Beautiful mansion is Detroit's biggest sale in at least a decade
Detroit has recorded its biggest home sale in a long, long time.
The historic and still-beautiful Alfred J. Fisher mansion sold to an anonymous all-cash buyer for $1.6 million, more than any Detroit home in recent memory, according to the Detroit Free Press.
That might not sound like much, but this is a city where thousands of homes have been razed because they couldn’t be sold for anything. Detroit hasn't seen a sale price like that for at least a decade.
The home has 15 bedrooms, 17 bathrooms, an indoor pool, a ballroom and 2 acres of landscaped grounds in the Palmer Woods neighborhood. (Click here or on an image for a slideshow of the historic Fisher mansion in Detroit.)
The mansion was built in 1926 for one of the seven brothers who owned Fisher Body, a coachbuilder that became part of General Motors.
It's lucky to have survived the housing crisis that has laid waste to Detroit, as the video below shows. (Click here for shocking before-and-after pictures of Detroit's housing catastrophe.) Down the street, the 5,500-square-foot mansion where onetime presidential candidate Mitt Romney grew up was abandoned after mulitple foreclosures. It was demolished in 2010 during one of the city's sweeps, under orders from the county, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Fisher mansion entered foreclosure, too, and was eventually taken over by lenders for a paltry $381,272, according to public record. In April, the owners listed the home with Matthew Duffield of the Bedford Group and had an everything-must-go estate sale (reflected in the photos here). It was briefly taken off the market because of legal problems, then relisted for $1.5 million in May.
The home is among a number of grand mansions in Palmer Woods. The Bishop Gallagher House, also built for the Fisher family in the 1920s, tops out at 40,000 square feet, and is now owned by a religious group. It’s located on Balmoral down the street from the seven-bedroom Charles Van Dusen mansion. Dusen, who was president of what is now Kmart, built the house in the 1920s. The home was also sold in August for $739,900 after being on the market for more than three years. A home by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright also occupies a spot in the area.
The Alfred J. Fisher mansion's architectural twin, the William Fisher mansion, was destroyed by a fire in 1994, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Ilyce Glink is an award-winning, nationally syndicated real estate columnist, blogger and radio talk show host, and managing editor of the Equifax Finance Blog. Follow her on Twitter @Glink.
