Summer sizzle: Jeanne Siegel sells lakefront Palm Beach mansion for $52M in slow season

Two months into the slow season and more than a year after listing her lakefront Palm Beach mansion, Jeanne Siegel sold it for $51.6 million.

Records show Siegel sold the home at 200 Via Palma to Geats LLC, a Delaware entity. The true buyer is unknown.

Lawrence Moens of Lawrence A. Moens Associates had the listing, and Suzanne Frisbie of the Corcoran Group brought the buyer. 

Siegel is the widow of media magnate Herbert Siegel, who died last year. He was the longtime owner of Chris-Craft Industries, a boatmaker that he pivoted into a media company and eventually sold to Rupert Murdoch for $5 billion in 2001, according to his Bloomberg obituary. Forbes’ most recent estimate pegged his net worth at $1.1 billion.

The Siegels bought the lakefront Via Palma mansion for $29.9 million in 2015, records show. Built in 1952 on 0.9 acres, the 10,100-square-foot mansion has seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, one half-bathroom, a pool and a dock, according to property records. The estate  was renovated last year and includes a guest house, the listing shows. 

Siegel first listed the mansion for $68.5 million in April of last year, and dropped the price three times before closing for $51.6 million. The sale price makes it among the priciest trophy homes to sell on the island this year.

Palm Beach’s luxury deals dawdled at the start of the 2023/2024 high season, but the market gathered momentum in late spring, and a slew of big-number sales closed in rapid succession. The most expensive deal was spec developer Todd Glaser’s sale of Tarpon Island for $152 million in May, in which Frisbie represented him. In April, Ideavillage founder Anand Khubani sold an oceanfront vacant lot for $85 million. In March, Nvidia billionaire Harvey Jones bought a lakefront mansion for $74.3 million, followed by his flip of a lakefront lot for $50 million two months later. 

Sales tend to slow to a trickle during the summer months in Palm Beach, when seasonal residents decamp to homes in cooler climates. Even so, Moens recently listed the island’s most expensive home for sale, an oceanfront mansion on the North End asking $96 million, Zillow shows.