrand and worked with him for several years. Hildebrand was featured on the first few seasons of Million Dollar Listing LA starting in 2006, but no longer appears on the show. Altman was hesitant about being on camera at first but as time went on, she opened up to the idea and became a regular figure on the show.
She has the reality show to thank for her marriage.
She actually met Josh Altman on an episode of Million Dollar Listing. Bravo had set Josh Altman and Hildebrand up as rivals and the two were very competitive in the real estate market. But when Josh and Heather met, even professional barriers couldn't stop them from getting together. While Hildebrand encouraged the romance to begin with, he got angry when he found out the pair was co-listing a property without first consulting him. He reacted by firing Heather.
But getting fired allowed her to take control of her own career and allowed her to continue to pursue her life with Josh Altman.
She's a big a dog lover.
Altman has had several dogs over the years, all of them small enough to pull in for a good cuddle. She posted a slideshow of her dogs past and present for National Dog Day a couple years ago. Her love of dogs is obvious in the photos; she let her little Yorkie Brady sit on the train of her wedding gown. She even posted a video of daughter Lexi with a Snapchat filter that made her look like the cutest dog ever.
Altman loves dogs.
They called off their wedding the first time.
As perfect as the Altman's life seems right now, they almost didn't make it down the aisle. They got engaged in 2013 and had initially planned for a 2015 wedding. But the pressure of the show and prospect of having their wedding be such a big, pubic affair gave them both second thoughts. In an emotional decision, they called off their nuptials and tried to step back and work on their relationship in private for a while. In hindsight, Altman feels like the choice saved them from messing up a good thing.
“I’m really happy we made that decision together to postpone the wedding because it just didn’t feel right. I felt empowered by the decision at the end of the day, as weird as that sounds, and I felt a huge relief also. That was a really, really emotional time for me,” Heather Altman told reporters at the time. “There was just so much going on and it was really chaotic. I almost went through with the wedding and I feel like if I would have, Josh and I might not be togethe or our relationship wouldn’t be where it is now.”
They got married in 2016.
Spoiler alert: They now have two kids.
The Altmans found our they were expecting their daughter just after they finally got married in 2016. Alexis was born in 2017 and the couple has been over the moon about parenthood ever since. The new season shows as they prepare to welcome baby number two but in real time, their son Ace arrived in 2019.
All four Altmans in 2020.
The last weeks of pregnancy were stressful.
In an Instagram post about Ace's delivery, Altman shared her worries from the last weeks of pregnancy. While she and the baby were both healthy, he wasn't totally cooperating with the idea of an easy birth. He was in a breech position, which makes vaginal delivery too dangerous and can lead to a C-section.
"As we like to say “Ace was a mover and a shaker” from day one," Altman wrote. "Breached baby, we tried every trick in the book from acupuncture to chiropractic to inverted crazy pregnancy exercises to finally having a successful [external cephalic version], little Ace turned head down just in time." Their son arrived on July 16, 2019.
Baby Ace was born last July.
Million Dollar Listing LA airs on Bravo on Tuesdays.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.