Remodel while marketing? Or provide architectural plans & ideas?

[John Arendsen]

We have a family owned high end home in Corona del Mar's very exclusive "China Cove", (Newport Beach), CA. Recent homes in this immediate enclave have sold for as much as 19m. 

This home is a 5 story home with an elevator and has a 6 car (double stack lift) garage which in this particular Newport Bay waterfront neighborhood is a huge value added. The only take away is that the home was designed and built by my wife's father, a renowned land developer, whereupon they resided for over 40 years until their passing.

Now we have the huge responsibility of marketing the property. The sad thing is that we have 3 RE brokers in our family that are qualified to sell it, however, due to the nature of the estate it has to be done on an arms length basis. 

So we hire a RE Broker after vetting several and they come back with a very nicely done video/vertual tour architectural rendering of what the home would look like after a 3.75m remodel. 

The architect offererred to partner with us and we would split everything over 11m 50/50. This sounds a little risky to me in that the high end home market in this area has slowed down recently.

The other option is to leave it as it is but offer some architectural and interior design ideas and solutions and market the property for 9.9m leaving about 3-4m wiggle room for the remodel.

Having been following a lot of very bright folks on this platform for the past year I'm reaching out to the BP community for some thoughts, ideas, opinions, alternative solutions, etc. 

Any feedback would be very much appreciated.