Did a house in Palo Alto really just sell for $30 million? A real-estate shocker in the town’s tony Professorville neighborhood Did a house in Palo Alto really just sell for $30 million? ByPATRICK MAY|pmay@bayareanewsgroup.com| Bay Area News Group PUBLISHED:June 5, 2017 at 12:22 pm| UPDATED:June 5, 2017 at 1:51 pm Looks that way. County records show on May 18 someone named Audrey Scott, trustee for the Jones Family Trust, paid a whopping $30,000,000 for the four-bedroom, seven-bath home at 1007 Cowper Street in Palo Alto’s uber-desirable “Professorville” neighborhood. Yes, houses in San Francisco and exclusive Bay Area towns like Atherton and Woodside have sold for $20 million and more before. But the Cowper sales is a real shocker, even in this mind-boggingly red-hot real estate market. The buyer, in effect, picked up four bedrooms at a cost of about $7.5 million each. Built in 1997, the single-family home is 7,550 square feet and sits on nearly a full acre lot in the middle of one the region’s most sought-after locations. There’s a pool and an intercom system and a bunch of other amenities tucked within its two-story living space. We’re not sure who Scott is or whether she plans to inhabit the home or tear it down and build three smaller properties on the lot. Investor groups often do precisely that, says RE/MAX realtor Steve Mohseni who has represented buyers and sellers all over the Bay Area. “The lot, which is huge, is probably the biggest in the entire neighborhood,” said Mohseni. “And that helps to explain why it sold for so much. Sometimes investors will buy a lot and and then subdivide it and build three or four new homes and sell them and profit from it. So maybe this one sold for $30 million not necessarily because someone really wanted to own that house but because it was an investment.” As he studied the site map included in the deed document on Monday, Mohseni wondered how such a piece of property could be cut into smaller pieces for new homes because part of the lot is essentially landlocked. “You’d need a driveway off Cowper to go across the existing home’s property to access a new home built behind it,” he said, “which could take away value from the existing home.” But when he used Google Maps to zero in on the property, Mohseni had a Eureka moment: he noticed a small alleyway leading off of nearby Lincoln Avenue which could conceivably serve as an entranceway to a new home in the back of 1107 Cowper.