A Palo Alto estate has sold for $28.5 million, the third-most-expensive single-family residential sale in the city’s history.
The property features a main home and a guest house on about half an acre at 1934 and 1936 Waverley Street. It lies in the city’s Old Palo Alto neighborhood, one of California’s most expensive on an absolute and dollar-per-square-foot basis, according to the property’s marketing website.
The pair of houses collectively sold for about $3,147 a square foot. Hanna Shacham of Coldwell Banker Northern California was their exclusive listing agent.
The buyer was Driftwood Trust, while the seller was a limited liability company named Yoshida Blofeld Holdings. The deal was recorded with the Santa Clara County Clerk-Recorder’s Office on June 28.
1934 Waverley Street (Coldwell Banker Northern California/Hanna Shacham)
The property’s three-level, 7,048-square-foot main house has three bedrooms, four bathrooms and a four-car garage, according to its website marketing it for sale and Old Republic Title records. Completed in 2017, the home comes with a 700-bottle wine cellar, a tasting room next door and a roof deck overlooking a private backyard, its website and Zillow data show. The 2,008-square-foot guest house, completed that same year, is connected to the main abode by an exterior trellis and includes a suite with a kitchenette, a gym/yoga studio and a detached two-car garage, according to its website.
While Compass data show that demand is declining for homes of all price points in Santa Clara County, which includes Palo Alto, the deal indicates that there are still buyers with deep pockets in the market. The decline in demand can be explained partially by typical seasonal dynamics: After peaking in the spring, homebuying activity in the county gradually slows through the summer and fall before the so-called mid-winter slowdown, according to Compass. That makes the sale of 1934 and 1936 Waverley Street something of an anomaly, especially because the second-place home sale in Old Palo Alto this year was less than half its price, at $13.8 million for a five-bed, seven-bath house, equating to about $2,573 a square foot, according to Zillow.
The Waverley Street sale is below two others on the list of Palo Alto’s most expensive home sales ever: the $30 million sale of a four-bed, seven-bath house totaling 7,550 square feet at 1107 Cowper Street in May 2017, and the $40 million trade of a 10,887-square-foot gated estate at 369 Churchill Avenue in July 2020. All three properties are in Old Palo Alto. Homes in the neighborhood sell for a median price of $5 million, according to Realtor.com data.
Details on the Waverley Street estate’s buyer and seller are scarce. Kyle Vineyard, a partner at accounting firm Realize CPA, is listed as Driftwood Trust’s trustee on the deed of the sale. Vineyard didn’t respond to requests for comment. Driftwood took out a $17.1 million mortgage from Silicon Valley Bank to finance its acquisition, according to First American Title records.
On the other side of the deal, seller Yoshida Blofeld Holdings is a manager and investor of LLC assets. Its business entity documents filed with California’s Secretary of State Office were submitted by Iconiq Capital, which didn’t respond to requests for comment. Iconiq is a private wealth management firm whose clients include tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey.
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