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Residential
South Florida

Convenience store mogul buys oceanfront Highland Beach estate for record price after listing California home

Buyer sold his company for $580M last year

2455 South Ocean Boulevard (Robert Stevens Photography, courtesy Ocean Estate Properties)
2455 South Ocean Boulevard (Robert Stevens Photography, courtesy Ocean Estate Properties)

Omaha businessman Steve Buchanan bought an oceanfront estate in Highland Beach, months after listing his waterfront home in Malibu.

Property records show he paid $40 million for the mansion at 2455 South Ocean Boulevard in Highland Beach, a small beachfront town north of Boca Raton.

Buchanan founded Buchanan Energy and Bucky’s Convenience Stores, which he sold last year to the convenience store chain Casey’s General Stores for $580 million. In January, he listed his Malibu home for $34.5 million, Dirt reported.

Buchanan and his wife, Samantha, financed their Highland Beach purchase with a $30 million mortgage from JPMorgan Chase, records show.

With furnishings, his purchase of the property came out to $45 million, according to the MLS. The sale marks a record for the town, surpassing the $34.7 million sale in February of the home next door at 2445 South Ocean Boulevard.

Bruce Leeds and Marina Rubio Ruiz sold the 1.9-acre property to Buchanan. Mark Timothy Luxury Homes developed the 23,625-square-foot estate, which has 14,000 square feet under air, eight bedrooms, 10 bathrooms and three half-bathrooms. It includes two guest houses, a two-story living room, a theater, wine room, library and club room. The estate was completed in 2014. The property has 151 feet of beach frontage, a motor court and a cabana pavilion with a pool.

Leeds is vice chairman of Systemax, according to LinkedIn. The firm rebranded last year under its parent company, Port Washington, New York-based Global Industrial Company, a distributor of industrial and maintenance, repair and operations products.

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Jonathan Postma of the Jonathan Postma Group represented the buyer. Postma declined to comment on the deal.

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Ocean Estate Properties’ Bev Aluise Knight represented the sellers. Knight, who was the listing agent for the sellers years ago, said the buyer’s broker reached out to her with an offer. Leeds acquired the property in 2011 for an undisclosed amount and later built the house.

“The seller was not interested in selling,” Knight said. “The timing was right, the offer was right and he can downsize at this time in his life. When you live in a home of that size and there’s only two people living in that house, in my opinion you can’t really enjoy living there. You become a property manager.”

Records and home flips have become common across price points in South Florida.

The house next door, which was sold two months ago to hedge fund manager Paul Saunders and his wife, Victoria Saunders, surpassed a record set in October when billionaire Don Hankey paid $30.3 million for the oceanfront mansion at 3715 South Ocean Boulevard.

The seller of that property, Eric Moskow, flipped the estate for 40 percent more than its purchase price of $21.6 million in March.

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Highland BeachHome SalesLuxury Real Estate