Luxury Land Grab.

MANSION OWNERS ARE BUYING ADJACENT HOUSES AND TEARING THEM DOWN

WESTSIDE moguls want some elbow room - acres and acres of it.

Owners of Westside mansions are expanding their estates by buying up and razing their next-door neighbors' homes.

But rather than using the expanded parcels to accommodate even grander mansions, as many owners did during the go-go 80s, today's moguls are buying adjacent parcels simply for breathing room and privacy.

The neighboring mansions are being razed and replaced with rolling lawns, dens, ponds, pools and tennis courts - not structures. It's all about creating a soothing compound that serves as an expansive, verdant buffer to the outside world.

"People are trying to create trophy properties and recreating major estates that don't exist anymore," said Craig Lipsey, an appraiser at Sommer Appraisal Services in West Los Angeles, who focuses on high-end properties.

Illustrative of the trend is David Bohnett, founder of Web company GeoCities, who began assembling his Holmby Hills paradise a year ago this month when he bought the former home of late actor Gary Cooper on 1.6 acres for $5.95 million. Bohnett then snatched up the neighboring property on Baroda Drive - the former home of talent agent Ken Kragen; on just under an acre - in January for $4.9 million. He promptly razed that house. And just recently, he bought the property directly behind his compound, the North Carolwood Drive estate formerly owned by Barbra Streisand, for about $6.8 million. The asking price had been $5.9 million.

"He wanted the property and was willing to pay more than $800,000 above the asking price because he's trying to provide insulation," Lipsey said. "Basically, he's guarding against somebody buying the property and not developing it to his liking."

Meanwhile, Bohnett's neighbor up the road is putting together his own Shangri-La.

Media magnate's paradise

After assembling five contiguous estate lots totaling seven acres and clearing the land of all structures, David Saperstein -- who built his Houston-based Metro Networks into the country's largest supplier of traffic broadcasts -- is putting up a 45,000-square-foot French chateau with six bedroom suites, two swimming pools, a tennis court and a 1,000-footlong driveway. The cost of the land was roughly $10 million, say real estate insiders, and Saperstein will end up spending at least another $10 million on the home.

Unlike the tear-down craze of the late-1980s, the current trend is being applauded by longtime property owners in L.A.'s ritzy neighborhoods. In the '80s, investors looking to quickly maximize their profits razed stately mansions and replaced them with monstrous new structures that extended right up to the property lines. Neighbors protested that such projects detracted from the community's aesthetics, and hurt property values.

It's not that such feuds have disappeared altogether. Benedict Canyon homeowners, for example, are in litigation to stop the 45,900-square-foot ridge-top manse with a 65-foot tower that nutritional supplements mogul Mark Hughes is proposing.

"No one is against people building homes as long as they take into consideration the neighborhood design and philosophy," said Robert Cohen, the homeowners' association president. "Otherwise, what will stop the next person from building something even bigger or out of touch with the environment?"

But in-your-face projects like the one Hughes is proposing are the antithesis

of what other Westside moguls are pursuing.

Community enhancement

In fact, neighborhood activists actually support most of the activity this time around, because they are reducing the neighborhoods' total square footage of structures and their number of residents.

"It's great for property values. Large parcels of land bring a certain dignity to the area," said Brooke Knapp, a broker at Sotheby's International Realty. "I think these properties also afford a sense of proportion to the size of the residence."

Adding credence to such assertions is the dearth of neighbor complaints.

"We haven't heard of any complaints regarding this because people are creating neighborhoods of glamour and privacy," Knapp said. "They're not trying to attract attention to themselves. They're trying to create more privacy."

One problem related to the assemblage of such expansive properties, however, is that establishing a true market value for them can be almost impossible.

"From an appraisal standpoint, it's hard to support these numbers. You have no historical data, so you don't know what these will go for in the future," Limpsey said.

Making the problem less pressing is that none of the moguls engaging in the practice are interested in selling.

Some say the initiator of the trend was Univision Inc. chief Jerry Perenchio, who began amassing his Holmby Hills acreage in the late '80s. He started off with about seven acres, for which he paid around $13.5 million, then added another two acres. Experts say the property today could fetch $100 million.

Now, the trend has spread throughout the city, most notably on the Westside.

Numerous examples

Actor Hal Linden's half-acre home in Brentwood Park sold last year for $3.9 million, to a next-door neighbor who razed the home and put in a pond.

Meanwhile, Walt Disney Co. chief Michael Eisner is on a tear in Malibu, buying up properties in Encinal Bluffs along Pacific Coast Highway. In February, he purchased a $4 million-plus, 0.71-acre lot to add to the $7.6 million worth of property purchases he made in 1995 and 1996. In all, Eisner owns nearly three acres.

Seth Epstein, a software executive, just last month bought the Carbon Beach property adjacent to the one he had bought last November, spending a combined $5.4 million for, the two parcels.

The trend is the exact opposite of the one that dominated Los Angeles during the 1950s, '60s and '70s -- when buyers snatched up vast plots, subdivided them, and sold them off piecemeal. The motives behind the two trends. are also at opposite ends of the spectrum. During the subdividing craze, the motive was quick profits. But the wealthy owners engaged in today's trend already have more money than they know what to do with. It's privacy and wide-open spaces they crave.

In some cases, the motive is merely to prevent someone else from buying the next-door property and possibly disrupting the neighborhood tranquility or otherwise doing something contrary to the mogul's wishes.

And with the pace at which Westside estates have been changing hands lately, chances are high that the next-door property won't be on the market for long.

High-volume sales

Last year, 59 homes sold in L.A. County for more than $5 million -- a 40 percent jump from 1998, according to Cecelia Waeschle, a broker at Coldwell Banker Previews in Beverly Hills. So far this year, another 16 L.A.-area residential properties have sold for $5 million or more.

"We are equal to the zenith of the top market in the late '80s," said Bruce Nelson, founder of brokerage firm John Bruce Nelson & Associates in Beverly Hills.

On the Westside alone, at least 19 estate properties are listed for asking prices in excess of $10 million. Another 52 have an asking price of between $5 million and $10 million.

But that's not enough to satiate demand. The inventory of resale homes at the top end of the market is about 20 percent less than a year ago, and 40 percent less than two years ago, said Joe Babajian, chairman of the estates division for Fred Sands Estates.

"It's the tightest I've ever seen it, even tighter than the late '80s," Babajian said. "I have a client today who said they want two acres, a view, a big house and they'll spend $30 million to $40 million -- and you can't find that. I've been going through the streets and trying to contact individuals who've bought these types of properties over the years to see if they may sell, and they probably won't."

Such frenzied attitudes are cause for concern, according to some experts.

"We're in a new territory with the economy," said David Dale-Johnson, director of the real estate program at USC's Marshall School of Business. "If you can't find the perfect property, then why not buy two not-so-perfect properties and get what you want? ... If the technology bubble bursts, some of this demand will go away, just as in the last recession when high-end homes didn't fare so well."