Passion: Julio Iglesias: December 2007

Monday, December 31, 2007

Julio in the Wall Street Journal

BY CHRISTINA S.N. LEWIS
The Wall Street Journal

Julio Iglesias couldn't sell his Indian Creek house.
Having failed to sell his Miami-area house for $25 million, Julio Iglesias razed it last month and plans to rebuild.

''We went down, down, down [in price] and then I thought, you know, this is too cheap,'' says the 64-year-old singer, speaking from his home in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. He had cut the asking price for the 10,350-square-foot house well below the original $32 million he was seeking when he listed it three years ago.

Iglesias says he tore the house down because it didn't meet his family's needs. ''The house was built for a couple [and] suddenly I had five kids,'' he adds. As a result, he was spending relatively little time at the home, his only U.S. residence. (The singer also owns a house in southern Spain.) Because he considered the four-acre property ''great,'' he plans to build a Spanish-style hacienda on it.

Iglesias, who performs about 150 concerts a year, bought the Indian Creek property in 1978 for about $650,000 and renovated the house. With about 400 feet of Intracoastal frontage, the Iglesias property includes a pool. Coldwell Banker's Jill Eber and Jill Hertzberg had the listing.

Escalating land prices have led to a boom in multimillion-dollar teardowns. ''At these prices the value is all in the land,'' says East Hampton, N.Y., broker Diane Saatchi, of Corcoran Group, who says she sold a $28 million teardown property in the Hamptons.

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)