When real estate developer Richard Kurtz put his 30,000-square-foot, 12-bedroom, 19-bath home on the market for $68 million in 2010, it was the most expensive property in New Jersey. Seven years later, the house, which sits on a little more than six acres in Alpine, a suburb about eight miles from New York City, remains both unsold and at the top of the market. The only change is its price: It will soon be relisted for a mere $48 million.
“I’m not giving it away,” Kurtz said in a phone interview. “There’s a lot of house, with a lot of value, and a very smart buyer will recognize that.” He’s in no rush to sell it, he said. “I could sit with it for another four or five years,” he continued. “But I’d prefer not to.”
If it remains in his possession for an additional four or five years—an unenviable situation, given that he's never lived in it and said it costs him about $400,000 a year to maintain—it will probably be for reasons similar to why it's been sitting on the market for years in the first place.
The Owner's Take
The simplest explanation is its price. Only a finite number of people both have that kind of money and are willing to spend it on a new-construction home in suburban New Jersey. Kurtz himself is first to admit this. “You’re dealing with a limited audience,” he said. “I spoke to somebody who deals with athletes, and even if they make $15 million a year, they can’t afford this house.”
Kurtz also attributes the home’s stagnation to the fact that he listed, delisted, and then relisted the house multiple times.
The saga began in 2006, when he purchased the estate from Henry Clay Frick II, grandson of robber baron Henry Clay Frick, for $58 million. (Part of the purchase agreement stipulated that Frick, who had Alzheimers disease, could live on the property until he died, which happened about a year later.) The property encompassed more than 60 acres, and Kurtz set about turning it into parcels, choosing a six-acre piece of property to build his and his wife’s dream home. (Forty of the acres remain undeveloped.)
Designed by Morristown, N.J., architect James Paragano, the house has an indoor basketball court, an elevator, an 11-car garage, a ballroom, a movie theater, a pool, and a tennis court. All told, including the cost of land, Kurtz said, the house cost about $38 million to build, a little more than $1,260 per square foot.
Even before construction was finished, though, the couple listed it for sale. “We were going to move into it, and then there were marital problems,” Kurtz said. “She’s from Beverly Hills and decided that Alpine wasn’t for her, and it took her a few years to decide that.” (The couple has since divorced.)
Kurtz said that the home’s on-again, off-again listing has hurt its prospects and that, despite the initial mountain of press coverage, no real buyers came knocking. “There was some interest, but not a lot of interest. I’d say it was spotty,” he said. “We never fully marketed the property.”
There was another factor, Kurtz speculated: New Jersey, itself. “There’s been some overall negativity with the state of New Jersey,” he said. “Just so many politicians that have gone to jail, and the Jersey Shore and Snooki and all that nonsense.” Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal didn’t help either, Kurtz said. Add in the state’s well-publicized debt issues, “and I think the higher end [of the market] has gotten hurt a little,” he said, predicting it will “come back, of course; the location is spectacular.”