In Florida, the action was mostly in Palm Beach and Manalapan, the area to its south.
No. 6 on Miller’s list is the massive property at 1840 S. Ocean Boulevard, on the stretch known as billionaire’s row, which sold for $109.6 million. Following that is the 33-bedroom, 15-acre compound in Manalapan sold by the Ziff family for $94.2 million. Hot on its heels is another Manalapan home, 1020 South Ocean Boulevard, which hedge funder Paul Saunders reportedly sold for about $90 million.
Wide Open Spaces
Some of the biggest prices paid this year were for huge tracts of land.
Rupert Murdoch’s $200 million purchase of a 340,000-acre ranch in Montana topped the list. No. 4 on the list is Climbing Arrow Ranch, an 80,000 acre working ranch near Bozeman, Mont., which sold for about $136 million.
Even if other properties couldn’t match the sweep and scale of a county-sized ranch, they were at least adjacent to wide open spaces. “It’s not that surprising,” says Miller. “It’s proximity to water and views.”
Indeed, the second-most-expensive home on Miller’s list, a 7-acre compound in Malibu purchased by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Every Palm Beach home on the list has waterfront, as does every Hamptons home included.
The Carter Estate in Maui, Hawaii, which Jeff Bezos reportedly purchased off-market for $78 million, is on the water, as is the $70 million Laguna Beach, Calif. mansion reportedly purchased by hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman. So is a $50 million mansion in Greenwich, Conn., that has 340 feet of frontage on Long Island Sound.
Go Big And Go Home
Only homes in New York and Los Angeles bucked a trend in which the emphasis was on square footage, rather than square acreage.
Los Angeles homes were particularly massive. The musician known as the Weeknd purchased a 33,000 square-foot home in Bel Air for $70 million. A newly constructed mansion in Brentwood’s tony Mandeville Canyon covers 19,000 square feet and sold for $62.6 million.
Meanwhile, billionaire Nicholas Berggruen acquired the 29,000-square-foot Hearst Estate in Beverly Hills for $63.1 million; not far behind, the Hilton family sold a 15,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion on 2.5 acres for $61.5 million.
The lowest-priced entry on the list, a nearly 29,000-square-foot home at 67 Beverly Court, was initially listed at $165 million. After failing to find a buyer, it sold at auction for $51 million.
Miller cautions against extrapolating from these sales to the wider market.
“This suggests—or illustrates—the widening wealth gap,” he says. “In many ways, it’s a circus sideshow. It has very little, if anything, to do with local markets, and has everything to do with a global perspective and investing in tangible assets instead of financial instruments.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.