Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Mansion becomes priciest home ever sold in Broward
An oceanfront mansion in Hillsboro Beach has been bought for $42.5 million, making it the highest-priced home to sell in Broward County’s history, property records show.
Playa Vista Isle, situated at 935 and 939 Hillsboro Mile, features the 11-bedroom mansion and an adjacent 2-acre piece of land along State Road A1A, a stretch nicknamed Millionaire’s Mile. The Broward property appraiser’s office recently recorded the deed, revealing the sale price and the buyer.
The estate was purchased by Oppornova LLC, of Delaware, at an auction, according to the appraiser’s office.
Oppornova LLC, which became a company in 2013, lists an address of 1209 Orange St. in Wilmington, Delaware — the same location that’s reportedly the registered address of more than 285,000 big-name American companies that use the spot simply as a drop box.
Records show Andrew Mack is a director of Oppornova. Although it’s not confirmed to be the same person, there is an Andrew Mack who was the former CEO of Teavana, who started the tea retailer with his wife in 1997. Starbucks acquired Teavana in 2012 in a deal with an estimated value of $620 million but eventually closed its Teavana stores because of underperformance.
The Hillsboro property has 30,000 square feet of living space, with 22 bathrooms; a 3D-IMAX, in-home theater with 18 recliners; 20-car garage with secure tunnel access; 3,000-bottle wine cellar with an adjacent tasting room; pool with a slide; and a Jacuzzi with ocean views.
Living in luxury
The home also has six
waterfalls, a putting green with its own sand trap, floor-to-ceiling retractable moving glass walls that offer panoramic scenes of the ocean, marble flooring from South Africa and bathroom plumbing fixtures that are 22-karat, gold-plated from France.
The Playa Vista Isle palace is formally known as Le Palais Royal. It got national attention when it was put on the market for $159 million in 2015, but wasn’t sold.
The house made news last year after the previous owner sued his contractor in Broward, alleging he used gold paint in some areas of the home. Owner Robert Pereira is suing to get the minimum 22-karat gold leafing he wanted. The contractor counter-sued for half a million dollars it says it did not receive for the faux marble paint job it did on columns and pilasters.
The lawsuit is pending, and the claims for damages will continue even though the house has been sold, said Michael Dutko, Pereira’s attorney.
In October, when the mansion was listed again for $159 million, the real estate website PropertyShark ranked the home No. 3 on a list of top 10 most expensive homes for sale nationwide.
The 58,000-square-foot estate was sold at a live auction Nov. 15, but the real estate auction company, Concierge Auctions, had declined to disclose the price.
The company, in a prepared statement, would say only that there was a bidding war among 11 buyers and, besides making history in Broward, it was the highest price sold for a U.S. home at auction.
Three of the top five most-expensive homes in the county’s history have sold in Hillsboro Beach since 2014, according to Holly M. Cimino, director of Finance, Budget and Tax Roll for the Broward County Property Appraiser.
Figuring out tax bill
But the hefty price tag may not mean more taxes for Broward County — it could mean less.
The property appraiser’s office had valued the adjacent lot for $5.8 million and it was sold for $5.4 million. Last year’s tax bill was just more than $100,000.
But the house was valued by the county at $85 million. It was sold for only $37 million. Last year’s tax bill was more than $1 million based off the original estimates, and the property appraiser said they’ll need to re-evaluate to see if they need to lower the value to reflect the cost — or insist the actual value is higher than what was paid “to represent the correct value.”
Property Appraiser Marty Kiar said this property “was so unique and different, the upper echelon, the most qualified people in our office” compared home sales throughout the state and toured the home in person to come up with the value for this past year.
He said they’ll re-evaluate to see if the latest sales around Florida “will corroborate the sales price of $37 million at auction,” of if they “disqualify that sale” for a more accurate value.
“We want to make sure people pay their fair share, nothing more and nothing less,” Kiar said. “We’re going to treat this like every property — very, very seriously, [that] whatever value we have is fair for everybody.”
The sale price of the Hillsboro mansion is far above the previous No. 1 property in Broward on record — three parcels combined into one purchase — that sold for $27.5 million in Fort Lauderdale in 2015.