When you're trying to sell a secluded, $35 million mansion in Malibu, simply listing your house on Realtor.com isn't going to cut it. No, if you're really serious about selling your California beachfront home, you do what interior designer DeeAnna Staats did: Hire a professional Hollywood crew to stage a big-budget production and film an thriller called The Spider and the Fly where your house is the star.
Staats bought her property for $6.6 million in 2006, but after a series of major renovation projects, has put a sale price of $35 million on her property. The Malibu estate, affectionately named Carbon Mesa Estate, is a sprawling 9,000 square foot Spanish home on six acres of property overlooking the Malibu shoreline. It's got a pretty intense working kitchen, a spectacular home theater, opulent finishes, wine cellar, and stunning views — all of which are major players in Staats's film, above. There's no record of what Staats paid for the production, but Wired estimates that it likely cost in the high six-figures or more.
We've seen a lot of intense home staging techniques, but hiring an entire film crew is certainly taking top tier real estate sales to new heights. And that's not the only trick this high-rent homeowner used to market her home. Staats also hired a crew to create a custom iPad app to help show off the estate at a cost of $20,000, minimum. Once finished, she bought 10 iPads, had the app installed, and then gave the tablets away as gifts to real estate agencies and prospective buyers.
Why bother with the expense? Simple: There's a lot of competition in the highest of high price range. Many comparable houses in the area, sell for much less. After all, if you're going to spend tens of millions of dollars on a property, wouldn't you rather buy one attached to a famous name like Celine Dion's $29 million private island compound?
[via Wired]
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca
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