Whether Owned by J. Lo or Mark Wahlberg, Los Angeles’s Biggest Mansions Are Getting Price Cuts to Match
Whether Owned by J. Lo or Mark Wahlberg, Los Angeles’s Biggest Mansions Are Getting Price Cuts to Match “Pie-in-the-sky” pricing is rampant, with many sellers eventually settling for tens of millions less than they were initially asking
BY CASEY FARMER
Source: Getty Image
The Los Angeles neighborhood of Beverly Park is known for its concentration of large houses and for its famous residents.
There are significant discounts to be had for trophy homes in and around Los Angeles.
Earlier in September, Milwaukee Brewers minority owner and financier Robert Beyer finally soldhis custom-built L.A. megamansion. He had been trying to sell the Brentwood estate since September 2023, when he listed it for $75 million. It sold for $44 million—a more than 40% discount.
Also in September, Ricky Martin’s former Beverly Hills home got a $25.1 million discount off its initial $75 million ask.
Robert Beyer’s custom estate sold earlier in September after spending two years on the market.Photo: Tyler Hogan
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s former marital home in Beverly Hills also took a hit this month and is now asking $52 million, $16 million less than when it hit the market in July 2024 for $68 million.
These aren’t abnormalities for Los Angeles County’s $50 million-plus sector. In fact, over the past three years, 25 homes that were initially listed for $50 million and above eventually sold with an average discount of 32%, according to data provided to Mansion Global by Realtor.com.
Photo Credit Marc Angeles
Still on the market, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s megamansion has seen $16 million in price reductions.Photo: Marc Angeles
In the rarefied market for Los Angeles trophy homes, it’s practically a rule that listings will hit the market with overly aspirational pricing.
In the past three years, the only $50 million-plus listing to sell for close to its asking price was Mark Wahlberg’s former Beverly Park megamansion, which Paris Hilton bought in June. She paid $63.1 million, about $5 million less than the asking price—the only single-digit discount in the data provided to Mansion Global.
But Wahlberg, who had the estate built in 2014, didn’t have the same luck when he sold it. He initially asked $87.5 million in April 2022, and eventually found a buyer who paid $55 million in February 2023.
Photo Credit: Tyler Hogan
The steepest discount, though, was for a penthouse at the Four Seasons Private Residences Los Angeles. The unfinished unit hit the market in July 2022 for $75 million and finally sold in February for $15 million, 80% off the original ask.
“Where did they come up with that number? Never in the history of L.A. have penthouses sold for that,” said Santiago Arana of the Agency, who represented the buyer in the deal. “It was an empty canvas…It might be worth, at some point, $50 [million] or $60 [million], but after putting in the money.”
There are a number of reasons why L.A.’s trophy homes are selling at a discount, or otherwise sitting on the market for long stretches of time, Arana said.
One of which is Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax that went into effect in April 2023 and places a 4% tax on properties sold over $5 million and a 5.5% tax on $10 million-plus sales. Additionally, the overall city’s market is still suffering the effects of January’s catastrophic fires, which have made it even harder to get the city’s properties insured.
These factors, plus coming down from the Covid-era sales boom, has left L.A.’s housing market stagnant.
“We used to see more clear cycles—every six, seven years, the market would adjust,” Arana said. “What Covid did, in my opinion, was make us skip a cycle—the market got really active. But there’s only so long you can sustain something that keeps going up and up and up. 2023 came and boom, now we have a down market, which is going to last a few years.”
The bigger problem is how pricing affects overall transactions, Arana said.
In L.A.’s mansion market, seeing neighbors get high eight figures or even nine figures for their home is setting unrealistic expectations for some.
“It’s a matter of ‘if they got that, I can get that,’ but it’s pie-in-the-sky thinking,” said Jade Mills, a luxury agent at Coldwell Banker Realty.
Egos, rather than logic, are often at play when it comes to overpricing a property.
“Everybody thinks their house is better than everybody else’s house,” Arana said. “A combination of an unrealistic person fed by an agent that is not bringing them to reality is the perfect storm.”
These overpriced properties present wealthy buyers with an opportunity to score a deal, if they time their offers right.
Price cuts can sometimes signal the seller is getting more eager to offload the property.
The buyers “think there’s a great amount of urgency, so then they might even offer less than they would if it was priced right in the beginning,” Mills said.
Some stubborn sellers might not be so willing to give in. “Maybe the seller is exhausted from those reductions, and they want to stay very close to that number,” she added.
On top of seeking discounts on big-ticket properties, Arana advised to act sooner rather than later, before the market recovers and buyers lose the upper hand.
“In the high-end areas, we’re the last ones to go down and the first ones to bounce back,” he said. “So by the time you hear people talking about turning a corner, then it’s too late—you didn’t buy at the bottom. It’s already the time to buy, and, in my opinion, it’s going to start to slowly climb back.”