William Paul Getty, known since childhood as Billy, closed on a seven-bedroom house in Dallas in June. The rest of us found out in late August, when The Real Deal went through the Dallas County file on the 24th and the Dallas Morning News followed on the 28th. The address is 3515 Crescent Avenue, Highland Park. The buyer was a trust. The price is a matter for the State of Texas, which has no opinion on the subject and no obligation to form one.
The House
Built in 2009, roughly 11,400 square feet, seven bedrooms, nine full bathrooms and one half, per the Dallas Morning News’s reading of county records. It was last listed at almost $20 million, which The Real Deal worked out to $1,754 per square foot, and at the end of 2025 it was among the most expensive homes still sitting unsold across Dallas-Fort Worth. That is a particular species of property: admired, photographed, discussed, unbought. In May 2026 the listing came off the market. In June the Gettys closed.
The sellers were José Roberto Quiroz Mata and his wife, María Isabel Mata Torrallardona, both directors of Dallas-based Grupo Bimbo Bakeries, whose brands include Little Bites, Takis and Entenmann’s. So the house passes from a family with a board seat in packaged snacks to a family whose surname is welded to twentieth-century crude. Highland Park does not appear to have minded.
Pogir Pogir of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s, who represented the sellers, called the place a “Mediterranean masterpiece” on Instagram and declined to comment on the off-market deal for the record, according to The Real Deal. The buyer’s agent was Douglas Newby of Douglas Newby & Associates, per Architecturally Significant Homes, which is the sort of detail that tells you what kind of transaction this was before anyone confirms anything. Newby’s whole practice is built on houses with provenance and clients who would rather not be part of a bidding pageant.
The Number
Texas is a non-disclosure state. Sale prices are not public, so the amount the Gettys paid is genuinely unknown, as Hoodline noted in its write-up. What the county file does contain is a loan of $11.5 million, reported by the Dallas Morning News. That figure is the only hard money in the entire story, and it is not a price.
It is worth sitting with the mechanics for a second, because this is the part the property desks tend to skip. A loan at that size, taken by people connected to one of the largest private fortunes in the United States, is a decision about which assets to leave undisturbed. Cash is the expensive way to buy a house when your other holdings are doing something more interesting.
There is one loose figure in circulation. The Real Deal’s San Francisco desk, in a 26 August piece about a separate property, stated that Getty had bought in Highland Park “earlier this summer for $20 million.” That number is single-sourced and sits awkwardly against the Dallas Morning News and Hoodline, both of which report the price as undisclosed. It may well be right. Nothing in the public record confirms it, and the last asking price and the closing price are not the same animal.
The Penthouse
Dallas is a new flag. The old one went up in San Francisco in 1995, when Billy, then 24, bought two top-floor penthouses in the Royal Towers on Russian Hill and combined them into a single 5,000-square-foot residence. In 1998 it traded for $15 million, roughly $31 million in current money, and set the record for the most expensive home sale the city had seen.
That same penthouse came back to the market in August 2026 asking just under $20 million, The Real Deal reported. The timing is a coincidence of the calendar rather than a transaction, but it makes for a tidy pair of bookends: the house that made his name in one city returning to the shop window the same summer he quietly took a house in another.
The family has been trimming elsewhere too. In 2024 his father, Gordon Getty, sold the Greco-Roman house in Berkeley known as Temple of Wings for $5 million, according to The Real Deal. Gettys have been buying and selling California real estate since Gordon moved to San Francisco as a boy in 1945. Texas is the departure.
The Trust
The money behind all of it starts in 1934, when J. Paul Getty, then 42, and his mother Sarah Catherine Getty, then 81, established the Sarah C. Getty Trust. When J. Paul died in 1976, Gordon took control of a $2 billion trust. He had joined the oil business to please his father, and eventually sold Getty Oil for more than $10 billion, according to Bloomberg, which also has him owning the mutual fund liquidity provider ReFlow and standing as the largest shareholder in the California wine and hospitality business PlumpJack Group.
In March 2026 the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put Gordon’s wealth at $8.15 billion, ranking him 463rd in the world. The Forbes 400 had him at $5.5 billion and 276th among Americans. A gap of $2.65 billion between two respectable estimates of the same man is the most Getty fact available, and neither outfit is being careless. Fortunes held through trusts and private companies are a matter of arithmetic and opinion in roughly equal measure.
The dynasty’s most-told story belongs to the 1980s, when a family fight over the Sarah C. Getty Trust put control of about $4 billion in assets in play, a sum Fortune calculated would still have stood at around $3 billion after enormous capital gains taxes: almost the size of the Ford Foundation, and larger than the stock market value of J.P. Morgan & Co. That was forty years ago and has nothing to do with a house in Highland Park. It is simply the weather this family has always lived in.
Billy’s own ledger is harder to read, and no current, individually attributed figure for his net worth exists in the public record. A W Magazine profile, now dated, described him as the youngest of Ann and Gordon’s four sons, likely to inherit a chunk of what it called a $2.3 billion dynastic fortune, and busy with ventures of his own. The most consequential of those arrived in 1995, when he co-founded the Cow Hollow wine shop PlumpJack Wine & Spirits with a childhood friend named Gavin Newsom, using seed capital from his father. Newsom is now Governor of California. The shop became a group.
The Move
Vanessa Getty, born Vanessa Louise Jarman in 1972, is a San Francisco socialite, philanthropist and model, and has been married to Billy since 1999. The W Magazine profile says the two met on the walk to school, when he was 14 and she was 12. They have raised their children in the city Gordon adopted as a boy.
Nobody has said why Dallas. Not the buyers, not the brokers, not the county file. Relocation, investment, a second house for reasons entirely their own: none of the coverage answers it, and the people best placed to answer are the two who structured the purchase through a trust and closed it off-market in a state that keeps prices to itself.
What the record holds is a 2009 Mediterranean house on Crescent Avenue, seven bedrooms, an $11.5 million loan, and a family name that has been buying property on the Pacific coast since Truman. Highland Park now has a Getty. Texas has the price.
