In a tactic in selling a home, a woman went as far to hire a Hollywood director to film her home. Â Once done the home owner gave away Apple iPads to Realtors and potential home buyers as gifts.
If being Cher doesn’t generate enough marketing buzz to sell a $41 million Malibu estate, and for Cher it hasn’t, what can your average person with more than one name employ to sell a wildly overpriced Malibu mansion?
For interior designer and budding restaurateur DeeAnna Staats (lots of vowels, yes, but still two names), it all begins with the iPad. And, as with every great Hollywood story, goes fantastically over the top from there.
Staats is doing a little for-sale-by-owner act on a 9,500-square foot home she’s dubbed Carbon Mesa Estate. Asking price $35 million. The charming contemporary Spanish sits on six acres above Malibu’s “Billionaire Beach,†where Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Oracle’s Larry Ellison have homes they barely visit. Note that Carbon Mesa is not on the beach, just nearby.
Staats purchased the property for $6.6 million in 2006, according to public records and the real estate agency that listed it, and spent several years remodeling and decorating the mansion with her interior design company Staats and Co. For all the effort and spendy materials Staats poured into the house, she’s convinced it is now worth five times what she bought it for.
It is, if she can sell it for $35 million. But with a price tag like that, Staats knows she has to do more than schedule an open house and bake cookies to attract a buyer. She needs to go big, and here’s how she’s doing it.
1. Give away iPads like they are Chiclets.
Staats reasons that most fabulously wealthy buyers won’t initially have the time to visit the house in person, or even send their lackeys. In place of walking through the estate, they’ll want a detailed overview of the property including videos, photos, and virtual tours. In order to make that possible, Staats commissioned an iPad app that includes all the information a home buyer would want, floor plans, materials, brand names of appliances and HD videos.
She then purchased 10 iPads ($400 to $800 each, depending on the model), installed the custom app, gift-wrapped them, and shipped them to unnamed potential buyers and real estate firms. Total cost? Likely around $4,000 for the 10 iPads (assuming she purchased iPad 2s) plus the custom-built app, which adds another $20,000 to $30,000.
2. Hire a Hollywood director to create a film that captures the luxurious and thrilling lifestyle you could be leading if you spent $35 million on a home.
As if the opportunity of owning such a choice property next to über-rich neighbors Ellison and DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen wasn’t enough to lure a buyer, Staats hired director Graham Henman (whose work you’ve seen in a variety of Budweiser and Chevrolet commercials) to make a short film that imagines what life could be like in your own Malibu lair. Titled â€The Spider and the Fly,†the three-minute video plays like a spy thriller, not a home tour. The video’s rousing soundtrack was created by Hans Zimmer’s Studio, the masterminds behind the Lion King, Dark Knight, and Pirates of the Caribbean musical scores.
In the film (which is no threat for awards season) a sultry women appears to break into the house through the U.S. Open-ready tennis court, skirting around the hired help so she doesn’t get caught. In her all-black spy getup, she makes her way through the home’s maze of rooms, pausing long enough to show off a restaurant-quality kitchen, a climate-controlled wine cellar, and massive crystal chandelier in the foyer — all the hallmarks of a well-appointed Hollywood home. Like any hard-working spy, she slinks upstairs and out of her spy gear into a massive shower. Next thing you know, a fully dressed, champagne-toting man joins her in the steamy confines. (SPOILER ALERT) It’s her husband, and turns out, she’s not even a spy, she lives there! Staats isn’t disclosing how much the production cost, but your average middling-budget commercial runs around $300,000.
3. Price it as high as Al Pacino’s character in Scarface.
As if everything isn’t already overwrought, the house’s price tag is too, especially when nearby homes owned by actual celebrities have sold for much less than Staat’s asking price. Last year, Brad Pitt onlyfetched $12 million for his Malibu estate. And then there is national treasure Cher.
Even after lowering the price of her 14,000-square foot estate from an eye-searing $45 million to a merely blinding $41 million in 2009, Cher couldn’t get the deal done and pulled the property from the market waiting for better days (or perhaps a new Vegas act to prime buyers). It seems crazy to point to Oracle’s island-happy Ellison as the rational one, but he bought five beachfront homes on Billionaire Beach in 2005 for what seems like a reasonable $65 million, or $13 million per house. When the asking price of Carbon Mesa was revealed to Bob Hurwitz, president of Los Angeles real estate firm Hurwitz James Co., and the property’s former owner, his response was utter disbelief.
Staat and Co’s vice president Lynn Guilburt says extensive remodeling of the estate in which the house was “completely rebuilt with special attention to only using the finest and most talented artists and craftspeople to develop a breathtaking estate†makes it worth $35 million. Of course, that’s the same kind of thinking that resulted in the $275 million stinker John Carter. The few who bothered to s
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