Honey, Barry Sherman Forest Hill lot sells for $7.4M,
Forest Hill site was spot for Honey’s dream house that will never be built
The pie slice-shaped lot where Honey Sherman was planning to build her dream home — more than one half-acre in the heart of Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood — has sold for $7.4 million.
A builder, who plans to construct two homes, picked up the property two weeks ago, paying $900,000 less than the current listing price. A year ago, the property was first offered at $9.9 million.
Toronto realtor Judi Gottlieb, who was friends with Honey and Barry Sherman, handled the transaction.
“I wish Honey and Barry were still alive and could have built their home,” Gottlieb told the Star.
The transaction has been listed on the Toronto Real Estate Board’s database, but the full details of the sale, including the name of the buyer, are not yet recorded at the provincial land registry. Gottlieb would not disclose the identity of the purchasers, except to say that it is a builder.
Barry, founder of generic giant Apotex, and his wife Honey, both leading philanthropists, were found dead in the basement swimming pool room in their house on Old Colony Road in Toronto on Dec. 15, 2017. The Toronto Police Homicide unit is investigating a case detectives have referred to as a “targeted double homicide.”
Police say the two-and-a halfyear-old case is “active and ongoing.”
In recent months, police have stated that the Shermans were murdered late in the evening of Dec. 13, two days prior to their bodies being found. Police have not revealed how they came to this determination, whether by forensic analysis or other means.
The couple had separately returned home from a meeting in an Apotex boardroom with the custom builders designing the home that was to be built at 91 Old Forest Hill Rd. They were both home by 9 p.m.
As the Star’s Victoria Gibson previously reported, the design for the Shermans’ planned new residence by Brennan Custom Homes called for a 16,000square-foot mansion on the double lot near Eglinton Avenue West and Spadina Road. The interior of the home was to be bathed in light with multiple skylights and a retractable glass roof 41 feet in length that would slide open from the centre over an indoor pool. After the Shermans were murdered, the building lot (the previous house had been torn down) sat vacant while the Sherman children decided what to do. It was put on the market in 2019 with an asking price of $9.9 million and then listed for sale last February at the reduced price of $8.3 million. Gottlieb’s listing states that the plans for the original home the Shermans and Brennan Custom Homes were designing were included, and permits were issued by the city for that particular design.
However, Gottlieb told the Star those permits have since expired and “nobody is building (the Shermans’) house. It will not be that house.”
The desire to move from 50 Old Colony Rd. and build a mansion came entirely from Honey, close friends have told the Star. Barry was happy with their home in north Toronto where they had lived since the mid-1980s (that home, the site of the double murder, has since been demolished by the Sherman family).
A man of simple desires — Barry famously drove rusted old cars and explained to colleagues like longtime friend and former Apotex CEO Jack Kay that all you needed was a steering wheel, an engine and four tires — he felt the same way about cars as he did houses.
Barry also loved a straightforward commute home from the Apotex offices in an industrial section in the northwest part of the city, using major highways until a short section of Bayview Avenue, south of Highway 401, brought him to their house.
Honey was also a person who enjoyed simple pleasures — a billionaire, she nevertheless scoured golf course ravines for balls lost by other players. Yet she loved a new project and with her sister and best friend, Mary Shechtman, she conceived of the idea to leave Old Colony and build a mansion in Toronto’s posh Forest Hill neighbourhood.
For Barry, it would be a return to his roots.
He grew up in Forest Hill, the son of the president of a zipper manufacturing company and an occupational therapist, and attended Forest Hill Collegiate Institute.
Barry, friends say, wanted Honey to be happy and grudgingly agreed to change his commute home, which when they moved would involve more internal Toronto streets.
For Honey, this was part of an ongoing effort to have more say in the financial affairs of the family. As the Star has previously reported, Barry was planning to give her a significant amount of money she could call her own, and at the same time he was contemplating giving much of his fortune to charity. Neither plans had been put into effect at the time of the murders. Toronto police have said information related to Barry Sherman’s estate is “embedded” in its own police investigation.
The Star is involved in two ongoing challenges to have information related to both the police probe and the Sherman estate made public.
Hearings in both cases were delayed when court matters were suspended as a result of the global pandemic and will be held later this year.
Sherman daughter Alexandra has previously told the Star that one of the driving forces in her mother’s plan was to be closer to her own young family and the two grandchildren Barry and Honey doted over. The second was born shortly before the murders. Alexandra said Honey had planned a “monster playroom” as part of the design of 91 Old Forest Hill Rd.
Nothing was ever simple with Sherman plans. In fact, Honey and sister Mary (funded by the billions Barry had made in the generic drug industry) initially purchased another property in Forest Hill. When it was deemed too small for the planned construction, 91 Old Forest Hill Rd. was purchased from the family of the late Abraham J. Green, a noted builder and philanthropist. The house on the property was knocked down and the site was prepared for construction. In a rare case of Honey Sherman being listed as the owner of property (it was typically Barry or a company, either named or numbered) land registry records show Honey as the purchaser of 91 Old Forest Hill Rd. in November 2016.
The sale price, believed to have been about $10 million, was not disclosed in the provincial registry documents.
Sources close to the planning of the new home, including members of the Sherman family, have told the Star that one source of tension was the rising cost of the build as Honey added in more features and Barry worked to negotiate the cost downwards. The total cost for 91 Old Forest Hill Rd. was estimated to be $30 million, including the land purchase and the home itself.
Realtor Gottlieb said that her clients, the Sherman estate, were pleased with the sale. Despite the lower selling price than originally asked, “they got exactly what they expected.”
Gottlieb would not disclose precise figures, but she said, “I threw in some of my commission to make the deal sweeter.”
The Star has written to the four Sherman children — Lauren, Jonathon, Alexandra and Kaelen — and to siblings of Barry and Honey regarding this story, asking if they would be interested in commenting. No reply has yet been received.
The lot that was the site of the Sherman’s former home at 50 Old Colony Road is not currently listed for sale.