Only a handful of states can claim a single-family home sale topping $100 million. Colorado has joined that rarified group with the record $108 million closing on Monday of 419 Willoughby Way on Aspen’s Red Mountain.
“It is great for the market. It is a testament to how special a community Aspen is on a global scale,” said listing agent Riley Warwick, who is with the Saslove & Warwick Team at Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
The founder of the Bellagio and Wynn resort casinos, Steve Wynn, teamed up with Thomas Peterffy, a pioneer in computerized and discount stock trading, to purchase the home for close to the $110 million the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.
Patrick Dovigi, founder and CEO of Green for Life Environmental and a former professional hockey player in Canada, was the seller. Dovigi, who has invested in several Aspen properties, purchased the home in 2021 for $72.5 million from Lewis Sanders, former chairman and CEO of Sanford C. Bernstein.
“Only a few markets have reached that kind of sale,” said Julie Morrah, president of Aspen Title & Escrow, which handled the title and escrow work on the purchase.
The U.S. saw its first $100 million home sale two decades ago. Since then, about two dozen sales, not counting Monday’s purchase, have crossed that mark, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Most $100 million-plus home sales have happened in Manhattan; Miami and Palm Beach, Fla.; Los Angeles and Malibu, Calif.; and Hawaii. Aspen now joins that list.
Monday’s sale busted a short-lived record for Colorado set last Thursday of $77 million paid for Owl Creek Ranch, also in Aspen.
So how did Dovigi reap a 50% return in just three years? He and his wife, an interior designer, remodeled the property, originally built in 2009.
The house sits in a prime location at the base of Red Mountain overlooking Aspen. At 22,405 square feet, the house has 11 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms, a guest house, a large garage, and a heated outdoor pool.
Pitkin County has capped future home construction at a maximum of 9,250 square feet, Warwick said. Unless the rules change, Aspen won’t ever see a new home built at that size, so scarcity also helped push the price higher.
Unlike a traditional closing where sellers, buyers and their agents sit across from each other at a table and hand over keys once the wire clears, the deal was done remotely and through attorneys, which is typical for the highest-end homes.
“You have a lot of attorneys involved doing a lot of the heavy lifting,” Morrah said, noting that a deal of that size had extra tight security.
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The progression of Colorado’s highest-priced home, which was privately listed, was as follows, according to Zillow:
Land was acquired for $7 million in September 2003. The home first sold for $43 million in July 2009. It sold again for $72.5 million in June 2021. On Monday it sold a third time for $108 million.
Zillow had pegged the house’s value at $90.2 million. A separate sale included furnishings and private artwork which was not disclosed.
Most high-end luxury homes trade for cash. But had the buyers taken out a mortgage, Zillow estimates the monthly payments would have been around $644,236.
To put that in perspective, the median price of a home sold last month in Colorado was $551,000, according to the Colorado Association of Realtors.