Steph Curry of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors just proved that the best athlete on the planet can lose big in real estate.
No athlete has had a better run than Curry since he bought a 7,894-square foot Walnut Creek home in 2015 for $3.2 million. Curry has two NBA Championship rings, was NBA Most Valuable Player twice, was All-NBA each year of his career, was BET Award for Sportsman of the Year every year, and received many more awards.
The superstar made $11 million in each of the last three years, but he is negotiating as a free agent and expected to sign a mega-max deal to $35.3 million per year by the season opener this fall. With guaranteed bonuses, Curry should pull-in about $205 million over five years.
But when it comes to investing in real estate, the five-bedroom, four-bath and six-car garage mansion that was advertised as “sophisticated and sexy,” which he bought on November 2, 2015, Curry has turned out to be a big-time loser.
The Contra Costa County Assessor’s records show that Curry and his wife Ayesha paid $3.2 million to buy the home 19 months ago. They then spent $500,000 in major improvements.
The Currys paid $5.77 million eleven months later to buy an even bigger 10,290-square-foot mansion with five bedrooms, eight-and-a-half baths, five fireplaces, a billiard room, a library, a Finnish sauna, formal gardens and an infinity pool on 1.5-acres in neighboring Alamo.
The budding real estate moguls then listed their Walnut Creek home on the market during the same month for $3.7 million. Three months later, the Currys cut the price to $3.395 million. The couple finally took a half-million dollar haircut to unload their smaller mansion last month for $3.195 million, according to the East Bay Times.
Local real estate interests are trying to blame the location of the house for the huge loss. But Breitbart News reported last month that although the average sales price of Silicon Valley homes is up 6.4 percent in the last 12 months, the sales volume during the period has been down by 11 percent over the last year, as the tech sector has cooled off.
The average sales price for a single-family home in Silicon Valley reached an all-time-high of $1,429,430 in May. But in a sign of the market being past its peak, the number of homes listed for sale ballooned by 11.6 percent and the number of sales was down by 11 percent versus the same time last year, according to Serrano Realty.
The California Association of Realtors’ latest Affordability Index for the state reveals that just 32 percent of California residents can afford to buy a home. It now takes an income of $102,050 to afford a $2,250-per- onth mortgage payment for the average home, which sells for $496,620.
The Affordability Index for the Bay Area counties is down to just 13 percent of residents having the $219,870 annual income necessary to make a monthly mortgage payment of $5,500 to buy the average home, priced at $1,429,430.
The huge difference in Silicon Valley home prices has been due to the extraordinary fortunes made during the tech boom over the last eight years. But Breitbart reported earlier this week that PitchBook had warned that second quarter venture capital activity for start-ups and early-stage fundings has crashed by 50 percent from the same period two years ago.
Steph Curry is fortunate that his income from playing basketball seems to be about to spike much higher. Hopefully, Curry’s real estate loss will give him some tax shelter.
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