Slam dunk: Sports agent buys Coral Gables home for $5M

He showed them the money.

A sports agent, whose clients have included National Basketball Association players Kevin Love, Brandon Ingram, Nikola Jokic and Kemba Walker, bought a Coral Gables house for $5 million.

Jeffrey A. Schwartz and his wife, Natalie, bought the two-story, nearly 8,000-square-foot home on Oak Lane, according to records. The house, built in 1957, is on 1.4 acres in the Snapper Creek Lakes gated community.

The house has six bedrooms, six bathrooms and a separate guest house, according to listings. Judy Zeder with the Jills Zeder Group at Coldwell Banker Realty represented the sellers. Ben Moss with Compass represented the buyers. The house listed for $5.5 million in April.

The sellers, Mario A. Cobo Trujillo and Angela B. Aguirre, paid $4.2 million for the house in 2018.

In 2002, Schwartz founded New York-based Excel Sports Management as a basketball agency, according to the company’s website. It has since grown to represent athletes in baseball, golf and other sports.

In 2019, Forbes deemed Schwartz “the world’s foremost basketball agent for the fifth consecutive year” for more than $1.8 billion in active contracts.

The agency has taken credit for a comedy fundraising event hosted by Blake Griffin, and for landing a LendingTree.com sponsorship of The Charlotte Hornets. It also takes credit for making Red Bull the “official energy drink” of seven NBA teams, according to the company’s website.

Other notable names who have called Snapper Creek home include Aztec Group founder and CEO Ezra Katz, who sold his mansion for $4.2 million in 2017; and football star Julius Peppers, who bought a 9,100-square-foot home for $5.2 million in 2014.

More recent Coral Gables sales include the president of a charter airline company paying $14.9 million for a mansion on the Coral Gables Waterway,  and a Miami cardiologist selling his Tahiti Beach Island mansion for $11.3 million — about half the original asking price.