The most famous trophy purchase in Beverly Hills just told us where the top of the market really is. Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, paid $70 million for 1181 N. Hillcrest Road in 2014. This week he listed it for $70 million, the exact same number, after adding a recording studio and a private nightclub.
What happened in 2014?
In December 2014, Persson outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z to buy the newly built spec mansion from developer Bruce Makowsky. The $70 million price set a Beverly Hills record at the time, and it came weeks after he sold his company, Mojang, to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.
The house had been asking $85 million. Even then, the trophy cleared at a discount to the ask, which is a detail worth remembering.
What is in the house today?
Roughly 22,300 square feet on nearly an acre at the end of a cul-de-sac in Trousdale Estates, Beverly Hills. Eight bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, two pools, an elevator, a theater, a 2,500-bottle wine cellar and a candy room that became part of the legend.
Persson then added what the original builder did not: a multimillion-dollar professional recording studio and a private nightclub with a DJ booth and bar. By any measure, the house being sold today is worth more as a property than the one he bought.
So why is the price flat?
Because the price was never really about the house. In 2014, $70 million bought a headline and a record. Today, as co-listing agent Aaron Kirman of Christie's International Real Estate Southern California told the Wall Street Journal this week, "we're not doing aspirational pricing anymore."
Kirman also noted that Persson spends little time in Los Angeles now and is committed to selling. The flat price is the strategy: meet today's market on day one instead of chasing it down for a year.
The timing matters too. Luxury contracts across LA County cooled last week, with 16 homes going into contract at $101.5 million in asking volume, down 16 percent from a year ago, per The Real Deal reporting on October 28. In a market like this, an ambitious ask does not get negotiated. It gets ignored.
What is $70 million in 2014 worth today?
Do the math with me for a second, because the flat price is not flat at all. Consumer prices are up about 41 percent since 2014, per Bureau of Labor Statistics data, so $70 million in 2014 is roughly $99 million in today's dollars. Pricing at $70 million now is, in real terms, a serious cut.
The contrast gets sharper. The wider Los Angeles median price has more than doubled since 2014, per the Los Angeles Times. And Makowsky himself later listed his Bel-Air spec mansion "Billionaire" at $250 million in 2017. It sold in 2019 for $94 million. That was the old playbook, and it is gone.
What does this mean for sellers here?
I sit at kitchen tables in Calabasas and Hidden Hills and have this same conversation, so let me tell you what I tell them. The lesson travels down market surprisingly well, because buyers at every level now arrive with the same data you have. Ask them to pay for your memories, your upgrades or your headline, and your home will sit.
The playbook I give my own sellers is the one this listing is running:
- Price to the comparable evidence, not to what you spent or what you added.
- Win the first two weeks, when your buyer pool is largest and your leverage is real.
- Treat a price reduction as a strategy failure, not a strategy. Chasing the market costs more than pricing right once.
- Judge the result by speed and competition, not by the headline number alone.
That is the same approach I lay out in my Seller's Playbook, and the same thinking behind my recent Thousand Oaks staging and pricing playbook.
If the Minecraft mansion sells at $70 million, it becomes the priciest Beverly Hills sale of the year. Watch how fast it goes. The speed, more than the number, will tell us how healthy the trophy market really is.
Thinking about selling, or just curious what your home would bring in this market? Start with a straight read on your number with my home value report, then let's talk.
Contact Stephen White, Luxury Estates Director, Christie's International Real Estate Southern California, at 310.701.9747 or visit whiteluxuryhomes.com.
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