As Los Angeles residents fled their homes last week, a luxury real estate broker started compiling a list of all the homeowners he knew with empty second or third homes in Los Angeles and asking them to rent them.

“The conversation was very simple,” said Josh Flagg, the broker who is a star of “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.” “For the amount of time that you spend in L.A., you can go stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel” and rent out the house to someone who needs it.

Then his phone began buzzing from early morning until late at night from displaced residents who lost their homes in the catastrophic fires and were desperate to glue their lives back together.

Evacuees of the L.A. fires have been staying in hotels, with friends and at shelters like the Westwood Recreation Center.Isadora Kosofsky for The New York Times

The grueling search for long-term housing is underway for thousands of Los Angeles residents, and real estate agents like Mr. Flagg are looking for untapped inventory — an exercise that has created a network of whisper listings.

At Compass, the local corporate office set up a Google spreadsheet where brokers are adding listings, some destined for the Multiple Listings Service, available to real estate agents across the city, and others that are off-market, known as pocket listings. Many of these listings were found by agents working the phones to find houses, condos and guesthouses that a homeowner might be willing to spare. Some brokers have added their own guesthouses or spare rooms to the list.

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