No bidding war. No line of buyers down the sidewalk for an open house. Just a quiet closing, and Montclair had a new home sale record: $8.1 million for 159 Gates Avenue. In a town where nearly every big sale comes with a fight, this one didn’t.
How Montclair’s Newest Home Sale Record Happened Quietly
159 Gates Avenue first listed in April 2024 at $8.5 million. By later that year, Montclair Local reported it had come off the market with plans to relaunch in the spring. It never officially went back on. Instead, the $8.1 million sale happened privately, off to the side of Montclair’s usual playbook of bidding wars and best-and-final deadlines, the request sellers make when they want a buyer’s strongest offer by a set date rather than an open-ended back and forth.
Jake Kushner, who now runs Kush Connection, the cannabis dispensary on Bloomfield Avenue, grew up in the house and still keeps an ear to the ground on Montclair real estate. He has a theory about how that works. “I heard that the people who represented the sale, the real estate brokers, they don’t do these standard sales where they list them in a more typical fashion,” he said. “It’s almost like an off-market kind of listing and maybe there’s a specific clientele that they share this with, and maybe that’s how they were able to get that price.” No open house line, just a call to the right buyer.
Before this was a story about brokers and back channels, though, it was a story about a house Kushner grew up in.
From the Kushner Family Home to a $5 Million Renovation
159 Gates Avenue was built in 1910 by architecture firm Van Vleck and Goldsmith, and it belonged to the Kushner family for years before the current sale. Kushner was heading into seventh grade when his family bought the house, and it stuck with him…