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Even Height of Luxury Proves a Tough Sell
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High-end sellers must lower asking prices by 20 percent compared with a year ago, when initial listing prices didn't reflect stricter credit conditions, said James Chalke, a broker at Nelson Shelton & Associates in Beverly Hills.
"What's really happening is that sellers are taking value off their own markup," Chalke said. "A property is only worth what a buyer is prepared to pay for it."
An 11-bedroom property in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, the neighborhood where actor Leonardo di Caprio and actress-singer Jennifer Lopez live, didn't attract potential buyers until the asking price dropped by $10 million, to $35 million, Chalke said.
Donald Trump's Palm Beach, Fla., estate, originally listed at $125 million, sold for $95 million in July, according to the Palm Beach Post. Trump, 62, paid $41.35 million in 2004 and renovated the property, according to the newspaper.
Charles Prince, 58, former chief executive of Citigroup, sold his five-bedroom home in Greenwich, Conn., for $5.2 million, 15 percent less than the original asking price of $6.15 million. The median price in the town fell 2 percent in June to $1.95 million, according to Prudential Connecticut Realty.
Sales of luxury Manhattan apartments are down 25 percent in the third quarter compared with a year ago, and "no one's sure where prices will go" as Wall Street firms cut jobs, according to Hall Willkie, 59, president of the Brown Harris Stevens brokerage.
The economic slowdown led Olivia Hsu Decker, of Decker Bullock Sotheby's International Realty in Tiburon, to organize a five-day tour of 20 unsold properties in the San Francisco Bay Area that began Sept. 1. More than 100 potential buyers from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Taiwan and Macau are attending parties and opera and symphony performances as part of the event, she said.
Decker said she will throw in a $174,100 Bentley sedan for the buyers of Porter's Los Altos Hills property and of a 10,000- square-foot home on the tip of Belvedere Island with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, listed for $65 million. Owner Robert Friedland, chairman of Vancouver-based Ivanhoe Mines, bought the place, known as Locksley Hall, in 1995 for $5.5 million and spent $34.5 million on renovations, Decker said.
Haan, founder of the Haan Foundation for Children, spent three years redoing the six-bedroom house in Pacific Heights.
"I'm ready to let go now," Haan said. "I'm ready to sell."
