Transaction Highlights, March 29

Mar 26, 2012 12:32 PM

322 Meadow Lane
Village of Southampton
$28,500,000

There’s a strong case to be made that Meadow Lane in Southampton is the most valuable of all Hamptons real estate. The street is located just south of the village center of Southampton, along the barrier beach separating the ocean from Shinnecock Bay.

In 2011, four properties sold on Meadow Lane for more than $20 million each, with the highest price paid for number 1710, which sold for $32.5 million. This property housed a magnificent 10 bedroom, 8,500-square-foot home on 5 acres sited perfectly between the ocean and the bay, offering sweeping 360-degree water views.

This house, number 322, is on a smaller but still sizeable lot at 2.4 acres. And although it is on the ocean, it does not also overlook water to the rear in quite as dramatic a fashion as 1710 does—although Halsey Neck Pond is visible from the back of the house.

The house was built in 2011, and is 9,000 square feet, with six bedrooms. It is traditional in style, essentially a large mass broken up by dormers and gables. There was no new ground broken here in terms of design or features but the interior takes advantage of the latest trends toward clean, uncluttered, sleek and mostly white surfaces. The same preference toward strong, clean lines is carried outside, where an oversized pool sits in the center of a rectangular limestone patio.

The seller purchased this property in 2005 for $16,250,000. Building costs vary widely, and it is hard to know how much was spent to create this enormous custom home, and whether it was a profitable venture; but the prior seller may have set the record, in terms of percentages at least, for a return on Hamptons real estate. He purchased this property for $936,000 in 1995, just before the dot-com explosion, and sold for more than $16 million just before the real estate meltdown. The previous seller’s gross profit of around $15 million over 10 years is a compounded annual rate of 33 percent per year, the highest this author has seen on any property.

And if the history of this property isn’t a convincing enough case that Meadow Lane is the most valuable address in the Hamptons, the transfers this week also showed the record of the sale of the partial interest of another home on this street for $13.5 million. We have no way of knowing the percentage of the property assigned to that transfer but it is likely that was a 50-percent interest, and that the parties agreed, probably via an appraisal, that the full value of the home was $27 million.