The luxury air business is booming — as many Californians struggle to breathe

By Sam Dean 

Gregory Malin remembers the night he realized a breath of fresh air could help sell a mansion.

The year was 2009. Some 2.8 million foreclosures were underway across the nation. Malin was hosting a party in San Francisco’s tony Pacific Heights, where his real estate development and investment firm, Troon Pacific, had bought a house for $6 million to gut and renovate it as a showpiece. They’d turned it into the greenest residence in the city, scoring super-platinum points on the LEED certification scale. Now they were showing it off.

A woman approached him and asked: “Oh, my God. What do you do in this home? Do you produce oxygen? I feel so much better right now than I felt all year,” Malin recalls. He had installed a state-of-the-art ventilation system for energy efficiency, but it also kept fresh filtered air moving through the building.