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Just as interest was heating up, the sellers got cold feet.
Richard Lester’s double-wide trailer on a third of an acre on Cross Highway in Amagansett was on the market for $1.1 million—what to the uninitiated might sound remarkable for an almost certain teardown in a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar estates.
“It is the cheapest piece of land, by far, in the eastern Hamptons that’s not on the highway” and south of it, explained Chris Chapin of Douglas Elliman, one of the listing agents, on Saturday. “You’re within spitting distance of some the most phenomenally expensive world-class houses,” like Jerry Seinfeld’s on Further Lane, he said, and he added that the property is within walking distance of Indian Wells Beach and the hamlet’s downtown.
Inquiries and showings were perking up—a lot—over 48 hours, especially with a recent Newsday story and a couple of price cuts since the original listing for about $1.6 million in October. There were four bids at play on Saturday—“$1.1 million now is probably below market,” Mr. Chapin said then. Most of the interest was from speculators.
But Mr. Lester, a bayman and Amagansett native whose family has been in the neighborhood for many, many years, said on Sunday that he and his family had sat down while those bids were in the air the day before and decided, “We’re not going to sell it now.”
“We all got together here, the whole family got together,” including his brother Harry Lester, who lives next door, he said. “We got together and decided not to. We’re going to stay here. We’ve been here so long, we like it, and we’re going to go fishing in the spring.”
He declined to explain any further.
According to Newsday, Mr. Lester and his wife, Theresa, were going to buy their first traditional house, in Hampton Bays, after selling their Amagansett property. The 780-square-foot, two-bedroom trailer and quintessential fisherman’s shed most likely could have been replaced with, at minimum, a 3,500-square-foot house, pool and pool house, Mr. Chapin said Saturday, before Mr. Lester had made his decision.
“It’s too cute. It’s amazing that it’s gone on this long. It’s like the last passenger pigeon,” the real estate agent said of the old home, which looks a lot like other fishermen’s homes that were replaced by much larger ones in Amagansett and elsewhere.
But not this one—at least not as of Sunday.
“We’ll leave it like it is,” said Mr. Lester, indicating that he was getting tired of “people calling, all that stuff,” and that he would like to get off the phone. “We’re not selling, sorry.”
on Feb 9, 2015