For the ultrawealthy, it used to largely be the case that they wanted their flashy home purchases and sales to be made very public: Think drone shots, a glossy listing, and a splashy press release naming the owner and buyer.
All of that served as a way to show off and solidify their wealth. But now the upper echelons of the housing market want to be much more private, and a lot of it has to do with privacy being the new sought-after luxury.
A growing class of ultrawealthy buyers, particularly tech and AI executives who have moved to Silicon Valley, are deliberately routing their home purchases through limited liability companies, privacy trusts, and so-called “whisper” listings that never touch the multiple listing service.
Their end goal isn’t getting the best deal they can possibly get: It’s more about maintaining anonymity and thinning their paper trails to ensure security. This new phenomenon is called stealth wealth buying, Ken DeLeon, founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based DeLeon Realty, told Fortune earlier this year.
The shift started about three years ago, said DeLeon, who is one of Silicon Valley’s top-producing luxury brokers and was once ranked the nation’s No. 1 real estate agent by the Wall Street Journal and RealTrends.That was when the market capitalization of tech companies began to grow again, and more wealthy people began flooding Silicon Valley.
Photo courtesy DeLeon Realty
“Increased wealth brought about greater security concerns and a stronger desire for privacy,” he said. “Over the last year, AI has driven some of the greatest wealth creation Silicon Valley has seen in 25 years, while also becoming an increasingly controversial topic. As a result, the desire for privacy has grown even stronger.”
Meanwhile, home prices in Silicon Valley have continued to rise. Atherton posted a median sale price of $8.33 million in 2025, a 5% gain from the previous year and a new high for the longtime Bay Area billionaire enclave, according to PropertyShark. The town’s top deal of the year was a $51.5 million sale of a 10,000-square-foot estate once owned by tech executive and multimillionaire Stephen Luczo, and it traded off-market, Palo Alto Online reported.
That detail is key: For the buyers behind these transactions, exposure about their home transactions is more of a liability than a flex.
Think back to April, when a man threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman‘s North Beach home in San Francisco, setting fire to an exterior gate. Authorities later alleged the 20-year-old suspect had traveled from Texas, intending to kill Altman, and had written about AI’s purported risk to humanity.
“Events like this have made people want to distance themselves further from public attention and increased their desire to remain anonymous,” DeLeon said.
Inside a ‘whisper’ listing
The mechanics of stealth-wealth home transactions look nothing like a standard sale. There is no Zillow notification, no open house, and often no sign in the yard. A listing might circulate among just three to five elite brokers in a given metro before quietly trading hands, DeLeon said.
“Some sellers prioritize privacy over price and are willing to sell off market to avoid exposure,” he added.
Outside of Silicon Valley, off-market residential sales have surged at least 30% year-over-year in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens between 2024 and 2025, with Brooklyn alone logging roughly $5.4 billion in privately marketed sales, according to data reported by The Real Deal.
Anonymity extends beyond just the listing. For higher-end clients, DeLeon said, he routinely recommends taking title through an LLC or a privacy trust—but with one key detail.
“Sophisticated clients want to structure things carefully, making sure the manager of the LLC is not someone directly associated with them, such as their personal attorney,” he said. “The goal is to ensure that, even if someone digs into ownership records, they still cannot easily connect the property back to the principal owner.”
And the effort toward maintaining privacy doesn’t stop at closing.
“Utilities, deliveries, and even small packages, such as toys ordered for their children, are often placed under the LLC or trust name rather than their personal name,” DeLeon said, in order for owners to maintain a low profile.
The broker as a buffer
It’s not just the buyers’ or sellers’ effort to keep a low profile. The job of luxury agents has shifted, too. DeLeon said he’s routinely asked to act as a buffer by meeting vendors, signing for inspections, and fielding questions and details that an owner would normally handle.
Sometimes clients won’t even want agents or sellers to know who they are, he added.
“In some cases, both sides of the transaction conceal their identities,” he said. “I try to serve as a buffer for my clients throughout the entire process, ensuring that vendors and other involved parties do not know the identity of the principal.”
The cost of maintaining a low profile
While stealth-wealth buyers win privacy, they pay for it—literally. That’s because off-market sales tend to reach a smaller pool of buyers, which means less competition and often lower offers.
“Most sellers understand that when they sell off the market, they are usually accepting a lower sales price,” DeLeon said. “In general, studies have shown that off-market listings across nearly all price points tend to sell for less than they would if they were fully exposed to the open market.”
A February 2025 Zillow Research analysis of 2.7 million home sales also shows that homes sold off the MLS in 2023 and 2024 typically went for almost $5,000 less than those listed on the MLS. That represents a median 1.5% gap, totaling more than $1 billion in lost proceeds for sellers. In California, the gap widened to 3.7%, or roughly $30,075 per home.
That tradeoff has caught regulators’ attention. The National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy requires agents to submit listings within one business day of publicly marketing them. As of March 2025, sellers can instruct agents to use a new “delayed marketing exempt listing” option, but only after signing a written disclosure acknowledging the trade-offs.
DeLeon said brokerages still push off-market sales for the wrong reasons.
“Unfortunately, many brokerages encourage off-market sales not to protect sellers’ privacy, but to minimize marketing costs and increase the likelihood of double-ending their commission,” he said.
Whether stealth wealth practices will become even more prevalent is still in question.
“If sellers are told the true cost of selling off-market—that protecting privacy will likely lower their sales price—then I think the pendulum may swing back where sellers prefer to get full exposure for their home and thereby maximize their sales price,” DeLeon said, “even if it means some loss of privacy.”
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on May 24, 2026.