Bank trims ask by half on Marin estate of one-time tech titan

The Marin home of former billionaire and serial tech entrepreneur Eric Greenberg came to market this week asking $9 million, less than half of its price before it fell into foreclosure.

The prior ask of just under $19 million in 2018 was “way too high,” said listing agent Matt Francis of Vanguard Properties. Bay Area buyers have been “conditioned” by underpricing strategies to pay 10 to 20 percent over ask, Francis said, a market atmosphere that means “overpricing is the death of a property,”

Calling the $9 million ask a “starting point,” Francis said even though most buyers want to make cosmetic upgrades to the 30-year-old property they also value the details such as its herringbone driveway and limestone construction–features that would be prohibitively expensive to create elsewhere.

“Everybody says it’s stunning and amazing—to build a home like this today would be impossible,” he said. “Everyone wants to know, what’s reality here? What’s the lender going to accept?”

Greenberg bought the over-10,000-square-foot European-inspired Ross property in 1999 for $17 million, setting a record for the highest-priced property in both Marin and San Francisco that year, his agent Olivia Hsu Decker wrote in a 2020 interview with Greenberg in Haute Living.

27 Upper Road in Ross, CA (Aerial Canvas)

Greenberg became a billionaire a few months before the purchase when Viant and Scient, the web consulting companies he co-founded in the mid-1990s, went public. Shortly after buying the home, he had an extravagant wedding on Treasure Island with 200,000 tulips flown in from France, a tent that had to be brought to the island between San Francisco and the East Bay via helicopter, and Elton John as a wedding singer. (The star required two private jets, according to the Chronicle, one for him and one for his piano.)

The newly flush newlyweds made numerous additions and upgrades to the home: high-tech security and sound systems, a home theater installed by a crew from Skywalker Ranch and an overhauled landscaping design from Ron Herman, who has also created gardens for Larry Ellison, Neil Young and Joe Montana. The wine enthusiasts even excavated mountains of dirt to add a 31,000-bottle wine cave 60 feet below ground.

The wine cave (Aerial Canvas)

“It’s beyond crazy,” said listing agent Francis. “It is one of the most impressive feats of engineering I’ve ever seen.

Greenberg’s fortune was diminished significantly by the dot-com bust and a few years later his extensive wine collection came under scrutiny when he was sued by Bill Koch as part of the oil billionaire’s passion project of unearthing fraudulent wine sales. Koch alleged that 24 bottles of supposedly ultra-rare wine he purchased from Greenberg in a wine auction were fake and he was awarded $12 million in damages in 2013, though that figure was later slashed on appeal to about $1 million. The appeal also allowed Greenberg to keep selling off his wine collection, which Koch had sought to bar. A 2017 auction of over 7,000 bottles contained a “buyer beware” disclaimer about the suit.

Greenberg has continued creating companies, including a health-focused casual restaurant called Beautifull in 2007, as well as Wrap Media, a mobile marketing company, in 2013. Neither were as successful as his ‘90s start ups and both have shuttered.

In 2016, he listed his three-acre Ross estate with Decker at almost $23 million. When the seven-bedroom, 8.5-bath home failed to sell at that price, it came back to market in 2017 and 2018 with the nearly $19 million ask.

In October 2019, Greenberg went into default on the property and in January 2022, Citibank assumed control at a value of just over $7 million, according to public records.

The bank worked in concert with Francis to set the $9 million price. It would not allow him to stage the empty property or fix the deferred maintenance on the lap pool, yet that has not stopped buyers, and several concerned neighbors in the tony town who are worried about their property values, from calling about the “as is” property, he said.

The lap pool (Aerial Canvas)

In the few days the home has been listed, he said he has been doing about four one-hour-long property tours each day with serious buyers, some of whom are looking for a primary residence and some of whom want “a country cottage” in the bucolic ‘burb. Most are factoring in the substantial cost of major cosmetic upgrades. But one, who owns seven other homes already, said they would just leave it as is since they’d only be there a few weeks a year anyway, he added.

Francis believes if the property is updated by its new owners it could possibly command about what Greenberg paid for it back in 1999.

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