Kirk Cousins is back with the Minnesota Vikings, but his family’s housing situation hasn’t fully caught up with the trade yet. The quarterback revealed that when he previously signed with the Atlanta Falcons in 2024, he sold his house through a neighbor without ever putting it on the open market.
Cousins said his neighbor told him he had someone who could buy the house immediately, so the sale went through without a public listing.
Luxury real estate agent Margit Brandt, who is based in Palm Beach, Florida, said Cousins may have gotten a bit lucky finding an off-market buyer so quickly, but that there are clear advantages to selling privately, especially for someone in his position.
“Another component to the off-market is also privacy and discretion and not having your name out there because when you publicly list something, press picks it up. There’s photos on Zillow and online of like what your living room and your kitchen and your closet, like all these personal spaces,” Brandt told OutKick.
“So for someone like Kirk Cousins to have someone come in off market and not have to like open his dress, so to speak, right, in terms of his home on the market, his name being out there. I think that’s appealing,” she said.
Brandt said her team has sold $1 billion worth of homes this year, with roughly a third of those sales completed off-market. When a client requests a private sale, she said she relies on her own network and relationships to find a buyer.
“We have like a private portfolio for off-market properties. And you have good broker relationships and you have to know the market and we have 30% of the Palm Beach market right now. So we know exactly who’s looking at what price point, who’s real, who’s not. It gives you a good bird’s eye view of like what’s happening here,” Brandt said.
She added that privacy isn’t the only motivation. “So, you can certainly try something off-market for all those reasons we just discussed, privacy, discretion, safety, even, right? People don’t want people to know where they live. It’s a safety thing,” Brandt said.
As for the Cousins family’s current situation in Minnesota, the 38-year-old quarterback said at the end of his re-introductory press conference with the Vikings that his wife, Julie, and their sons are staying in a hotel while she searches for a new home. Cousins said he hopes they find one soon.
Brandt said that even with deep market knowledge, finding the right buyer or the right house takes patience. “Trust me, because we sell a lot of houses, it’s harder than it looks. It’s sometimes it takes a little bit to get to the right person for every house, but there is a person for every house. We’ve learned that there is,” she said.
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