The surfing world’s first billionaire has charged into the lineup of landowners with prime oceanfront views of Oahu’s North Shore surf mecca.
Nicholas Woodman, the surfer who founded camera maker GoPro Inc., has bought two properties in the Sunset Beach area — including one parcel that has set a record price for residential property on the North Shore.
Public records and sources familiar with the purchase indicate that a Woodman company paid $8.5 million for a 31,000-square-foot oceanfront lot and $925,000 for an adjacent 66-year-old house in poor condition last month.
North Shore real estate agents said the lot price was a record that raises the profile of the area’s housing market, which only relatively recently began attracting high-net-worth buyers whose new homes are cropping up among surf shacks and former sugar plantation housing.
"The North Shore has new upper-end buyers coming in, discovering the North Shore and choosing to make it their home or second home," said Richard Sterman, a 40-year area resident and principal broker of Haleiwa-based Sterman Realty.
Michael Shower, an agent with Coldwell Banker Pacific Properties concentrating on the North Shore, said he wouldn’t be surprised to see more purchases like Woodman’s. "It’s idyllic," he said of the area.
Much of the North Shore’s attraction is centered around its surf and country atmosphere far from Oahu’s urban core. That combination doesn’t appeal to most ultra-wealthy homebuyers who have flocked to exclusive resortlike subdivisions such as Kukio on Hawaii island or more traditional and well-developed luxury resort areas such as Wailea on Maui or Manele Bay on Lanai.
In recent years, surfing product companies including Billabong and Volcom, which sponsor professional wave riders, have bought homes on Ke Nui Road fronting Banzai Pipeline, where most of the big contests are held in the winter.
Woodman’s properties are a half-mile or so farther up Ke Nui Road fronting the Rocky Point surf break.
Sterman, whose firm represented the buyer and sellers in the two deals, would not confirm Woodman as the buyer.
The buyer’s agent, Lora "Bitsy" Healey, whose son is big-wave pro surfer Mark Healey, also said she could not disclose her client’s identity.
"The person who bought it is a wonderful, very nice person interested in the North Shore lifestyle," she said.
A GoPro representative did not respond to a request for information about the purchase Tuesday.
One person with knowledge of the purchase said Woodman intends to build a family home on the lot.
Some North Shore residents have complained about the influx of wealthy out-of-state buyers pushing up property values. But Sterman said the neighborhood has maintained its sleepy, rural character and is not in danger of becoming a ritzy or gentrified place.
Woodman is indeed wealthy, and soon will become wealthier by selling stock in GoPro through an initial public offering. Yet the 38-year-old also fits some of the profile of the North Shore’s surf-obsessed residents.
A Forbes article last year said Woodman "caught the surfing bug" as a high school senior in California and that he dropped team sports and formed Menlo School’s first surf club.
Woodman enrolled at the University of California at San Diego in 1993 based on its location near the beach in La Jolla, according to the school, which said in a publication that Woodman joined a fraternity of surfers who "worshipped Black’s Beach as La Jolla’s surfing mecca."
GoPro was founded in 2004 as Woodman Labs Inc. in response to Woodman’s personal quest to develop a waterproof camera that everyday surfers — unlike pros who attract their own photographers — could wear on their wrists to take photos of themselves.
The entrepreneur worked on his invention during a surf trip in Australia and Indonesia, and began initial sales while living in a 1974 Volkswagen minibus in California.
Today Woodman’s series of mountable high-definition HERO cameras are extremely popular with a variety of sports enthusiasts. The company said it sold 3.8 million cameras last year and earned a $61 million profit.
Forbes calculates Woodman’s current net worth at $1.3 billion. Last year Woodman earned $1.9 million at GoPro. The year before he got a cash dividend of $57 million from his shares in GoPro.
A Surfer Magazine story in February that described Woodman as surfing’s first billionaire touched on the GoPro chief’s continuing passion for surfing in a story that recounted how he organized a surf trip to Peru in his Gulfstream 5 jet and entertained the idea of following the swell to other countries.
Woodman said last year that he tries to go on "about one solid surfing trip a month," according to an interview with Outside magazine. "June was Chicama, Peru," he said in the article. "July was Mexico."
Hawaii could now perhaps become a regular trip destination, fulfilling what a September story in UCSD’s alumni magazine described as a childhood dream to one day live in surf paradise.
The story said Woodman decided to become a surfer when he was 8 and saw Surfer Magazine photos on a friend’s bedroom wall depicting "palm trees, beautiful people, and the curling turquoise waves" of Oahu’s North Shore.
"I didn’t even know that world existed," the story quoted Woodman as saying. "But from then on, I knew I wanted to live in that world."
