Want a first look at the area’s most prestigious and expensive waterfront homes in some of the most exclusive neighborhoods?
Forget scanning home-listing websites like Redfin or Zillow. Call one of OC’s more connected residential brokers.
Off-market home listings—call them whisper listings, private-exclusives or pocket listings—offer Orange County’s well-heeled the chance to discreetly shop around their luxury homes to potential buyers without the fuss and, they hope, publicity that can happen when listing publicly on the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS.
Listings of this type appear to be on the upswing, according to an informal polling of some of the area’s top luxury brokers.
Whether it makes sense to do so is another matter.
In the end, “you want the eyeballs,” said Coldwell Banker’s Tim Smith, who has had some of OC’s most-prominent and expensive listings the past few years.
Smith’s decidedly in favor of promotion; his brokerage team got nearly 120,000 YouTube hits for a music video parody that also served to highlight a home listing he had on the Balboa Peninsula last year.
Limiting a potential buyer audience “is not a recipe for success,” said Smith, noting the local real estate market’s big base of foreign buyers, who can be shut out of the process when a listing is off market.
Privacy Concerns
Adrienne Brandes of Surterre Properties said there’s a plethora of reasons why a home may trade off-market.
“Sometimes it’s for privacy and security purposes,” Brandes said. “It might be a celebrity or a very, very high-net-worth individual and they don’t want people to know that their home is for sale—maybe it’s vacant or a second home and they don’t want it out there that they’re not [living] there.”
Keeping a multimillion-dollar transaction on the down low would at first glance appear to have its perks for press-shy business executives, wealthy residents and the occasional celebrity or high-profile political donor.
Smith, though, calls the belief that an off-market listing buys the seller more privacy “an illusion.”
Another downside for pocket listings: Brandes said as a business transaction it can be “a real disadvantage” and “hugely effects pricing.”
“The more eyes you have on the home the more you’re likely to get it sold for the highest price in the least amount of time,” she said.
2,000 PSF
Those comments are echoed in the data from the Business Journal’s analysis of last year’s 16 largest home sales in OC that were done largely off-market and unreported through traditional means like MLS.
Nearly a quarter billion dollars’ worth of coastal properties—and one Shady Canyon residence in Irvine—are represented in the special listing, starting on page 66.
It’s a companion piece to our inaugural annual listing of OC’s Largest Homes Sales, which ran in the Business Journal’s March 11 issue and included luxury home sales here valued at $515 million combined. Those 28 sales averaged about $2,200 per square foot, according to a reading of listing details, each of which were broker-listed on MLS.
The homes profiled in this edition come in a bit lower, around $2,000 per square foot.
It’s still nothing to sneeze at. A new home in OC’s fastest-growing city, Irvine, by way of comparison goes for about $500 per square foot.
Both lists have the same cut-off point for inclusion: a reported sale price of $10 million or higher.
But while this week’s listing tops off with an $18.5 million Corona del Mar home that records indicate was sold to an area real estate executive, the March listing included a quartet of homes over $30 million, and an additional six over $20 million.
Both of the Business Journal’s lists have one common element: at least one home sale either tied to billionaire bond trader Bill Gross or his ex-wife, Sue Gross.
Property records indicate the buyers on this week’s list are about as varied as the home’s featured, from an entrepreneur and son of former Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner to the founder of one of Canada’s largest retailers of furniture, mattresses, appliances and home electronics.
It’s not easy to track whether the popularity of off-market listings has increased lately, but Christopher Dyson of The Agency said he has at least seen more off-market homes on the platform he co-founded with The Agency Chief Executive Mauricio Umansky and “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” stars James Harris and David Parnes called The Pocket Listing Service, or ThePLS.com.
The broker-only website allows them to share and search nationally for off-market listings, cutting down on the work typically required by agents who often share whisper listings by word-of-mouth or email blasts to other brokers.
“Since the beginning of the year, we have [had] record months in terms of [broker] signups on the site and inventory,” he said. “We’ve had some incredible listings [at] $38 million, $25 million, $15 million. We’ve had over 100 listings in Orange County.
“Orange County is one of the best areas in this country so listings are high.”
If pocket-listings are to continue—and most brokers agree the practice is here to stay—then they say they’ll adapt.
Rex McKown and Marcy Weinstein earlier this month announced plans to leave Surterre and join competitor Compass.
One reason: better access to off-market listings.
“We only recommend keeping the ‘elite’ estates off the market, and the reason for our move to Compass is they have a nationwide system to share to this level of buyer,” they told the Business Journal via email last week.
