Mansion’s $3 million sale tops high-end price trend
Few people have ever driven the sloping driveway off Pinehurst Drive that leads to one of Bakersfield’s most luxurious homes — and those who have were required to remove their shoes before stepping inside.
That may or may not change now that the four-bedroom, fivebath mansion is about to sell, having spent more than a year on the market, to a cash buyer from Hong Kong for the original list price of $2.995 million.
The pending transaction offers a glimpse into the city’s super high-end home market, where prices tend to fluctuate at an exaggerated pace and, from an investment perspective, they often don’t pan out.
Perhaps making money on the deal isn’t the point. From the looks of 4000 Pinehurst, in the Bakersfield Country Club neighborhood, maybe it’s more about living in a home that could double as an annex to the Getty Center museum in Los Angeles.
At 6,588 square feet on a manicured lot measuring 1.36 acres, the house features 22-foot-high ceilings, six fireplaces, marble bathtubs and dual walk-in closets. Its sound system extends throughout the interior, with a second-story glass bridge, an upstairs kitchenette and full home automation, down to the motorized window shades.
The home was designed by the current co-owner, who works in Singapore as a commodity-futures specialist managing a $5 billion portfolio of assets for equity investors around the world.
Alexander Gansch and his wife bought the property in the early 2000s before having it demolished about eight years later. Kern County records indicate the rebuild was completed in 2013 — or two years earlier, according to information posted by sales agent Mary Christenson. She said escrow is scheduled to close within two weeks to an unidentified buyer who plans to live there full time.
The home is in some ways
an anomaly, priced at the very top of Bakersfield’s luxury market in a part of town where no homes sold for more than $1 million during either of the last two years.
Research by Bakersfield’s Team Gordon real estate family shows 44 homes sold in the city’s northwest for $1 million or more during that twoyear period. Those came in addition to 28 such transactions in Seven Oaks, six in Olde Stockdale or Stockdale Estates, and one in Westchester.
Team Gordon noted that such homes have tended to perform better than lower-priced properties when the market is strong, but worse when it’s not.
“Prices for luxury homes increased the most during the boom and are now decreasing the most, relative to other properties,” the wife-husband-son team said by email.
They added that Bakersfield’s highest home sale price in the past year — $2 million for an 8,000-square-foot golf course property in Seven Oaks — was a third less money that the most expensive to change hands during the previous 12 months.
Appraiser Gary Crabtree, a keen observer of the local home market, said by email Bakersfield’s luxury home market ranges between $1 million and $3 million, with most of those properties surrounding the city’s golf courses. He noted that homes in that category made up just 1 percent of the 5,841 homes sold citywide in 2022.
Crabtree said the owners tend to be professionals, such as attorneys and doctors, or entrepreneurs — even sports celebrities. When they eventually sell, he noted, they don’t typically get what they paid.
“It has been my experience that these homes never resell for their original cost,” he said. “In fact, most of the time, much less.”
“I know of one home,” he continued, “that cost $4 million to build and resold four years later for $2.2 million.”
An exception may be the mansion at 4000 Pinehurst, which the county most recently assessed at $1.27 million.
“It is very custom,” he wrote, with “‘all white’ finishes throughout.”