Jason Weiss / Guest of a Guest
- Weed is teaming up with the $165 billion real-estate industry.
- A Los Angeles luxury real-estate agent recently held a "cannabis open house" at a $3.5 million home, his publicist told Business Insider.
- About 100 guests gathered to enjoy cannabis-infused chocolates, gummies, and other edibles, kombucha cocktails, vape pens, and CBD cream massages in a space artfully staged with hemp plants and marijuana paraphernalia.
- The agent got an offer on the home three days later, and it went into escrow within two weeks.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
With cannabis and CBD becoming multibillion-dollar industries, it was only a matter of time before they teamed up with another lucrative industry: real estate.
Early this month, Rodeo Realty partnered with Society Group PR and the Mota Group — a members-only club for cannabis creatives — to hold what they say is the first-ever "cannabis open house."
At a $3.5 million home for sale in Los Angeles, 100 guests gathered for an event called "The Greenleaf Cannabis Laboratory." The open-house event featured cannabis-infused chocolates, gummies, and other edibles, kombucha cocktails, vape pens, and CBD cream massages. Hemp plants and marijuana paraphernalia were staged around the home.
Jason Weiss / Guest of a Guest
The house, listed by Ben Quibrera of Rodeo Realty for $3.495 million, sits on Greenleaf Street in Sherman Oaks, an affluent, family-friendly Los Angeles suburb with upscale shopping malls and manicured parks, where the median price of a home is $1.14 million.
Alexander Ali, founder and CEO of Society Group PR, which helped put on the open house, said that although recreational marijuana has been legal in Los Angeles for over a year, people are still wary of it.
"So I said, let’s brand an entire house with cannabis," Ali told Business Insider. "We’ll put cannabis plants in the MLS photos, we’ll have a trimming open house where brokers can get up close and personal with a cannabis plant and learn how to trim and cure it. And then we’ll throw a huge party where we have a bunch of cannabis activations from all these new brands and show people the evolution of cannabis."
Jason Weiss / Guest of a Guest
On the Monday following the Friday event, Quibrera said he got an offer on the house, and now it’s in escrow.
"This cannabis and CBD open house is the tip of the iceberg for luxury real estate in Los Angeles," Quibrera said in a press release.
According to Ali, it’s high time people see how the world of cannabis has changed in recent years.
"This isn’t bongs and tie dye," he said. "Billions of dollars are being poured into this industry."
Cannabis is touching industries from real estate and wellness to Wall Street and tech.
Indeed, with cannabis becoming a multibillion-dollar industry, its foray into real estate shouldn’t come as a surprise.
"Since Colorado legalized the drug in 2012, the previously illegal plant has birthed multibillion-dollar public companies, minted billionaires, and brewed social change not seen since the end of Prohibition," Jeremy Berke recently wrote for Business Insider.
In California in particular, legalization has bolstered an already thriving wellness scene.
As Dana Goodyear wrote in The New Yorker last year, "among an affluent demographic of Californians — heavily invested in optimizing personal experience, micro-regulating moods and appetites, states of pain and creative flow — cannabis is part of a booming wellness industry."
And Mota Group, for example, is opening a private club for cannabis creatives in Downtown Los Angeles later this year. Think the "SoHo House of cannabis," Ali says. On their website, they sell vape pens for $70 and cartridges for $60, as well as pre-rolls, edibles, and various CBD products like lip balms, bath bombs, and massage oils.
As far as whether cannabis open houses will be a passing trend or become commonplace in real estate, only time will tell.
See Also:
- Forget price tags and bad odors: The top real-estate agent in Beverly Hills says the main factor driving buyers away from luxury homes right now is a need for renovations
- Microhotels are popping up in major cities around the world, and some ‘rooms’ are as small as 30 square feet
- What it’s like living in the most expensive ZIP code in the Hamptons, where the median home price is $5.5 million and you need to make at least $850,000 a year to live comfortably
Source: Business Insider – kwarren@businessinsider.com (Katie Warren)