The sale of a lakefront estate outside Montreal has broken a short-lived price record for the Canadian province of Quebec.
Marketing entrepreneur and Ferrari collector James Upton sold his six-acre property for $14.5 million to an unidentified buyer, according to the Wall Street Journal. Upton bought the property in 2017; he listed it earlier this month for $15.4 million.
The previous Quebec record was set earlier this month when a home in the Montreal suburb of Westmount sold for $14.3 million.
The two sales are more than twice the average price for luxury single-family homes in Quebec this year, Sotheby’s International Realty data shows.
A six-acre estate and its 11,500-square-foot mansion sold within a month of listing (Sotheby’s)
The 1995-built main home of the lakeside estate sold by Upton totals about 11,500 square feet. It includes a home theater, wine cellar, gym, music room and a game room. There are five fireplaces throughout.
The property has about 400 feet of frontage on the Lake of Two Mountains, and a two-level dock. There are also three garages on the property, with parking for seven cars, as well as a two-bedroom guesthouse and a garden.
The main lawn is big enough to land helicopters, which Upton has arranged for Ferrari events in the past.
Listing agent Cassandra Aurora of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada said that Quebec’s housing market is red hot and “listings can’t last for two days on the market.”
“We have never had this type of market. We never even had bidding wars,” she said.
Canada’s housing market as a whole has been hot since the pandemic, raising fears of a bubble. The market slowed somewhat in the late summer and early fall — as it did in the U.S.— but the pace of sales quickened again in October.
Market watchers say that Canada is at a higher risk than a bubble than the U.S. because mortgage debt makes up a larger chunk of total consumer debt in the country.
[WSJ] — Dennis Lynch