Last call: Late industrialist’s lakefront Palm Beach home sells for $50M

The estate of the late Bill Flaherty sold his lakefront Palm Beach home for $49.6 million in the waning days of the island’s busy season.

Flaherty’s family sold the house at 315 Chapel Hill Road to Ocean Breezes 2 LLC, a Delaware entity. The true buyer is unknown, according to records.

Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate represented both parties in the deal. 

Flaherty was an industrialist who built a zinc “empire,” according to his obituary in the Wall Street Journal last year. After working stints at General Motors and Reynolds Metals, Flaherty and his partners bought a New Jersey-based zinc processing operation and renamed it Horsehead Industries. Now known as American Zinc Recycling, Luxembourg-based Befesa acquired the company in 2022. 

Flaherty and his then-wife, Tina Santi Flaherty, bought the Palm Beach house for $1 million in 1990, property records show. He won the house when their split was finalized in 2012, and she walked away with the Fifth Avenue penthouse in New York City.

The Chapel Hill Road home in Palm Beach was built in 1987 on 0.8 acres. The 6,400-square-foot house and its accompanying guest house have a combined eight bedrooms, eight bathrooms and two half-bathrooms, according to the listing. The property includes a pool and spans 200 feet of frontage along the Intracoastal Waterway.

Flaherty’s family listed the house for $59.5 million in October, according to Redfin. 

After a slow start to the season, price cuts led to high-dollar deals closing at a break-neck pace in March, April and May. 

The island’s priciest home on the market this season, Tarpon Island, sold for $152 million last month. The billionaire Hearst family sold a non-waterfront home for $25 million at the tail-end of May, and Nvidia billionaire Harvey Jones flipped a lakefront lot for $50 million after buying a lakefront mansion for $74.3 million in March.