'Very motivated' billionaire knocks $46M off Palazzo di Amore

And it's STILL the nation's most expensive home.

'Very motivated' billionaire knocks $46M off Palazzo di Amore

When Beverly Hills' Palazzo di Amore hit the market in November at $195 million, it was the most expensive home listing in the United States.

Today it's being "reintroduced" at $149 million, a markdown of $46 million.

And it's still America's most expensive home, Yahoo Homes' review of public listings suggests. Only a couple of homes even come close, including a $135 million new-to-the-market neighbor that was built for "Make Room for Daddy" comedian Danny Thomas. The Thomas house is next door to Minecraft founder Markus Persson's mansion, which set the record last year for the most expensive home ever sold in Beverly Hills. Persson, aka Notch, paid $70 million — in cash.

The owner of the Palazzo di Amore, billionaire real estate mogul Jeff Greene, hasn't left the home untended over the past months. He's been busy upgrading, according to Coldwell Banker Previews International, whose agents Joyce Rey and Stacy Gottula are handling the listing.

"He decided to replace the original deliberately understated entry" — ahem, not the description we'd have applied — "to match the grandeur of the estate," a news release says. At a cost of nearly $1 million, he added a new gate, turnabout and guard station, "all framed by 50-year-old olive trees."

The Greenes married at the mansion in 2007, giving it the name Palazzo di Amore, or Palace of Love. Click photo for slideshow.
The Greenes married at the mansion in 2007, giving it the name Palazzo di Amore, or Palace of Love. Click photo for slideshow.

A 2-acre organic farm is in the works, too.

Greene and his wife — who dubbed the home the Palazzo di Amore, or Palace of Love, because they were married there — poured tens of millions of dollars into the home.

But they've since moved their base of operations to the East Coast.

"Palazzo di Amore represents eight years of hard work. When we originally put it on the market, we were prepared to see what the response would be. Now, we are very motivated to sell," Greene said.

The 25-acre promontory property includes about 55,000 square feet of living space — 35,000 of it in the main house — and enough room to park 150 cars.

When Yahoo Homes spoke to Gottula and Rey in November, they pointed out that recent blockbuster sales had included much less land.

"This property has triple or five times the acreage of a lot of the sales that have happened," Gottula told us. If there's another property the size of the Palazzo di Amore in the area, "I don't know about it," she said. (Of course, the Hollywood Reporter just broke the news that L.A.'s "last real estate trophy," The Vineyard Beverly Hills, has hit the market at $1 billion — yes, with a B — with 157 mountaintop acres. However, that's undeveloped.)

When we asked whether Rey and Gottula thought they had a shot at breaking the residential sale record set by Connecticut's Copper Beech estate (which has two islands and 4,000 feet of water frontage), Gottula answered:

"For sure that's our goal. We hope it'll be the highest sale [ever]."

Click here or on a photo for a slideshow of Beverly Hills' Palazzo di Amore, discounted $46 million and still the nation's most expensive listing.

Also on Yahoo Homes:

$135 million is the staggering asking price for Danny Thomas' old estate (21 photos)
Minecraft creator Notch buys 'L.A.'s most extreme home' for $70M (43 photos)
L.A.'s last real estate trophy, The Vineyard Beverly Hills, wants $1 billion

Jeff Greene in a January 2015 interview: