Lakefront Mansion Price Cut by $25 Million
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A Lake Tahoe, NV mansion called Tranquility is yours for $75 million. |
Knock 25 percent off the listing price of a $100 million home, and you've just saved a prospective buyer a cool $25 million -- a sum that's bound to pique the interest of even the fabulously rich.
That's the thinking behind the new asking price for Tranquility, a nine-bedroom, 38,000- square-foot estate in Lake Tahoe, Nev. that originally went on the market in 2006 for $100 million. The mansion anchors a 210-acre property.
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Tommy Hilfiger Corp. co-founder Joel Horowitz and his wife Ann built in the late 1990s, sparing no expense in constructing an eight-building compound that incorporates materials, artifacts, furniture and art gathered from around the world.
The main residence's great hall features 30-foot-tall windows, and a sky-lit entryway boasts marble floors patterned after those in the New York Public Library. The dining room features 300-year-old French plank flooring, and there's a cigar lounge modeled after one in New York City's St. Regis Hotel.
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Tranquility's great hall features 30-foot-tall windows. |
Now the couple are ready to move on, and have repriced the house to sell. "I think people's lives are moving much faster now -- they are kind of gravitating to where their families are," said Shari Chase, president and CEO of the brokerage representing the Horowitzes, Chase International. "They want to be closer to their kids, and grandkids, and it's very difficult to have people traveling back and forth."
Instead of dropping the asking price gradually, "We thought we'd make the (new) price compelling right out of the gate," said Chase of the decision to slash the asking price by 25 percent. The property -- which sits on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe and completely encircles a smaller lake -- went on the market when the U.S. was on the verge of a housing crash that triggered a global recession.
Around the nation, there are several homes on the market with steeper asking prices than Tranquility, according to LuxuryRealEstate.com. They include a partially completed Windermere, Fla. mansion with an asking price of $100 million (or $75 million "as is"), and "Spelling Manor," a Los Angeles estate with 27 bathrooms put up for sale in 2009 by television producer Aaron Spelling's widow, Candy, which is priced at $150 million.
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Tranquility's boat house sits on a lake encircled by the property. |
The latest numbers from the National Association of Realtors show sales of homes priced at $1 million or above were up 11.1 percent in April compared to a year ago. That compares to a 22.2 percent decline in sales of homes priced at $250,000 to $500,000. Sales of homes priced at $1 million and above were up even more sharply in the western U.S., rising by 22.7 percent.
"The key is the value perceived by the buyers," she said.
Determining the value of a one-of-a-kind home like Tranquility can be complex. For one thing, there are no "comps," or comparable properties, in the Lake Tahoe market. Zillow doesn't offer a "Zestimate" for the property, but notes that the asking price has dropped from $2,631 per-square-foot to $1,973.
