Scott McNeeley Finds Buyer for Portola Valley Home at $35M

Tech billionaire Scott McNealy has finally found a buyer for his 13-acre Portola Valley estate — complete with golf course and ice skating rink — after over five years on and off the market.

With an original asking price of nearly $100 million in June 2018, the home came back to market most recently at $54 million and sold July 18 for $35 million, according to public records. It ranks as one of the biggest deals in the Bay Area residential market so far this year.

Stanley Lo of Green Banker Real Estate last held the listing, and did not respond to a request for comment on what appears to have been an off-market sale.

The buyer was Zenith Path, according to public records. The address listed for the LLC is the same as Youhe Invest, a multi-family office and business management company based in New York City that appears to cater towards an international clientele, based on its website.

McNealy and his wife Susan built the five-bedroom, 7.5-bath home at 610 Los Trancos Road in 2008. The cost of construction was $11 million, according to an earlier story from SFGate.

The 13-acre lot gave the Sun Microsystems founder and former CEO plenty of room for all of his family’s hobbies, including a 110-yard practice golf course, an ice hockey rink, a rock climbing wall and a tennis pavilion. The interior spaces add up to more than 21,000 square feet, including a 4,000-square-foot guest house.

Previous listing agent Deepee Chattha told CNBC after a $42 million price chop in 2020 that the McNealys didn’t get serious about selling the home until their sons moved out that year.

“The home was originally placed on the market with an attention-grabbing list price that reflected the McNealys’ desire to maximize the return on their real estate investment but not a strong desire to sell while their children were still in school,” she said at the time. “Now that their children have left home and the McNealys would like to relocate, the price was adjusted.”

Chattha is now at Intero but at the time was with Rex, a real estate listing service and lender where McNealy served on the advisory board at the time, according to CNBC.

San Mateo County has had by far the most sales above $10 million so far this year, according to Compass data. The Peninsula saw 32 sales above that price point by July 15, while San Francisco had 12 and Santa Clara County 11. The “Stanford Circle,” which includes Portola Valley, nearly doubled its second-quarter number of $10 million-plus sales compared to last year. The median home price in the circle crossed the $4.1-million mark in the second quarter, the highest in two years.

The annual median price in Portola Valley/Woodside so far this year is just under $4 million, while Atherton is more than double that at $9.5 million. The country’s most expensive zip code has seen a slew of $20 million-plus deals this year, including Gap founder Doris Fisher’s $48 million sale of two parcels of her long-held estate. That’s one of the biggest deals in the region so far this year, outside of Laurene Powell Jobs’ record-shattering purchase of a Pacific Heights home in San Francisco for $70 million and Iconiq Capital’s $54 million Woodside buy.

At $35 million, the McNealy home now appears to tie for fourth with a Woodside sale from earlier this summer.