Bird founder looks set to fly from glassy Bel Air mansion

Bird founder Travis VanderZanden looks set to fly the coop in Bel Air, where his mansion went into contract on Wednesday for an undisclosed price.

VanderZanden, a 42-year-old who founded the Santa Monica-based scooter sharing service in 2017, bought the spec mansion from Daily Show star Trevor Noah in September 2020, paying nearly $22 million.

But VanderZanden, a Wisconsin native and USC Marshall School of Business grad, apparently didn’t want to stick around Bel Air. He looked to flip the house this April, listing it for $25 million. In July he knocked the tag down to $23.9 million.

The four-year-old property, located at 11507 Orum Road, is just over 10,000 square-feet and has six bedrooms and nine bathrooms. It also has an infinity pool, saltwater aquarium, a home theater and “walls of glass that disappear into an al fresco dining patio area with incredible city and ocean views.”

Bird, founded the same year as Lime, its primary rival, has hundreds of employees and deploys its scooters in cities around the world. The company recently went public through a SPAC merger that originally valued it at around $2.3 billion, although that’s dipped by about a quarter since it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month.

After selling the mansion to VanderZanden, Noah — who spends most of his time in New York — bought a different Bel Air mansion, on Stradella Road, for $27.5 million in January, only to go for a flip himself, listing the mansion last month at $29.8 million. Celebrities — they’re just like us!

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