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)