A sprawling Newport Harbor estate that garnered its share of local and international attention in the past year sold late last month for $35 million.
It’s not just the price that’s notable—though it’s the highest ever disclosed price for a home along the harbor.
The home got interest, and plenty of eyeballs, through a unique marketing strategy that included a music video, “Teach Me How to Duffy,” a Newport Beach-themed parody of the 2011 “Teach Me How to Dougie” by Los Angeles-based hip-hop group Cali Swag District.
That video, which cost more than $50,000 to produce, was a “risk that paid off,” according to listing broker Tim Smith of Coldwell Banker.
The video has garnered close to 150,000 views on YouTube, but likely raked in millions more when considering all of the channels the video was shared on, said Smith, one of the area’s top luxury brokers.
“There were 50 international and national media outlets that picked up the story in the first few days,” said Smith, who takes part in the video. “In the final hours of the listing, we had two offers from buyers outside of California that said they heard of the property through the music video.”
The Balboa Peninsula mansion at 1813 E. Bay Ave. first hit the market last October for $44.9 million.
Even with the price decrease, the sale is a new record for the immediate area, and is the highest in Newport Beach in the past two years.
The buyer is an undisclosed out-of-state U.S. resident.
Local seller
The sales price is more than three times what it went for in 2014 when Craig Atkins, chairman of Irvine-based homebuilder City Ventures and co-founder of now defunct land brokerage O’Donnell-Atkins, paid a reported $11.5 million for the property.
This is due to the extensive rebuild of the property that took four years to wrap, creating the massive 12,710-square-foot home on three waterfront lots.
The “dream team,” as Smith calls it, behind the rebuild was Newport Beach-based Patterson Custom Homes, Los Angeles architect Robert Sinclair, and design firm Blackband Design.
Atkins, now a Jackson Hole, Wyo. resident, wanted to build a “unique house that would be difficult to duplicate,” according to Smith. It was an investment endeavor “that worked out well,” Atkins said.
As it was on the market, he rented it out as a vacation home, with one tenant shelling out $300,000 for a three-week stay.
