2950 Broadway (Image Source: 2950broadway.com)

The sale of 2950 Broadway closed escrow yesterday with a reported contract price of $29,500,000 ($2,682 per listed square foot).

In the absolute, call it the second most expensive single-family home sale in San Francisco history, for as plugged-in people know, 2840 Broadway quietly sold for $33,000,000 this past August (albeit for only $1,909 per listed square foot).

As we first wrote about 2950 Broadway back in 2009:

It’s the outer Broadway mansion from which Melvin Belli ran naked “firing a pistol at his wife who hosted a real estate show for the highest priced properties on television.”

It’s a Frederick Herman Meyer design, and an ex-Decorator Showcase home (Miss 1987 to be exact). And as a tipster notes, 2950 Broadway is in the process of getting prepped for sale and “coming soon” (asking $39,500,000).

And once again, it’s the one with the heated outdoor pool.

2950 Broadway Pool Aerial

UPDATE: Okay, while we weren’t going to name names, apparently the Wall Street Journal did, and the buyer of 2950 Broadway was German musician (think Tangerine Dream) turned real estate and natural resource investor Peter Baumann.

66 thoughts on “2950 Broadway Sells For $29,500,000 (And No, That’s Not A Typo)”
  1. Maybe they will put the Zygna logo in the bottom of the pool. Either way the house is beautiful and great location and lot.

  2. It’s becoming clear to me that these homes are essentially forever going to be off the market and are now gone. The often over used phrase, “Once in a generation / lifetime” is actually apropos in some of these cases.
    The amazing thing about this sale is that there is probably $5M of finish work to this place that is going to take place. This place is hardly move in ready for the likely new buyer. Have you seen Zynga’s new HQ? I sincerely hope nothing like that transpires inside this classic home.
    I still think the double lot place on Broadway is going to sell in the next 12 months. Whoever bought this place almost certainly looked at that home too. Interesting conclusion that this was the one to move.

  3. I’m not sure why the protesters are wasting their time on the Port of Oakland or the plaza along the Embarcadero… they should be posting up in PacHeights. Seriously – $29.5MM for a house?!?!?

  4. And worth every penny! If I had that kind of money I would spend it the same way. They aren’t just buying a house they are buying a home for future generations, it’s a piece of history to pass down to future generations to call home and create memories in!

  5. Well, this is one of the most beautiful exteriors in Pacific Heights, rivaled only by maybe the Spreckels Mansion. I agree with eddy – 6+ million renovation, 10+ million in furnishings. I hope this home gets the grand treatment it deserves.
    With three major sales on the Gold Coast over the past few months (2950, 2920, 2840) let’s all thank the uber-rich for the collective $1 million they’ll be paying annually in property taxes.

  6. nancydrew99, some people in this City (yes, local members of our upper 1%) have so much money they literally don’t know what to do with it all.
    The more enlightened among them donate to charity or otherwise engage in philanthropy. And others of them go around collecting property as trophies and otherwise consuming Veblen goods.
    Looking at the silver lining: at least the property tax basis will reset to market.

  7. There do not appear to be fences along the property lines and when I zoom in on Google map view, the pool appears to be on its own lot within the block. Any clue?

  8. no need for a fence – why would the rich keep out the other rich? not like the neighbor is going to lift the cutlery.

  9. “The more enlightened among them donate to charity or otherwise engage in philanthropy.”
    How does buying this house preclude that? This would be a nifty place for charity fundraisers, no?

  10. How does buying this house preclude that? This would be a nifty place for charity fundraisers, no?

    Sure. If you’ve got the money way over and above the purchase price then it doesn’t preclude it at all and it probably facilitates it.
    Yes, I concede that this would be a very good venue for fundraisers of the type where the wealthy homeowner invites all of their wealthy friends and associates over for a high-dollar party with fancy catering and pricey wine being poured and said friends and associates are buttonholed for donations to the target charity.
    I’ve always thought that some component of that, a small, but still significant component, was a self-administered ego stroke for the owners. The owners of the home can’t admit it, but some part of them does want you to come over and ooh and aah and be envious of their home and high-end furnishings and expensive art work almost as much as they want you to cut a check to the favored charity.
    I’m talking about about conspicuous consumption here; it’s not enough to simply get a lot of checks flowing to the charity in question and for the guests to enjoy themselves that evening, the hosts also like to get a story in Vogue or Vanity Fair, preferably with a photo of themselves and one or more celebrities looking like they are having the time of their life at the moment the shutter is engaged. When guests leave, they simply must be thinking, “wow, if money smells bad, then the couple that own this place are stinking.”
    To me, this ego aspect detracts a little bit from the act of giving (cf Matthew 6:1-4) so I’d personally never do it that way if I had the money, but I do understand the social function behind it, so if that’s a reason the new buyers bought this place, more power and congratulations to them.

  11. It’s pretty amazing how all of you guys simply hate rich folks. Truly. Do not deny it. That’s one recurring theme on this — very, very commercial — website.

  12. charity is unamerican and destructive of morals but otherwise I am salivating at your party description.
    I hope they just use it for extreme conspicous consumption. we need some celebutante zillionaries to bring happiness to the 1%.

  13. I would have to agree with Anon.ed, there is lots of bitter and hateful feeling towards the rich on this postings, especially from Brahma. I think if you have the money this for now is still the land of the free. Do with it as you like! If you want live in a $29 million dollar home and can afford the taxes all that does is help everyone including the ones on here that for some reason can seem to be happy for other peoples success. When the supper rich buy and transfer large properties, the tax base on them goes up sometimes by over 10x or more times, which means more money in the general fund to pay for things the city needs!
    Either way this is a property blog. We should be talking about how beautiful and spectacular the house is and the architecture as well. A wonderful home at any price!

  14. Agree with MarinaBoy — why all the hate?
    For every person who reads this blog and comments on it, I think I can safely say that none of you are living in poverty — so just as you view $29.5 million as unreachable, the MAJORITY of the world’s population views YOU and YOUR lifestyle the exact same way.
    You can bet that there are people out there who hate you, just because you live a decent life in San Francisco. The don’t know you, but they hate you nonetheless.
    But wait, you say, I work hard for my living, and my 2 BR condo, why do you hate me???
    Well, it is the same with the billionaires — (inherited money aside). People who have amassed their own fortune tend to be extremely smart, and in general they CONTRIBUTE to our society in the way of ideas, jobs, productivity, etc. You don’t get to be a billionaire unless you CONTRIBUTE to society — that is how you get paid, when you have something to offer.
    And, for every hater on this blog — don’t you have opportunities in this world??? Yes, you do. Look at JK Rowling — made a billion dollars in ten years by using her brain and writing good stories.
    So, way too much whining and entitlement in this country…get over it and get to work if you want something better or different than what you have.

  15. It’s pretty amazing how all of you guys simply hate rich folks.
    Don’t hate them, don’t love them.
    The big big problem we have today is that the 0.1% upper crust is
    1 – in charge of:
    – our jobs
    – our health insurance choices
    – our retirement plans
    2 – they’re trying to undermine:
    – infrastructure spending
    – education spending
    – government-organized social protection (that we pay for)
    3 – because of lobbying and campaign financing they’ve got a disproportionate chunk of the politicians’ ears.
    I know I’ll never be in this 0.1%. I am close enough to the 1% to be happy enough professionally and financially. But I do recognize a deliberate power grab when I see it.

  16. “You don’t get to be a billionaire unless you CONTRIBUTE to society”
    How did John Paulson CONTRIBUTE to society by teaming up with Goldman to short housing derivatives and realize billions in gains at the expense of others in an equal amount?
    I’m not down on the rich at all (I am one of them by any reasonable measure, albeit far from the top .1%). But the blanket statement that all those who are wealthy (outside heirs) got that way by CONTRIBUTING to society is simply wrong.

  17. the premise is wrong. The rich don’t contribute to “society” and they don’t have to. BTW what is “society”? You?
    John Paulson contributed to GS which is why they did what they did for him – fact that they screwed other clients as a result is between them and those clients. How did anyone here suffer b/c of John Paulson?
    The claim that the .1% are in charge of your:
    – jobs
    – health insurance choices
    – retirement plans
    is false unless Bill Gates picked your coverage, your job and what’s in your 401(k)

  18. Come on people. lighten up a little — yes, of course there are people who got rich by doing unsavory things, but in the bigger picture, the world does not tend to pay unless you contribute something. And, if it turns out you didn’t contribute, eventually you will be found out and your fortune will disappear (Madoff, etc)
    Examples:
    1. Bill Gates
    2. Warren Buffet
    3. JK Rowling
    4. Mark Cuban
    5. Mark Zuckerberg
    6. Steve Jobs
    7. Henry Ford
    and on, and on, and on, and on….
    These people DO contribute. They change our world, and they get paid for it….
    This is why superstars get paid — movie stars, athletes, great musicians.
    We all pay them because they add something positive to our lives.

  19. Wrath,
    0.1% doesn’t mean Bill Gates types. More like most CEOs and major investors.
    Most employers do not give you any choice as far as health insurance is concerned. It’s Soylent Green or Soylent Yellow. Sure, you have PPO, HMO. Same difference. In the end these are simply profit centers that just incidentally happen to be in the healthcare business. The individual is second to business, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
    Retirement plans are now quickly becoming private. 401(k)s are managed by behemoths entities that charge very high hidden fees. These companies are picked by your employer. The decision is not yours. Again the choice the 0.1% makes for you. You’re free not to opt in, but do you really have the choice in view of the planned phasing out of SS?
    You are free not to participate and go your own way, of course. But there are very few opportunities available to the truly independent. This is the way most of us live today.

  20. I remember buying a used car from a guy in a wealthy neighborhood. When I was inspecting the car, I found a couple of drops of radiator fluid on the ground, and he explained that he just topped off the fluids but that the car was fine. The next day, when he brought it over to complete the sale, it overheated due to a leaky radiator within a few minutes. He must have driven it over, stopping to top it off again along the way. My conclusion was that a lot of times money ends up in the hands of people who step on others to get ahead, and do not necessarily contribute anything special. That’s essentially how success in business is defined.

  21. You don’t get to be a billionaire unless you CONTRIBUTE to society — that is how you get paid, when you have something to offer.
    Billionaires with a B, probably most of them are not just leeches. But there are many millionaires who are.

  22. @fred — really? How did this go down — you believed him because he was “wealthy”?? Caveat emptor buddy. 😉
    And, don’t ignore those HUGE red (maybe green in this case) flags.
    Your story has more holes than your bad radiator. How do you know he was “wealthy”? What did he do? Was he really one of the ultra-rich we are discussing on this forum? Or, just your average ambulance-chasing attorney making $500,000 per year.

  23. There are chiselers and shysters in every income bracket. Come on people, seriously this is just human nature.

  24. Just because someone has amassed wealth doesn’t automatically mean they’ve contributed to society. A lot of wealth is inherited, which means you don’t necessarily have to do anything to be rich.
    Heck, I live in the Marina and I’m sure I see people like that all the time.

  25. I don’t even care if a lot of the wealthy got that way through conduct that provides no societal benefit whatsoever or even by being leeches. I’m just calling B.S. on the notion that all, or even most, of the uber-wealthy got that way by contributing to society. Many did, but most did not (at least re the wealth created in the last 30 years or so).

  26. Self-made genius billionaires are one thing, but the bay area has a lot of people who live off passive sources of income. Inheritance money, essentially. People who do nothing but take up space.
    Just one example, but I once met a guy whose parents left him an multi-unit apartment building. He’d done basically nothing his entire adult life besides paint (badly), get high, and live off rental income. He obviously wasn’t a billionaire, but lived pretty well for doing practically nothing.
    Look, I’m not defending either side of this quasi-debate based largely on false pretenses – to neighbor’s point, I’m probably rich in the eyes of many. My point is you can’t make generalizations like, “Why do you all hate the rich?”
    There are wealthy people whose existence has generally been a net positive to mankind, like Bill Gates. But there are many MANY others who are walking arguments for a 100% estate tax.

  27. let’s refocus:
    sure many CEOs are legally stealing shareholder money but what did the “poor” contribute to society? (other than being leeches, demanding more of other people’s money and communicable diseases)

  28. “Or, just your average ambulance-chasing attorney making $500,000 per year.”
    That is anything except average…
    or even by being leeches. I’m just calling B.S. on the notion that all, or even most, of the uber-wealthy got that way by contributing to society.
    I don’t think we’re disagreeing A.T. — I was using leeches as shorthand for someone who doesn’t contribute to society (which generally means they are taking from it, although perhaps there are some limited number of subsistence-types).

  29. Next time you guys eat a tomato, please remember it was picked by a “leech” as you say living off society doing a job none of you “hard workers” might do for $9/hour.
    Jeez, it’s not all Tenderloin bottom-dwellers out there. There are plenty of people who work hard and get to live another day with a roof over their heads and nothing much more to show for it.

  30. chances are the tomato was picked by somebody who had to travel across half of Latin America, evade coyotes, drug smugglers and the US border patrol and – amazingly – managed to get a job in the US!
    that is not a leech – unlike the occupy BS crowd

  31. “but we did everything right, I mean we went to college? why no jobs?”
    from today’s New York Times:
    “Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has been flat…
    If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying? In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.”

  32. ^ IMO, this is very analogous to the housing issues of the past few years. People confused correlation with causality when looking at financial outcomes of owners vs renters and wrongly concluded that by making homeownership more accessible they’d improve overall outcomes. Same with a college degree. Lowering the bar to give more people a degree does not produce the positive outcome the some people expected.

  33. UPDATE: Okay, while we weren’t going to name names, apparently the Wall Street Journal did, and the buyer of 2950 Broadway was German musician (think Tangerine Dream) turned real estate and natural resource investor Peter Baumann.

  34. So sold to a new age musician turned spiritualist investor. Perfect ending to this thread. In true Pac Heights mansion tradition, this essentially means the place will be 1) extensively remodeled, 2) never lived in, at least not full-time, and 3) sold in a few years, probably for less than what was paid. I’m sure you locals will keep the rest of us posted on how much fun those charity fundraisers are…

  35. Neighbor,
    Regarding my car story, I knew the guy was wealthy because he had a large house in Chappaqua, NY where I went to see the car. Well, I had the radiator repaired for about $500 on an $8,000 car and drove it for many more miles, so it worked out ok. This is just one data point of a well off guy who was dishonest.

  36. Wow, that is wild. I used to listen to Tangerine Dream back when I was a pimply teenager. Never would have imagined that one of the members would become a multimillionaire. He must be some Sorcerer.

  37. “Next time you guys eat a tomato, please remember it was picked by a “leech” as you say living off society doing a job none of you “hard workers” might do for $9/hour.”
    No, that’s not a leech. A good example of a leech would be a trustafarian.

  38. “Please Joel, do what they say, just get off the babysitter.”
    “Porsche. There is no substitute.”
    “Looks like the University of Illinois!”

  39. “http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/11/how-to-change-the-world-or-how-to-occupy-yourself/”
    This guy is a dumbass, and I feel dumber for having read his post. The amount of inane crap that people pass around as “wisdom” never ceases to amaze me.
    What would make the world is a better place is if people read intelligent things instead.

  40. A trustafarian is “consuming” money and therefore is doing something useful for society: redistribution of wealth. They’re the 3rd generation of the famed fable “wealth doesn’t pass 3 generations”.
    My “leech” comment came on the top of another poster. People at the bottom are more often than not hard working people. You have your bad apples, actual profiteers and whatnot, but putting everyone not in the top 1%, or even the top 50% in a bucket of sour losers is simply disingenuous.
    You can ask for justice or equality without being a commie troublemaker. Our founding fathers fought the injustice of taxation without representation for instance.
    We are more or less in the same situation, with profits shared by a few and risks shared by the many. Democracy is a living thing and I think it will correct this.

  41. Didn’t he write the theme song to Risky Business?? That guy’s obviously a genius — he deserves 10 of these houses.

  42. “No, that’s not a leach. A good example of a leech would be a trustafarian.”
    This country was founded by silver spooners. This town is a known commodity as far as being chock full of the family monied set. So what? People are people. Get real.

  43. As someone who has bought and sold more than two dozen cars over the past 33 year I agreed with Neighbor that fred’s car story seemed to be missing something.
    Than fred wrote:
    > Regarding my car story, I knew the guy
    > was wealthy because he had a large house
    > I had the radiator repaired for about
    > $500 on an $8,000 car and drove it for
    > many more miles, so it worked out ok.
    If the story was true you probably could have spent a few minutes at the computer and put together a nice flyer telling your story with the guy’s name a photo of his house and the car and gone back to his house asking for the money for the radiator. If he said no you would pull out the stack of flyers from Kinko’s and tell him that you were heading out to talk to his neighbors and hand out the flyers to everyone in the neighborhood to warn them that they were living near a dishonest slimeball. If he still would not give you the money you could tell him that you would follow him to work the next day to tell your story to his boss and co-workers (no one that lives in a “large house” will want everyone he lives near and works with to think he is a slimball crook if he can avoid it for $500)…

  44. Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait.

  45. “This country was founded by silver spooners.”
    Actually, the way it’s usually stated by haughty Europeans and pretentious conservatives is that the US was founded by lawyers and merchants, and the true monied aristocrats (in a time of primogeniture) stayed in Europe.
    I don’t have any problem thinking that people who did nothing to earn their wealth are leeches, since they generally are. People who earned it through monopolies or oligopolies or coercion are generally in the same category (which includes a lot of Wall Street-types).

  46. Actually your language doesn’t match mine, as landed aristocrats from Europe and the Virginia plantation owner set I referred to aren’t synonymous. But I’m not going down this “talking past each other” road yet again. You’re very judgmental with your words on the internet. Hopefully the 8 or 9 trust funders who likely live in your neighborhood, because they’re all over the city, get nicer neighborly treatment in real life.

  47. You’re very judgmental with your words on the internet. Hopefully the 8 or 9 trust funders who likely live in your neighborhood, because they’re all over the city, get nicer neighborly treatment in real life.
    If your concern is that I’m inconsistent on the internet vis-a-vis real life, rest assured I’m not. I do believe trustafarians are generally leeches and don’t usually produce much for society. I don’t usually say it to their faces, although if one asked I would.
    I know I’ve said it to banksters to their face before — that their industry is corrupt because a bunch of incompetents allegedly brought down our whole economy, yet got bailed out, did not get fired for gross incompetence, and got massive bonuses to boot, and that much of what they do that isn’t traditional commercial banking or traditional investment banking is based on monopolies, oligopolies, network effects, lobbying, insider trading, and sometimes outright fraud.

  48. Honestly man, if you think about it the trust fund set probably has quite a lot to do with keeping our restaurant/nightlife/bar scene as vibrant as it is. Remove those folks from the equation and I bet there would be a lot of service industry people looking for work.

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