Laurene Powell Jobs Pays About $70 Million for San Francisco’s Most Expensive Home

Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple visionary Steve Jobs, has paid around $70 million for a San Francisco mansion, setting a record for the California city, according to people familiar with the transaction.

The sellers were Sloan Lindemann Barnett and Roger Barnett, who bought the Pacific Heights home for $33 million in 2011. Sloan is the daughter of billionaire George L. Lindemann, and Roger is chief executive of health-supplement maker Shaklee. 

The property wasn’t publicly listed for sale, but the Barnetts had quietly shopped it in recent years, according to people familiar with the situation. They had initially wanted more than $100 million for it, those people said.

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The Barnetts didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Powell Jobs declined to comment.

The house is located on a prestigious street near the famed Presidio park. A property owned by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison is next door and Jonathan Ive, the famed designer behind some of Apple’s most famous products, owns a home on the same block.

The house dates to 1916, according to the real-estate data firm PropertyShark. The Barnetts did extensive work to the property, according to people familiar with the situation. It measured around 17,000 square feet when they bought it, though it is unclear if any changes have been made to the size of the house. 

Powell Jobs, 60, is the founder of Emerson Collective, an investment, philanthropy and advocacy company. She and her late husband, Apple’s co-founder, were married in 1991 after meeting when he gave a lecture at Stanford’s business school, where she was a student. They had three children. Jobs died in 2011.

This isn’t Powell Jobs’s first blockbuster real-estate purchase of the year: Last month she paid $94 million for an oceanfront property in the Paradise Cove area of Malibu, Calif., next to a property she already owned, according to people familiar with the situation. In 2018 she was linked to the $16.5 million purchase of a home in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood.

The previous San Francisco record was set in 2021 by the sale of another Pacific Heights home for $43.5 million, according to local agents.

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Powell Jobs’s purchase suggests that the San Francisco market is picking up after a few slow years, particularly on the high-end. Median sales prices in the city rose about 6% in the second quarter from the same period of last year, according to a recent market report by brokerage Compass. The number of San Francisco sales grew 9% year-over-year, while sales of homes priced at $5 million or more soared 54%.

Write to Katherine Clarke at Katherine.Clarke@wsj.com