Nacho De Marco, CEO of software outsourcing company BairesDev and co-founder of venture fund BDev Ventures, has nabbed a historic Cow Hollow home built as a wedding gift for the son of one of San Francisco’s first mayors. He paid just under $10.2 million for the home.
De Marco bought 1772 Vallejo Street off-market after renting it first, he told The Real Deal. The mansion’s seller was John Moran, founder of the nation’s largest event rental company, Classic Party Rentals, according to public records and his LinkedIn profile.
The sale marks one of the few times the home has changed hands since it was built in 1875. The landmarked property is known as the Burr Mansion, after San Francisco’s eighth mayor Ephraim William Burr.
Built as a wedding gift for Burr’s son Edmond and his wife Anna, their daughters owned and lived in the home until 1968, according to a listing site from when it last sold in 2012. It is on the National Register of Historic places as well as San Francisco’s City Landmark No. 31.
The sale closed Dec. 5, according to public records, but has not been reported until now.
The history of the property was a big selling feature as well as its potential as a “spectacular” site to host events, De Marco said.
“The Burr Mansion is one of the most beautiful homes in San Francisco, and it’s also in an extraordinary lot, which makes it even more beautiful,” he said, adding that he and his wife are planning to make a few minor updates but “keep the house’s essence intact, which is one of the reasons we bought it.”
De Marco was born in Argentina, but moved to Australia and eventually relocated BairesDev to San Francisco, according to a profile in Forbes Argentina. The company, which connects largely Latin American programmers with U.S. companies, grew by an average of 86 percent a year between 2019 and 2023, according to the March 2024 article.
Moran bought the five-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom home with about 6,200 square feet in 2012 for $6.5 million. It listed for $12.9 million in 2022 with Sotheby’s International Realty agent Janet Feinberg Schindler, but does not appear to have been marketed publicly recently. Schindler did not reply to a request for comment.
The detached Italianate home with a mansard roof sits on over a quarter of an acre, one of the biggest lots in the city, Schindler told SFGate in 2022. It once had even more land but the lot was split in 1971, according to the article. In addition to the historic main home and large garden, it also has a one-bedroom, one-bath cottage, a gated driveway and a detached two-car side-by-side garage.
The property has only sold a handful of times in its nearly 150-year history. Before Moran, the previous owners — Ralph Baxter, the former CEO of law firm Orrick, and his wife Cheryl, founder of activewear site The Sweatbar — had owned the home since at least the mid-1990s, according to public records. It underwent a major renovation and restoration during their tenure in the early 2000s, according to the 2012 listing.
Moran sold L.A.-based Classic to a private equity firm in 2006. He was the president of hedge fund Passport Capital from 2008 to 2017 and also founded San Francisco-based Bright Event rentals in 2013, which now operates in major markets across California and Texas. Moran, who retired in 2023, wasn’t immediately reachable.
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