Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, a single-family home or apartment selling for $100 million or more was little more than the pipe dream of billionaires and the high-powered real estate agents that service them. However, with the ultra-rich just getting richer and sitting on piles of money burning holes in their pockets, $100+ million dollar deals in some of the country’s premium zip codes have become increasingly, and some might say disconcertingly commonplace.
The trend, if it can rightly be called that, began back in 2013 when a Silicon Valley spread sold for $117.5 million, allegedly to billionaire SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son. The following year, in Greenwich, Conn., the historic Copper Beech Farm estate fetched $120 million — it was purchased by hedge fund fat cat Ray Dalio, and several months later an 18-acre oceanfront estate in East Hampton, N.Y., was sold to billionaire hedge fund manager Barry Rosenstein for a staggering $147 million.
In 2019, property collecting hedge funder Ken Griffin dropped $238 million on a 23,000-square-foot penthouse atop New York’s 220 Central Park South, and last year Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg sold a six-acre spread in Beverly Hills to trophy property collecting WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum for a whopping $125 million, a titanic deal dwarfed earlier in the year when Jeff Bezos paid David Geffen a bone-rattling $165 million for the legendary Jack Warner Estate, also in Beverly Hills.
This year, several homes in Palm Beach, Fla., have traded at more than $100 million. They include a 30,000-square-foot spread with both ocean and Intracoastal Waterway access that went for $109.6 million and a 21,000-square-foot spec-built contemporary facing the Atlantic Ocean that hauled in $122.7 million.
Prolific south Florida developer Todd Michael Glaser and his partners, who include Miami developer Johnathan Fryd and Miami Beach developer Scott Robins, hope to join this club of rarefied whale sellers in Palm Beach with the announced listing of Tarpon Island, a Palm Beach estate that uniquely occupies its own private island. According to The Wall Street Journal, the first to report on the matter, buyers will have two options. They can opt to acquire the property as-is at $120 million or, after a massive overhaul and expansion, $200 million. Glaser told the WSJ that once the renovation is complete the asking price could go higher than $200 million.