BUYER: Mark Walter
SELLER: David Geffen
LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $85,000,000
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Billionaire music and media tycoon David Geffen sold his longtime beachfront compound on Malibu’s Carbon Beach last month in an internationally trumpeted off-market deal valued at a record obliterating $85 million. Property records list the buyer as a generically named corporate entity with an address in Miami, FL, but this property gossip, along with the impeccably well-connected Yolanda Yakketyyak, hear from a growing slew of trusted real estate snitches, including Peter Propertyseller and Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air, the new owner is billionaire financier Mark Walter. Mister Walter, who presides over a private fortune the bean counters at Forbes estimate at around $2.5 billion, is the founder and CEO of Guggenheim Partners, a global investment and advisory outfit with about a quarter of a trillion dollars under management, but he is perhaps more publicly well-known, at least in sports circles, as the owner of the L.A. Dodgers who swooped in and bought the team out of bankruptcy about three years ago for $2.15 billion.
Supremely sited along one of Malibu’s most coveted and forbiddingly expensive stretches of sand, the casually plush compound comprises two lots and a compact cluster of grey-shingled structures that include a spacious main house, a couple of guesthouses and a separate pavilion that houses a screening room. The beachfront property offers broad expanses of verdant lawns, a large lily pond, an ocean-side swimming pool and spa, several covered porches and an outdoor living room with fireplace.
The previous record sale price for a single-family property in Malibu came in 2013 when billionaire serial entrepreneur Jim Jannard, founder of the Oakley eyewear and athletic wear brand as well as the pioneering Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, shelled out $74.5 million for an approximately 9.5-acre bluff-top spread sold by billionaire investment manager Howard Marks.
As far as this property gossip knows, the Carbon Beach compound is the first residential property in the Los Angeles area purchased by Mister Walter and his wife, Kimbra, who have long made their home in Chicago where they custom-built a hulking and grandiose 26,000-square-foot chateau-style mansion on at least seven contiguous lots they acquired in a series of transactions that cost them more than $9 million along a picturesquely leafy street in Chicago’s affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood. Our research suggests the relatively low-profile and obviously deep-pocketed couple also maintain a not-quite 3,500-square-foot residence outside of Aspen, CO, that they acquired in 2009 for $2.4 million as well as the White Oak Plantation, a 7,400-acre wildlife conservation facility, resort and conference center about 30 miles outside of Jacksonville, FL, they scooped up in 2013 for “at least $16.9 million.”
As for Mister Geffen, who owns more than $150 million in residential real estate in New York City and the Hamptons not to mention the 450-plus-foot ship-sized yacht Rising Sun, his portfolio of properties in the Los Angeles area still includes the former Jack Warner estate in Beverly Hills that he picked up in 1990 for a reported $47.5 million as well as a two-bedroom and two-bathroom contemporary cottage on Malibu’s Carbon Beach he bought in early 2008 for $9.8 million from Hard Rock Café co-founder Peter Morton and last month listed, at a eye-popping near million dollar loss, with an asking price of $8,995,000.
Aerial image: Bing
