An aerial view of the recently sold $117.5 million home (Courtesy of Google Maps)
Recently news broke that a Woodside, Calif. home has fetched an astounding $117.5 million. The nine-acre estate quietly traded hands in November, according to county records, and had never been officially listed for sale. The news had some, like myself, suspicious that a “fat finger” typo was behind the astronomically high number gracing public records. After all, how could this property yield a nine-figure windfall when even the prized 92-acre Flood Estate totes a lower price tag of $85 million?
After much digging, it looks like that $117.5 million price is correct, according to multiple sources. But the media outlets that ran with this story when it first broke got something slightly wrong: it’s not the second most expensive home sale in U.S. history. Technically, it’s the most expensive on record.
The seller of the hilltop estate was Tully Friedman, chief executive of Friedman, Fleischer and Lowe, a San Francisco-based private equity firm. The buyer was SV Projects LLC, a so-called straw buyer entity tied to a Los Angeles law firm used to keep both the privacy and additional assets of the buyer safe. As of yet, the identity of that buyer is unknown, though several Silicon Valley real estate sources suggest an Asian billionaire is behind the shockingly steep sale. (Update: some suspect Japan‘s second-richest man Masayoshi Son, chief of Softbank, is the buyer)
$117.5 million is the highest confirmed price ever paid for a single family home in the U.S., ever. It eclipses the $100 million forked over by venture capital billionaire Yuri Milner in 2011 for a Palo Alto mansion and that was believed to have been the highest single residential transaction ever recorded for a single family home stateside. It also tops the $103 million paid for an undeveloped 40-acre East Hampton, N.Y. land parcel by billionaire Ron Baron in 2007.
Still, the transaction– and this is where it gets tricky — has been called the second most expensive home sale in U.S. history by some media outlets in the past week. Folks have been (prematurely) speculating that the recent acquisition of the Broken O Ranch by another billionaire, Stan Kroenke, yielded an even higher price. The massive Montana ranch, also traded in November, had been listed for $132.5 million. At that price, yes, Broken O would top the list of the most expensive home sales in America — but that’s a big if. Montana is a nondisclosure state, meaning that the final sales price is not public record — nor will it ever likely be since Kroenke and his ranch real estate team prefer to keep it that way. If local Montana publication the Fairfield Sun Times is even remotely close to accurate in estimating that the “undisclosed” price is in the “$90 million neighborhood,” then the Woodside estate represents the highest ever paid by far. Regardless, without a confirmed number for Broken O Ranch, the Woodside abode is the most expensive home sale confirmed and on-record.
Perched atop a hill with 360-degree views of the surrounding Woodside Mountains, that lofty sales price includes a nearly 9,000-square foot neoclassical-style house, a 1,117-square foot colonnaded pool house, a detached library, a “retreat” building, a swimming pool, a tennis court and formal gardens. “Reflecting the strong Palladian tradition in the United States, it is planned around hyphens and dependencies and features a double volume, elliptical garden room, ” elaborates the website of architect Allan Greenberg, the East Coast architect who designed and completed the home in 2005.
The Mountain Road abode is located in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Silicon Valley. Area residents include tech billionaires Gordon Moore, Jeffrey Skoll, John Doerr and, perhaps most famously, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison who reportedly spent more than $200 million constructing his lavish Japanese-style Woodside estate. Ranked 22nd on Forbes’ 2012 list of the Most Expensive Zip Codes, Woodside’s median home price is a hefty $3,074,909, up about 33% since 2011.
The last time this property changed hands was in 1997 for a relatively miniscule $8 million. In other words, nearly 15 years and undoubtedly millions in construction costs later, the property has appreciated by more than 1,300% — despite the economic downturn.
“Silicon Valley real estate continues to appreciate and is buoyed by strong hiring, an increasing flow of capital from Chinese investors and strong earnings from most tech firms such as Google, LinkedIn and Facebook,” says Ken Deleon of Deleon Realty, a luxury real estate firm that has brokered some of the biggest sales in Silicon Valley. (His firm was not involved in this record transaction.) “While we will not see the really strong growth of 2012 where Palo Alto’s average price increased by over 20%, strong sales overall and particularly in the upper end will continue this year as most buyers in Silicon Valley remain optimistic and are trading up with stock option funds.”
Realtors like Deleon suspect there will be more big-ticket sales in the region this year, particularly in the $40 million to $60 million range. But the $117.5 million sale will likely remain an outlier, much like the $88 million penthouse sale in New York City’s 15 Central Park West has been on the East Coast. If the 15 CPW sale is any indicator, this transaction will inspire some current sellers to hike their prices in overly-optimistic attempts to use the deal as a loose comparable moving forward.
Other high-ticket U.S. homes that have come close to the nine-figure mark are the $95 million Palm Beach, Fla.’s Maison De L’Amitie bought by Russian billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev, the two $90 million-plus penthouse sales in New york City’s One57 building, and Gary Winnick’s $94 million splurge on the Weber Mansion in Los Angeles (more than a decade ago). Several sales have also yielded $80 million-plus price tags in the past few years, including that $88 million penthouse purchase and an $85 million house purchase in Los Angeles in 2011. Just this month, a record sale further south in Malibu, Calif. clocked in at $75 million as billionaire money manager Howard Marks offloaded his oceanfront estate to Russian billionaires.