Laurene Powell Jobs buys mansion on San Francisco’s Billionaire’s Row for $70 million, a record high for the city

The buyer was billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the transaction.

Powell Jobs, the founder of Emerson Collective and widow of Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs, has a net worth of $11.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The purchase extends a buying spree she’s made of luxury California properties. Earlier this year, she bought a $94 million estate in Malibu spanning four acres and overlooking the Pacific Ocean — her fourth purchase in the Los Angeles area since 2015.  

The sellers of the San Francisco mansion, located in the so-called Billionaire’s Row area of Pacific Heights, are Sloan Lindemann Barnett and Roger Barnett, who bought the home in 2011 for $33 million. She is the daughter of billionaire George L. Lindemann and he is the chief executive officer of supplement company Shaklee Corp. 

The Barnetts didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Powell Jobs declined to comment. 

The San Francisco property wasn’t publicly listed for sale and news of the off-market transaction came as a surprise to several high-end real estate agents in the city.

The deal follows a recent trend of wealthy people playing an outsized role in San Francisco’s housing market. Home sales in the city rose 9% in the second quarter from a year earlier — but they jumped 54% for properties priced at $5 million or more, according to brokerage Compass. The average days on the market for listings is at a two-year low.

Property records showed the Pacific Heights buyer, listed as Mister Rogers Trust, paid a transfer tax of $4.26 million, which would equate to a purchase price of around $70 million. The previous San Francisco record price was $43.5 million for another Pacific Heights mansion set in 2021. 

The Spanish Renaissance Revival-style mansion was originally built in 1916 and is four stories, with a two-story courtyard crowned by a glass roof. The Barnetts hired architect and designer Peter Marino to lead a restoration of the house, installing four stories of glass on the home’s north side to reveal panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island and the skyline of the city, according to a 2020 report in Architectural Digest.