A one-story house built in 1952 and ripe for a renovation has sold for a recorded $10 million in the Palm Beach security zone that closes to through-traffic when when President Donald Trump is in residence at his nearby Mar-a-Lago Club.
The house that just sold had been in the same family for 45 years. Seller Joyce S. Vaughn had the house homesteaded as her primary residence in the latest Palm Beach County tax rolls.
Vaughn bought the house for a recorded $385,000 in 1981 with her late husband, management-consulting executive Clother Hathaway Vaughn III. He died in 2019 at 85.
The buyer was a Delaware-registered limited liability company named 112 Algoma LLC, the deed recorded June 24 shows. Delaware’s strict corporate-privacy laws cloak the identity of anyone behind that entity.
The four-bedroom house at 112 Algoma Road was priced at $11.295 million when it sold. The property was intially priced $11.5 million before it underwent the price reduction about a month later, the MLS Show.
With 2,930 total square feet, the Bermuda-style house stands on a non-waterfront lot of about a third of an acre. It’s the second house west of South Ocean Boulevard, which divides a row of direct-beachfront homes from the rest of the Estate Section.
Broker Linda Olsson of Linda R. Olsson Inc. said she had fielded several offers on the property, including from people who said they would renovate the house rather than tear it down.
Agents Todd and Frances Peter of Sotheby’s International Realty represented the buyer’s side. Todd Peter declined to comment about the sale or discuss any future plans for the property.
But Olsson’s sales listing had stressed that the house provided a great opportunity for people looking for a remodeling project.
“It’s a great property to renovate, and people today are interested in renovating,” she told the Palm Beach Daily News.
Olsson declined to discuss specifics of the sale or the parties involved. But she described the house as a “beach bungalow with a lovely garden” and said it offered multiple selling points, including the size of its southern-exposure lot, its deeded access to the nearby shore and the privacy of the street.
She also said the house could offer an alternative for people who were not looking for a grandly scaled home but instead wanted “an alternative to a condo in a great location — the prestigous Estate Section. It’s also a fabulous ‘land bank’ (investment).”
Her sales listing mentioned the security the neighborhood, thanks to nearby Mar-a-Lago.
When Trump is at Mar-a-Lago, security officers shut down South Ocean Boulevard in the neighborhood, opening the road only to property owners or their authorized visitors, representatives or workers. The security zone runs north from the club property for seven blocks, or about half a mile, to South County Road.
Because the area is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Intracoastal Waterway on the other, the roadblock effectively divides the town in two, forcing through-traffic to detour across bridges into West Palm Beach and back.
In addition to Vaughn, the deed listed Colleen MacLeod on the seller’s side as successor trustee of a trust in Vaughn’s name.
Vaughn’s husband was a retired partner with the Alexander Proudfoot Management Consultant Co., today known simply as Proudfoot.
The Vaughn house had previously been marketed by another agency in both the single-family and land categories of the multiple listing service.
Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: ‘Beach bungalow’ near Mar-a-Lago in Trump security zone goes for $10M
Reporting by Darrell Hofheinz, Palm Beach Daily News / Palm Beach Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Darrell Hofheinz, Palm Beach Daily News | USA TODAY Network
