Squatters Take Over $4.4M San Francisco Mansion
In San Francisco’s tony Sea Cliff neighborhood, a multimillion-dollar property on a quiet residential street has been overrun by squatters—and the city is suing the purported owners for fraud.
City Attorney David Chiu filed the lawsuit accusing Diana Peng and Brandon Aadee of obtaining the $4.4 million property through forged and fraudulently notarized deeds, with the goal of eventually selling it for a profit.
The four-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot Tudor-style home at 250 32nd Ave. was last officially sold in 2013 to Wei Wang and her husband, Xiangdong Guo. Guo eventually transferred the full deed to Wang in 2015, and Wang lived in the home for several years before moving abroad.
Peng and Aadee entered the picture in 2025, when they filed a deed purportedly transferring the property to Aadee. Over the next year, Aadee and Peng then transferred title back and forth between each other eight times. According to the city’s lawsuit, at least five of the eight transfers were forged, including the initial deed from the legitimate owner, Wang, which includes a forged signature from a notary.
In some cases, the deeds transferred ownership between “Brandon Aadee” and “Brandon Eugene Aadee.” Other deeds transferred the property from Peng to Aadee, and then back to Peng. In many cases, notaries said their signatures were either forged or the documents they notarized were altered after the fact.
It’s a situation that has both city officials and neighbors on edge. Neighbors say Peng, Aadee, and their associates have created an unsafe environment in the neighborhood, with a motley crew of odd characters coming and going from the house at all hours.
“It’s just a matter of time before something terrible happens in the house,” one neighbor told KGO-TV.
A blighted home in a wealthy community
San Francisco is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. An influx of tech wealth has created an inflationary housing market, with the median listing price in San Francisco around $1.3 million. In Sea Cliff, where Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and actress Sharon Stone have homes, the median listing price is around $4.5 million.
Wang and Guo purchased the home on 32nd Avenue, just blocks from China Beach, in 2013 for $2.41 million. But according to neighbors, the couple stopped living there in 2019. That’s when neighbors first started calling 311 to complain about the property’s condition.
In 2025, local agents noticed the home was on the market for $2.9 million, way below its previous sale price. That set off alarm bells for Alex Martin of We Buy SF Bay Homes, who told the local ABC affiliate that when he spoke to the purported seller, the person was “very sketchy, very shady” and wanted cash up front.
“They wanted to know how quickly we could close and whether we could close in cash,” he added, which made Martin suspicious he was facing a case of seller impersonation fraud.
Seller impersonation fraud—scams in which criminals pose as property owners to sell homes they don’t own—is on the rise.
A survey released this month by the American Land Title Association found that 59% of title firms had encountered at least one seller impersonation fraud attempt in the past year.
Neighbors report suspicious comings and goings
Peng and Aadee differ from many other seller impersonators—who often conduct their illegal activities from a distance—because they are often spotted at the property.
In August, real estate agents Cathy and Michael Robles received a cold email from Aadee, who was looking to quietly sell the property. He claimed he’d received the Sea Cliff home as a gift from his girlfriend’s elderly grandmother.
“I wanted that house sold like three months ago,” Aadee wrote in an email to Robles reviewed by Realtor.com®. “I am not doing any open houses. I don’t want for sale signs in my house. I am willing to sell it under market value.”
The email went on to say that he was in danger of defaulting on the home’s taxes, so he wanted the “house sold very, very fast. … Sorry to be blunt, but I just wanted to let you know where I stand right now with that house.”
Aadee invited the couple to view the property and said he would leave a key in a lockbox for them.
When the Robleses went to visit the property, they immediately knew something was wrong, they told the San Francisco Standard. The home’s locks had been drilled out and replaced, and the garage and front door had been pried open. The yard was overgrown, and the home appeared to be abandoned
A woman they later identified as Peng then drove up to the property. She claimed that Aadee was not the owner and refused to let them enter the house.
Had the Robleses spoken to any of the neighbors, they would have immediately been on high alert.
Neighbors say Peng, Aadee, and a rotating cast of characters have been living in the derelict house for the past 14 months, putting them on edge with strange comings and goings at all hours.
Neighbors have made more than a dozen complaints about the property, most recently calling city authorities after alleged “squatters” were observed doing construction on the property after 8 p.m.
Beyond the evening construction projects, another recent complaint noted that “there are a number of people entering the property with forced entry materials (hammers, crow bars) and the police have been notified. There is also an illegal unit (with kitchen) in the basement of the house.”
Both Peng and Aadee have criminal histories involving fraud. In 2009, Aadee pleaded guilty to defrauding FEMA out of thousands of dollars and was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $48,000 in restitution.
Hundreds of thousands of unpaid taxes
After years of dealing with a derelict property, filing dozens of complaints, and calling the police more than 30 times, neighbors say they’re fed up. They began doing their own research on the home and pulled the original quitclaim deed Aadee filed with the county assessor’s office that granted him ownership of the property.
Unlike his story about being gifted the property from a girlfriend’s grandmother, the quitclaim deed said Wang signed the property over to him in a divorce, which exempted him from responsibility for any outstanding property taxes. More than $324,000 in property taxes are owed.
The notary whose name is on that document says he never signed it and that someone forged his signature.
Chiu, the city attorney who is suing Peng and Aadee, said in a statement that their conduct “undermines the legal real estate market and violates California’s Unfair Competition Law, which prohibits unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent business practices.”
The city has filed a restraining order that would “enjoin Defendants from selling, encumbering, transferring, gifting or otherwise affecting the title or ownership of the Property in any meaningful way until this matter may be heard for an Order to Show Cause re: Preliminary Injunction.”
Aadee did not respond to an email requesting comment, and Peng could not be reached for comment. No attorney had appeared on their behalf yet in the civil suit.
If found liable in the city’s lawsuit, the pair will owe a civil penalty of up to $2,500 for each violation.
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