Tinder Tycoon Sean Rad Seeks Match for Montecito Estate
After almost exactly three years of ownership and amid an extensive renovation, legally embattled Tinder co-founder Sean Rad seeks a deep-pocketed match for his idyllic equestrian compound California’s ultra-swank seaside community of Montecito that’s come up for sale at $12.67 million. Rad, one of nine current and former Tinder employees suing InterActiveCorp (IAC) and Match Group, the owners of Tinder, for $2 billion, purchased the ocean and mountain view compound over the summer of 2016 in a clandestine, off-market deal valued at $11 million. The sellers were Ellen DeGeneres and Portia di Rossi who, as is their real estate habit and good fortune, realized an enviable multimillion-dollar profit on the historic spread they’d acquired only about nine months earlier for a wee bit below $7.2 million.
Bordering Oprah Winfrey’s massive Promised Land estate and known as Rancho San Leandro, the not quite six-acre compound is approached along a romantic gravel drive that cuts through a fragrant eucalyptus grove and is composed of a village-like cluster of authentic, hacienda-style structures attractively arranged around a cobblestone courtyard. A low-slung, L-shaped adobe that dates to the middle 1800s and measures in at a tetch more than 3,100 square feet, the sprawling single-story main house has just one ample bedroom, a single bathroom, an eat-in kitchen and a cavernous, 53-foot-long combination living and dining room with identical fireplaces at each end under a vaulted and beamed exposed wood ceiling.
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Across the courtyard from the adobe main house, a trio of hacienda and Monterey-Colonial style buildings linked by a deep, covered porch combined measure a little more than 3,600 square feet. One building houses a three-car garage while another contains a cozy library/office along with a powder room and fitness suite that spills out through French doors to a grassy courtyard and the third, a self-contained, two-story guesthouse, offers two and potentially three more bedrooms, three bathrooms. There’s also a tile-accented staircase, a complete kitchen and a step-down living room with a fireplace between French doors that lead a large terrace that overlooks the manicured gardens and grounds. The bucolic property additionally includes a four-stall horse barn with tack room, a fenced dressage arena and paddocks.
The property is listed with Suzanne Perkins at Compass as well as Kurt Rappaport and Kevin Booker at Westside Estate Agency and, somewhat curiously, publicly available digital marketing materials indicate the listing photographs “were taken prior to the renovation and are not an accurate representation of the updated amenities.”
Over the last couple of years, the apparently still single 30-something year old dating app tycoon, reportedly worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion, has become a property gossip column regular. In the fall of 2016 he took in $7.75 million on the sale of a 5,300 square foot penthouse atop a luxury high-rise along Wilshire Boulevard in L.A.’s Westwood — he’d bought it just over a year earlier for $7.5 million — and plunked down $7.65 million for up a ivy-encrusted 1930s traditional villa just above the Sunset Strip. Rad soon caught a creeping case of The Real Estate Fickle and in late 2018, after he’d shelled out $24 million for a newly built mansion just up the street, listed the glammed-up Sunset Strip traditional for $10.9 million. The property remains unsold at a reduced price of $9.75 million.
Launch Gallery: Tinder Co-Founder Sean Rad Swipes Right on Montecito Equestrian Estate
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