Palo Alto house two doors from Zuckerberg estate sells for $12.4M

A house two doors down from Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime Palo Alto estate has sold for $12.35 million, or about $3,500 per square foot.

That’s about double the price per square foot of other recent sales in Palo Alto’s Crescent Park neighborhood, where Zuckerberg owns five adjoining properties. Similarly sized homes on similar one-third-acre lots typically sold for between $1,500 and $1,800 per square foot over the last year, according to data provided by Compass agent Sia Glafkides.

“It would not be an attractive price to pay for a developer,” Glafkides said via email. “It makes more sense it is an end user who was willing to pay way above what its actual fair market value would be.”

The 1936 home at 1444 Edgewood Drive came to market March 14 with an asking price of $13.2 million. It was then quickly withdrawn from MLS, went into contract March 28 and closed off market on April 3, strongly indicating an all-cash deal. 

The buyer was Seed Breeze LLC, according to property records. The LLC, created the same day the listing came to market, shares a mailing address with several other LLCs that use registered agent services — a mailbox in a UPS store in the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, according to state filing records.

The sellers are William and Anne Butler, according to property records, who bought the home for $5.8 million in January 2014. William Butler is an investor with Sand Hill Angels, a seed-round venture capital firm, as well as CEO of his family-run high-end plumbing product distributor, where his wife is the COO, according to their LinkedIn profiles. 

Not surprisingly, the listing notes mention that all of the home’s seven bathrooms and its kitchen have been remodeled. An $18,000-a-month four-month lease listing on Zillow from 2020 said the home has a heated pool, and city permits show it was recently updated. Decorative dormers were added during the Butlers’ tenure as well.

The couple looked at Menlo Park, Atherton and Los Altos when they relocated from New York in 2014 with their young children, but chose Crescent Park “because it was the most quintessential Norman Rockwell neighborhood,” Anne Butler told Palo Alto Online in 2015.

Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent Meta, purchased his first home in the neighborhood in 2011, the year before he married Priscilla Chan, and then bought up four more surrounding properties over the next few years in an effort to create a private compound for family and friends. In total, he spent about $30 million. That was well over market value at the time, Glafkides said.

She added that while the buyers on this deal also paid a premium for their proximity to the Zuckerberg estate, it’s not always considered a plus to live so close to one of Silicon Valley’s biggest stars.

“Residents of Palo Alto and Atherton prefer to remain anonymous and off the radar and away from the scrutiny of the public,” she said.

Crescent Park is not the most expensive neighborhood in the city. That prize goes to Old Palo Alto, closer to Stanford University and typically the site of the city’s biggest sales.