SELLER: Sean Rad
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1.795 million
SIZE: 2,298 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: While perusing high-end condominium options in Los Angeles over the weekend, we happened upon a luxuriously appointed, city-view spread in a swank if architecturally monolithic high-rise apartment house along the tony Wilshire Corridor that’s listed at $1.795 million and owned, per property records, by Sean Rad, the polemical, 29-year-old co-founder and fairly recently reinstalled CEO of the increasingly ubiquitous dating and hook-up app Tinder.
For all the married folk and others who voluntarily or otherwise occupy a location-based dating app-free zone, Tinder is a mobile app used by primarily heterosexual lonely hearts and other lusty sorts who right-swipe their finger across photos of other users in the immediate geographic area that they find attractive. If the swiped one also right swipes the original right swiper then, voila, a match is made and the birds and bees do what the bees and birds do. Preternaturally confident and sometimes too loose-lipped for his own good — he took an angry torrent of public outrage last year after he indiscreetly boasted that a super-famous supermodel was ‘“begging”’ him for sex — Mister Rad co-founded Tinder in 2012 with his b.f.f. Justin Mateen. He held the position of CEO until November 2014, when he was unceremoniously demoted to president, at least partly as a result of his mismanagement of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Mateen by another co-founder, Whitney Wolfe. The lawsuit was settled — Wolfe reportedly agreed to a settlement of “just over $1 million” — and, in an unexpected turn of corporate events, Mister Rad was reinstated as CEO in August 2015 as Tinder’s parent company, Match Group, owned by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, prepared for its successful November 2015 IPO that, according to Bloomberg, quickly brought Match Group’s market value to about $3.5 billion.
Property records reveal the Internet entrepreneur, who hails from a wealthy Persian family in Bel Air, purchased the 2,298-square-foot, mid-floor apartment at the geographically convenient convergence between Westwood, Holmby Hills, Century City and Beverly Hills in July 2012 for $1.3 million, and current listing details show the unit provides two en suite bedrooms and a total of three bathrooms. A wide entrance hall with an unusually articulated ceiling that includes dramatic up-lighting leads to a comfortably ample combination living and dining space with chocolate-toned hardwoods, a custom entertainment unit, and ceiling-height glass sliders that open to a small terrace with open city views. The adjacent kitchen, stocked with densely grained slab marble countertops and a full array of high-quality stainless-steel appliances, opens to an informal dining area, which connects through to a laundry room. What the otherwise well-equipped kitchen does not appear to have is a built-in cubby for the microwave that, instead, takes up a lot of valuable counter space. Who, children, designs a deluxe, high-end kitchen without a designated cabinet for a microwave? Seriously. Are we missing something? But we digress. The master suite, situated for maximum privacy on the opposite side of the apartment from the en suite guest bedroom, has unfortunately angled and remarkably art-free walls, a small sitting area with gas fireplace, and glass sliders to a second terrace. In addition to a closet-lined dressing corridor, there’s a walk-in closet, according to listing descriptions, and the attached bathroom has and L-shaped two-sink vanity, a party-sized soaking tub, and a separate space for the toilet and shower.
Coincidentally or not, just weeks after he was reinstalled as Tinder’s CEO, property records indicate Mister Rad shelled out $7.5 million for a spacious penthouse aerie just about three-quarters of a mile west of the condo he’s now got up for sale. Mister Rad’s new bachelor pad, in the same fancy-pants full-service tower where newly single “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” cast member Yolanda Foster recently shelled out nearly $4.6 million for her recently acquired bachelorette pad, measures in at a generous for one person but certainly short of gargantuan 5,283 square feet with, according to listing details we dug up from the time of the purchase, three bedrooms, five bathrooms, deliciously head-roomy 13-foot ceilings, multi-paned floor-to-ceiling windows, and several terraces with sweeping, sweat-inducing city, mountain and ocean views.
listing photos: The Agency