Jerry Rice's old Atherton estate asks $35M. The math holds up

The Atherton house Jerry Rice built in the early 2000s is for sale again, and the asking price is $35 million. That is almost four times the $9 million the current owners paid Rice for it in 2013, according to PropertyShark records cited by Mansion Global. It is also about three typical homes in the same town. Houseberry's Atherton city page puts the typical Atherton home at about $11.51 million in September 2026.

The listing went live October 9 with Alex Buljan and Pierre Buljan of Compass and Ken DeLeon of DeLeon Realty. The sellers are Peter and Susanna Pau, co-founders of Sand Hill Property Co.

So is $35 million a Hall of Fame markup? We ran the numbers. Per square foot, it is a market price, and a slightly cheap one by this year's Atherton standards. Rice's old gym is a bonus.

Rice's gym is still in the house

The headline feature is the one a receiver would care about. The listing says Rice's original gym is still there, with the equipment he picked, next to a recovery room with a steam shower and a sauna, Mansion Global reports. Rice famously used Redwood City's Edgewood Park, about 10 minutes north, for his running workouts, SFGate notes. The gym fits.

The rest reads like 2001 money. Versace limestone floors. Swarovski crystal accents. An elevator across three floors, a mahogany library, six bedroom suites and 11 bathrooms. The Art Deco theater has tiered seating and a concession stand, and the wine room holds more than 1,000 bottles. Outside there is a 25-yard lap pool, a putting green, an outdoor kitchen, a stone fireplace and a guest house with its own kitchen. Below it all sits a seven-car garage with a Tesla charger and a climate-controlled dog kennel that connects to the main house. The Paus redid the kitchen, the family room and the primary suite, according to Buljan.

Now the fun part. The lot is 1.24 acres, about 54,000 square feet. A football field with both end zones is 57,600. So the yard is about 94 percent of a field, which is more ground than most Atherton estates get even in a town whose main residential zone requires an acre for any new lot. Spread the $35 million across Rice's 22,895 career receiving yards and each yard costs about $1,529.

One housekeeping note: SFGate's 2007 write-up described the house as 15,000 square feet on 1.4 acres. We use the current listing's 12,520 square feet and 1.24 acres.

From $22 million to $9 million in six years

This house has been on the market before, and it did not go well. Rice listed it at $22 million in December 2007, SFGate reported at the time, with Pierre Buljan, then at Cashin Co., holding the listing. That was the month the Great Recession began.

In 2011 a buyer, Bayside Peninsula LLC, put down a $330,000 deposit and then walked away, and the Rices sued in San Mateo County Superior Court, The Almanac reported. The asking price slid to $10.5 million. It finally sold in 2013 for $9 million.

Six years of backpedaling, from $22 million to $9 million. Nineteen years later, Pierre Buljan is back on the listing at $35 million.

Per square foot, $35 million is the going rate

We think $35 million is a fair opening ask.

The Almendral Avenue house that sold for $32.5 million on March 30 was built in 2015 and has 11,504 square feet, the Mountain View Voice reported. That sale came out to about $2,825 a foot. The Rice house asks $2,796. In 2025 the year's top Atherton deal was an off-market estate at $51.5 million, and the town's median sale price was $8.3 million, second in the country on PropertyShark's ZIP code list, according to The Almanac.

The trade-off is age. This is a 25-year-old house built to early-2000s taste, and a buyer paying $35 million may want to redo a lot of it. Per-foot comparisons at the very top also rest on a handful of sales a year. Our own Atherton figure shows how thin that market is: the typical price on the Atherton price history swung from $9.82 million to $14.25 million inside 12 months. So "three Atherton homes" is really somewhere between two and a half and three and a half.

What $35 million buys around the Bay

The Rice price looks different once it leaves 94027. Houseberry's September 2026 typical price is about $3.30 million in Menlo Park, the city that wraps around Atherton, so the listing equals about 10.6 Menlo Park homes. In Oakland, at about $927,000, it is 37.7.

The more surprising number is the score. Houseberry ranks Atherton 4th of 20 places in San Mateo County on overall score, at 4.0 out of 5. Portola Valley, Hillsborough and Belmont rank higher. Belmont scores 4.1 with a typical price of about $2.5 million in September 2026, less than a quarter of Atherton's. Atherton's schools score 4.3 and its curb appeal 4.8, but nearby merchants score 1.9, which is what a town of one-acre lots and almost no storefronts gets you.

Atherton's other big housing story this year went the opposite direction: a filing for 30 townhomes on one acre at 110 Glenwood Ave, near the Menlo Park Caltrain station, under the state's SB 79, which we covered in August. Thirty homes on one acre there. One house on 1.24 acres here. Same town.

At $35 million, the house Rice built would not even be the priciest Atherton deal of 2026. A spec home fetched $45.5 million in January, The Almanac reported. That is how far the town has moved since Rice sold for $9 million. To see how its six neighborhoods compare, from Lloyden Park to West Atherton, start with Houseberry's Atherton neighborhood ranking.

Sources

• SFGate, "49ers legend Jerry Rice custom-built this Bay Area home on the market for $35M," October 9, 2026: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/jerry-rice-atherton-former-home-22470439.php
• Mansion Global, "Silicon Valley Mansion Built for NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice Hits the Market for $35 Million," October 9, 2026: https://www.mansionglobal.com/amp/articles/silicon-valley-mansion-built-for-nfl-hall-of-famer-jerry-rice-hits-the-market-for-35-million-7eab3062
• SFGate, "Rice's estate in Atherton on market for $22 million," December 2007: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Rice-s-estate-in-Atherton-on-market-for-22-3300031.php
• The Almanac, "Jerry Rice sues over Atherton home sale," December 14, 2011: https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2011/12/14/jerry-rice-sues-over-atherton-home-sale/
• Mountain View Voice, Atherton sale ranks 9th most expensive in the nation, May 15, 2026: https://www.mv-voice.com/home-sales/2026/05/15/atherton-sale-ranks-9th-most-expensive-in-nation-behind-zuckerbergs-florida-purchase/
• The Almanac, "Atherton loses title as nation's priciest ZIP code after 8-year run," October 21, 2025: https://www.almanacnews.com/real-estate/2025/10/21/atherton-loses-title-as-nations-priciest-zip-code-after-8-year-run/
• Pro-Football-Reference, Jerry Rice career statistics: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/R/RiceJe00.htm
• Houseberry City pages and rankings for Atherton, Menlo Park, Belmont, Oakland and San Mateo County, pulled October 9, 2026.