Mill Valley Homeowner Seeks Anthropic Shares for Home

A Mill Valley homeowner is searching for a buyer willing to offer up artificial intelligence stock shares instead of cold, hard cash.

Miami-based investment banker Storm Duncan is shopping his roughly 13-acre Strawberry neighborhood property at 114 Inez Place on LinkedIn, pitching a direct swap of the home in exchange for shares in Anthropic, the San Francisco Standard reported. Duncan did not disclose an equivalent dollar amount in Anthropic shares.

“[I] would like to exchange the property for Anthropic equity,” Duncan wrote, listing the home’s address as a company on the professional networking website. The unique trade setup, Duncan said, would “provide liquidity, diversification and a luxury estate for an Anthropic shareholder on a highly tax advantaged and cash free basis, while still allowing retained upside in shares for the current share owner.”

The four-bedroom, five-bathroom home boasts typical high-end amenities like an infinity-edge pool, hot tub and putting green. The banker is offering to cover all closing costs and to structure the sale as a private transaction “so there are no out of pocket costs for the Anthropic equity holder,” according to his LinkedIn call. Duncan’s goal in asking for equity in Anthropic is to increase his holdings in the artificial intelligence sphere while simultaneously trimming his real estate portfolio.

“I’m under-concentrated in AI investments relative to the importance of AI in the future and over-concentrated in real estate,” Duncan told the Standard. “My perspective is that someone that owns Anthropic stock is probably in the exact opposite scenario.”

The AI boom in the Bay Area has led to an influx of deep-pocketed buyers looking for top-tier homes such as this one. In San Francisco, demand at the higher end of the market has outpaced supply so much that the city is dealing with what industry experts are calling a mansion shortage.

It isn’t the first time the home’s price has attracted attention. The previous owner first listed the property in 2016 for $10.8 million, though the house eventually sold to Duncan in 2019 for nearly $4.8 million, according to public records cited by the Standard. The banker hasn’t yet found a buyer but said he has had some “very thoughtful, very engaged” conversations with multiple Anthropic shareholders.

— Chris Malone Méndez