John McEnroe, whose on-court outbursts are still quoted back at him, says his house on the sand in Malibu is where he calms down. He and his wife, singer-songwriter Patty Smyth, are selling it anyway — asking $35 million, the Journal's Katherine Clarke reports, for a Paradise Cove home they bought for $21 million in 2015. He's keeping a smaller Malibu place. And he's listing into a market the paper says has been dented by environmental worries — coastal erosion, plus a sinkhole that opened near Nicolas Cage's house in September — with last year's Palisades fire, which destroyed many Malibu homes, still fresh.
The house itself is the easy part. Built in the mid-1990s, roughly 6,500 square feet, four bedrooms, an elevator, 0.3 acre, a front yard with a waterfall and a tiki-hut pavilion that does duty as a gym or yoga room, per listing agent Chris Cortazzo of Compass; the main living room opens onto an oceanfront deck. Local agents call Paradise Cove Billionaires' Bluff, though it's two neighborhoods in one — estates up on the bluff, beach houses like this one down on the sand — and California's priciest-home record has fallen there twice. Beyoncé and Jay-Z own there; so do Marc Andreessen and Laurene Powell Jobs. McEnroe, a New Yorker who still lives mostly on the Upper West Side, fell for Malibu in the late 1970s while dating a woman from Beverly Hills, and he describes it as the opposite end of the dial from the city's energy.
The seller's calm is not your risk assessment
The seven-time Grand Slam singles champion, now a commentator, says the house helps him unwind, which he admits he's gotten better at with age. “Anyone that lives on a beach knows what it feels like,” he told the Journal. Fair enough. The market is less relaxed: environmental worries have dented Malibu, the paper says, and the fire that destroyed so many Malibu homes last year stopped short of Paradise Cove — which is luck, not a feature. On fire and erosion, McEnroe says he doesn't lose time worrying. Florida has hurricanes, California has earthquakes and mudslides. “Everyone has their things,” he said.
Our read
This is Insurance and Consumer Protection (M11) with Housing (M6) alongside. The Journal sets the environmental worry right beside the price tag: the fire spared Paradise Cove, but the Malibu market around it still took the hit. A seller's peace of mind is a personality trait. A buyer's job is arithmetic — what coverage costs, whether it's even available at that address, what the bluff and the beach have done in the last few years and what the deck will cost to insure after the next bad season. None of that is printed here, and we won't invent it; the point is that it's the first question, not the last.
Then the seller's side. The ask, by our arithmetic, is about two-thirds above the 2015 price — roughly 4.75% a year over 11 years if it sold at the full ask, before commissions, carrying costs and whatever a mid-1990s house on salt air has needed since. That's a decent number, not a windfall, and an ask isn't a sale. Whether you're buying on the sand or selling it, the question to ask in daylight is the one he says he doesn't spend time on: what does it cost to be wrong here? Read the policy in October, not in the first atmospheric river.