This week San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced a “rent emergency” and plans to help people stay in their homes longer, including by having the city pay $3 million to lawyers to help fight evictions.
You can’t help but wonder how that’s all going to work out after reading this story about a squatter crime scene (one of many) that has been playing out in one of SF’s nicest neighborhoods for more than a year. A local realtor, Cathy Robles, stumbled into the story after someone contacted her asking to sell the house quickly.
In September 2025, a San Francisco real estate agent named Cathy Robles received an email from a man looking to sell a house. She looked up the address — 250 32nd Ave. — and could not believe her luck. It was in Sea Cliff.
…The average Sea Cliff home is worth just shy of $5 million, according to Zillow…Selling this home would be a career milestone.
The seller’s name was Brandon Aadee. On the phone, Aadee sounded professional and clearly knew his real estate lingo, Robles said. He told her he needed to sell quickly and was willing to go under market to do it. But Aadee was hard to pin down and kept making excuses for why they couldn’t meet in person. Robles followed up, but he went silent.
Sea Cliff is the neighborhood where Robin Williams used to live. It’s a very nice area.
After the initial contact, Aadee disappeared for 11 months but finally, in August of this year, he contacted Robles again and said he needed the sale done quickly. When Robles looked up the title she found it had someone else’s name on it: Diana Peng. Aadee claimed the document was a forgery and that he was the real owner, but he never wanted to meet in person. Finally, he told Robles to just go see the home, which she agreed to do. When she arrived, she immediately knew there were squatters involved.
The two-story, four-bedroom house looked abandoned. The yard was overgrown. Two men, one wearing a construction vest, were standing out front holding drills. Robles raised her phone to take a picture of the house, and the men sprinted inside.
She timidly walked up to the front door, her husband hovering behind her. The locks had been drilled out and replaced. The garage and front door looked like they’d been pried open — she could see gouges in the wood. The security cameras had been cut. Four chrome truck rims were stacked in the driveway.
At that moment, Diana Peng arrived in a Porsche, told Robles she was the real owner of the house and walked inside.
In reality, both Aadee and Peng are squatters who have been fighting over the house for months using fake documents.
In the past 14 months, the house in Sea Cliff has been deeded eight times, passing back and forth between Aadee and Peng, who both have felony convictions for identity theft. The notaries named on most of the deeds say they never signed them…
Of the hundreds, if not thousands, of San Francisco homes that police allege have been inhabited by squatters (police do not keep an active count but have logged nearly 4,000 squatter-related calls over the past decade), few have flummoxed authorities like 250 32nd Ave. Since 2023, 18 complaints about the property have been made through the city’s 311 line — with reports detailing deteriorating exteriors, public health hazards, cars on the sidewalk, and most recently, unpermitted construction. The San Francisco Fire Department and Animal Care & Control have been out. The city attorney and the district attorney have been investigating the house for more than a year. In total, police have been dispatched to the house more than 30 times — making the property one of the 10 most-called addresses in San Francisco over the last two years.
Neighbors trained cameras on the property and watched as a series of obvious crimes took place.
“It really has been a 24-hour surveillance that’s going on,” a neighbor said. “People are at a breaking point.”
At 4 a.m., neighbors say surveillance video captured property stolen in plain sight… unknown people packing the trunk with suitcases. Luxury cars outside, some appear without license plates…
Neighbors say the property appears to have been abandoned by the owner in 2020, but over the past year, a group of roughly a dozen people have frequented the property. Some appeared to have moved in.
As all of this was happening and neighbors were calling for help, the city did nothing. As of yesterday when the SF Standard published its story it was still “under investigation.” Today, with at least two more local stories about it, the city attorney finally took action.
San Francisco’s city attorney is suing two alleged squatters accused of trying to take over a multimillion-dollar Sea Cliff home with forged and altered deeds, then sell it for profit.
The lawsuit, filed by City Attorney David Chiu on Friday against Brandon Aadee and Diana Peng, asks a judge to void the disputed deeds, block the two from claiming ownership or occupying the property at 250 32nd Ave. and stop any further transfers tied to what the city describes as a real estate fraud scheme.
“Defendants are effectively trying to steal a house and sell it to make millions in profit,” Chiu said in a statement. “Several notaries have said defendants forged their signatures or illegally altered the deeds. That is fraud, and they are trying to profit off that crime.”
They’re both crooks with records for fraud. The actual owner of this home was a wealthy Chinese couple who used to visit for a few weeks at a time but stopped showing up altogether in 2019:
In 2013, the house sold for $2.4 million to a married couple from China, Xiangdong Guo and Wei Wang. In September 2015, a grant deed left Wang as the sole owner, according to the assessor-recorder’s office. The following month, a new white BMW X3 appeared in the driveway…
The last time anyone on the street saw Guo or Wang was in 2019. Wang made her final property tax payment that December, according to records from San Francisco’s office of the treasurer and tax collector.
Neighbors said the family appeared to have left in a rush. A Christmas tree stayed up by the window for years. The BMW was left in the driveway.
Who knows what happened to the owner. In any case, it shouldn’t take the city a year to deal with an obvious case of squatters fighting over an abandoned property. It’s probably not a coincidence that City Attorney David Chiu finally leaped into action one day after this made the local news.
Read the full article here
