A property called La Dune in Southampton is on the market for $145 million? Well, J. Michael Evans will raise you $5 million and offer his property for $150 million, taking top spot as the most expensive listing in the Hamptons.
According to the New York Post, Mr. Evans, co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, and his wife, Lise, are the owners of an estate on Meadow Lane, also in Southampton, that is now for sale. The property is actually a combination of three oceanfront parcels and a bayfront one containing several structures that were accumulated during the past three years via an investment of $115 million. Mansion Global reports that the agent representing the Evanses is Harald Grant of Sotheby’s International Realty.
The combined properties offer 700 feet of direct frontage on the ocean. One of them, on 3.5 acres, includes a roughly 12,000-square-foot house, built in the 1990s, with 8 bedrooms and an indoor pool. Another parcel, on 3 acres, has two shingle-style houses: one measuring about 2,000 square feet with an outdoor swimming pool, and a roughly 3,000-square-foot home with a tennis court. A third, 5-acre parcel, has two putting greens plus two “golf cottages” overlooking the ocean. A fourth parcel is a roughly 2.5-acre vacant lot with frontage on Shinnecock Bay, ensuring the property has water views on both sides.
The former owner of the properties was entertainment mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman. At one time Mr. Sillerman, once the chancellor of the now-defunct Southampton College, owned several parcels on Meadow Lane but business reversals forced him to sell them off. A high point in Mr. Sillerman’s business career came in 2000, when he sold SFX Entertainment for $4.4 billion. With that in the kitty, he went on to start up new companies and pursue other opportunities, one of them being buying the majority rights to the Elvis Presley estate Graceland in Memphis. Mr. Sillerman revived SFX Entertainment four years ago to focus on electronic dance music. This effort included acquiring a number of dance music promotion companies, among them Made Event, React Presents, and Totem. Apparently, the recovering economy did not bring SFX Entertainment along with it, and the company filed for bankruptcy.
It probably didn’t help either that one of Mr. Sillerman’s many philanthropic efforts was being a donor and fundraiser for the Democratic Party during the 2016 election. Given the expanding reach of Goldman Sachs, presumably the Evanses are selling the Meadow Lane estate simply because they want to.