Only a handful of states can claim single-family home sales above $100 million. Colorado has joined that rare group with the record $108 million closing Monday at 419 Willoughby Way on Aspen's Red Mountain.
“It's great for the market. It is a testament to how special a community Aspen is on a global scale,” said listing agent Riley Warwick, with the Saslove & Warwick Team at Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
The founder of Bellagio and Wynn resort casinos, Steve Wynn, teamed up with Thomas Peterffy, a pioneer of automated and low-cost stock trading, to buy the house for nearly $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 achieved these types of sales,” said Julie Morrah, president of Aspen Title & Escrow, which handled the title and escrow work for the purchase.
Twenty years ago, a house worth $100 million was sold in the US for the first time. Since then, about two dozen sales, not including Monday's purchase, have exceeded that mark to the Wall Street Journal.
Most home sales over $100 million have occurred in Manhattan; Miami and Palm Beach, Florida; Los Angeles and Malibu, California; and Hawaii. Aspen now joins that list.
Monday's sale broke a short-lived Colorado record set last Thursday of $77 million paid for Owl Creek Ranch, also in Aspen.
How did Dovigi achieve a 50% return in just three years? He and his wife, an interior designer, renovated the property, originally built in 2009.
The house is in a prime location at the base of Red Mountain overlooking Aspen. The house measures 22,405 square feet and has 11 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms, a guest house, a large garage and a heated outdoor pool.
Pitkin County has limited future housing development to a maximum of 9,250 square feet, Warwick said. Unless the rules change, Aspen will never see a new home of that size built, so scarcity has also helped drive the price higher.
Unlike a traditional closing where sellers, buyers and their agents sit across from each other at a table and hand over the keys as soon as the wire is cleared, the deal was done remotely and through attorneys, which is typical for higher-end homes.
“There are a lot of lawyers involved who do a lot of the heavy lifting,” Morrah said, noting that a deal of that size had extra security.
The progress of Colorado's most expensive home, which was on the private market, was as follows, according to Zillow:
In September 2003, land was purchased for $7 million. The home first sold for $43 million in July 2009. It sold again for $72.5 million in June 2021. On Monday, it sold for the third time for $108 million.
Zillow had the value of the house at $90.2 million. A separate sale included furniture and private artwork, which was not made public.
Most high-end luxury homes are traded for cash. But if the buyers had taken out a mortgage, Zillow estimates that the monthly payments would have been around $644,236.
To put that in perspective, the average price of a home sold in Colorado last month was $551,000, according to the Colorado Association of Realtors.
