Portola Valley’s Priciest Home Sale of Year Totals $18.8M

The $18.8 million sale of a newly built house at 138 Goya Road in Portola Valley could help to close the pricing gap between the tony Peninsula town and its even more expensive northern neighbors.

“The Portola Valley real estate market deserves to be in the same discussion as its neighbor in Woodside,” said Brent Gullixson of Compass, who represented the buyer of 138 Goya along with his mother, Mary.

Michael Repka of DeLeon Realty listed the 7,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom, eight-bath minimalist-style home in the Westridge neighborhood. He confirmed that, to his knowledge, it is the most expensive sale in Portola Valley so far this year, though “there could have always been something that sold quietly off-market.”

According to Redfin, only one Portola Valley home has sold for more in the last five years — a 3.7-acre estate that went for $25 million at the height of the pandemic-era market in early 2022. Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy’s 13-acre estate went for $35 million this year but it is on the border between Portola Valley and Palo Alto.

Repka declined to comment on the sale or the sellers due to privacy concerns, but property records show the 3-acre property was purchased by Sanjiv and Aruna Gambhir in 2019 for $2.5 million, when there was a 1960s-era home with about 3,600 square feet on the property.

Sanjiv Gambhir was the chair of radiology at the Stanford School of Medicine who pioneered the use of molecular imaging to detect early stage cancer but succumbed to the disease in the summer of 2020, according to an obituary posted by the university. Aruna was the CEO of CellSight, a company founded by her husband and dedicated to using imaging tracers to better understand immune responses. She died in November 2023, also from cancer, according to an obituary in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

The newly built home, which Repka called “an epitome of sanctuary” in a marketing video, was not completed until this year. The property has a five-bedroom, three-level main residence with glass slideaway walls to take in the rolling hills, and a two-bedroom guest home, both with distinctive vertical wood siding, as well as a three-car garage and lap pool.

It came to market in June with an asking price of nearly $23 million, went into contract at the end of September and sold Oct. 29 for $18.8 million. Property records show the buyer was a trust in the name of Wei Chen.

Gullixson declined to comment on the buyer but said homes like 138 Goya, with “beautiful design and unquestionable quality,” would be what help Portola Valley level up its prices to Woodside levels.

“It’s only a matter of time until that parity comes to fruition,” he said.