A house two doors down from Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime Palo Alto estate sold for $12.35 million, or about $3,500 per square foot.
That’s about twice the price per square foot of other recent sales in Palo Alto’s Crescent Park neighborhood, where Zuckerberg owns five contiguous lots. Homes of a similar size on similar one-third-acre lots typically sold for between $1,500 and $1,800 per square foot last year, according to data from Compass agent Sia Glafkides.
“It wouldn’t be an attractive price for a developer,” Glafkides said via email. “It makes more sense that it’s from an end user who was willing to pay well in excess of its actual fair market value.”
The 1936 home at 1444 Edgewood Drive went on the market March 14 with an asking price of $13.2 million. It was then quickly withdrawn from MLS, signing on March 28 and closing the market on April 3, strongly suggesting an all-cash deal.
According to property records, the buyer was Seed Breeze LLC. The LLC, which was formed the same day the listing went public, shares a mailing address with several other LLCs that use registered agent services — a post office box at a UPS store in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center, according to state records.
The sellers, according to property records, are William and Anne Butler, who bought the home in January 2014 for $5.8 million. Runs a high-end plumbing products retailer where his wife is COO, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Unsurprisingly, the listing notes mention that all seven of the home’s bathrooms and kitchen have been remodeled. A four-month lease worth $18,000 per month on Zillow as of 2020 said The house has a heated pool and the city permits show that it has been recently renovated. Decorative dormer windows were also added during the Butlers’ tenure.
The couple looked at Menlo Park, Atherton, and Los Altos when they moved from New York with their young children in 2014, but chose Crescent Park “because it was the typical Norman Rockwell neighborhood,” Anne Butler told Palo Alto Online in the year 2015
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent Meta, bought his first home in the neighborhood in 2011, a year before he married Priscilla Chan, and then bought four more surrounding lots over the next few years to create a private estate for family and friends . In total, he spent about $30 million. That was well above market value at the time, Glafkides said.
She added that while the buyers in this deal also paid a premium for their proximity to the Zuckerberg property, living so close to one of Silicon Valley’s biggest stars isn’t always seen as a plus.
“RResidents of Palo Alto and Atherton prefer to remain anonymous and off the public radar and scrutiny,” she said.
Crescent Park isn’t the city’s most expensive neighborhood. This award goes to Old Palo Alto, closer to Stanford University and usually the site of the city’s biggest sales.
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