Asking price for Laguna Beach home is in the ‘stratosphere’
Guess the asking price for a multi-story beachfront house with six bedrooms in the Irvine Cove area of Laguna Beach.
$10 million? $20 million? $40 million?
Wrong, wrong and wrong.
The house, at 2431 Riviera Drive, is listed at $51 million, according to HOM Sotheby’s International Realty’s website. HOM Sotheby’s International Realty, which has the listing, is Southern California’s coastal and desert representative of Sotheby’s International Realty brokerage firm.
The 10,000-square-foot house on nearly half an acre includes nine bathrooms, guest quarters, a library, a home theater, a wine cellar and a pool. The home, built in 1996, descends to a secluded beach.
While some may gasp at the $51-million price tag, such a figure is not unheard of in Laguna Beach.
Rob Giem, who is the listing agent, said he sold a house in February for $45 million, down from an asking price of more than $51 million.
The $45-million sale price was a record for Laguna, Steven Thomas — a real estate broker and founder of Reports on Housing, a company that tracks demand for Orange County houses — wrote in an email. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom house on Marine Drive sits on 2.28 acres that overlook the ocean, said Thomas, who gathers data from the Multiple Listing Service.
Giem declined to say how long the house on Riviera Drive has been on the market.
The $51-million asking price is “pushing the upper stratosphere,” Thomas said.
“The lot sits on the beach in an exclusive community,” he added. “It looks like a hotel.”
These types of prices are more common in Los Angeles, though Orange County is seeing a rebound in the housing market, Thomas said.
For example, 3,221 homes sold for $1.25 million or more this year in the county compared with 2,963 in 2015, Thomas said, citing MLS statistics.
The average sale price for Laguna houses in 2016 was $2.45 million, he said.
Twitter: @AldertonBryce
