Los Angeles mansion owner raises property to US$80 million to beat the market

In early 2008, Albert Elkouby bought a 1.54-acre piece of land on the corner of a main thoroughfare in Beverly Hills for US$18 million and set about erecting a 28,000 square-foot “French chateau-inspired” house. Four years later, in 2012, Elkouby, who owns JH Design, an apparel company that makes branded jackets for the NFL, NBA, and Nascar, put the shell of the home on the market for US$29.9 million.

Elkouby had originally bought the land for himself, said his daughter Vered Nisim, who through a family trust is a partial owner of the property. But after seeing yet another lot on the same street at a higher elevation, he decided to unload the property quickly, hence the not-quite-completed house going onto the market when it did. “I think he did it on a whim,” she said, but after minimal market interest, Elkouby took it off the market to finish it.

After another three years passed, the house, which has 11 bedrooms, 18 bathrooms, and a garage that holds 15 cars, returned to the market in 2015 for US$72 million, or nearly a 141 percent price increase. The one catch? It still wasn’t done.

“Some of the finishes were far from being done,” said Nisim, who is the vice president of marketing at her father’s company. “And the landscaping wasn’t completed.”

The family’s logic for listing the property before it was complete was simple, she said. With a listing that expensive, “we were thinking that the potential buyer would come in with their own vision and taste, and then we would finish it for them.”

But after it languished with no takers, they realised that “at this price point, the buyer needs to see the finished product,” she said. “It’s difficult for the buyer to envision what the house would look like, and that was our biggest barrier.”