$46M Lake Tahoe sale is fourth-highest ever, though well below original asking price

Owners listed home at $60 million in July, accepted the only offer in November

575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)
575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)

A lakefront Lake Tahoe estate sold for $46 million, just short of a record for the mountain region even though it was $14 million below the original July asking price.

The buyers and sellers, who knew each other socially, came to an agreement quickly, according to Compass agent Mary Kleingartner, who co-listed the property with Ryan Mitchell. The buyers, whose names weren’t disclosed, toured the property in November and shortly thereafter made their offer – the first since the 2012 home received since it came on the market.

575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)

575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)

When the property went into contract last month, some guessed that the 5.3-acre Incline Village estate with a 12,679-square-foot main house modeled after Yosemite National Park’s Ahwanee and a 3,800-square-foot guest home would sell for closer to its $60 million asking price, which would have broken the $50 million price record for the region.

Kleingartner said the property had “a ton of interest” and another potential buyer “circling,” so the agents anticipated it would at least surpass a $48 million Zephyr Cove sale from 2013.

“The sellers recognized this was ultimately the right buyer,” she said, and agreed to the $46 million price.

575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)

575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)

About eight financially pre-qualified potential buyers toured the home and had backgrounds that included hedge funds, crypto currency, tech and gaming. Many already own property in the area, some with lake frontage, and the home’s shared pier may have deterred them from making an offer.

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The buyers, who are already Incline Village residents but don’t own property on the lake, “knew instantly that they loved it,” Kleingartner said. Like the sellers, they have young grandchildren and are excited at the thought of using it as a multigenerational family home.

“They were just the perfect buyers,” she said. “They know Incline. They love Incline.”

Lake Tahoe real estate, and Incline Village in particular, has staged an unprecedented boom since the start of the pandemic. The median sales price for a house in Incline Village and Crystal Bay almost tripled in April to $2.53 million from a year earlier, according to Compass.

575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)

575 Lakeshore Boulevard (Photos via Peter Tye)

Since the summer wildfires closer to the South Lake area, the market has “softened a bit but is still at a pretty fevered pitch,” said David Marriner, sales manager of the Compass office in Incline Village.

Another home on the Nevada side of the lake came even closer to breaking the sales record. The 1.39-acre Incline Village estate with 150 feet of lake frontage sold in November for $47.5 million.

The Thunderbird Lodge set a record for the biggest residential deal ever in the area when it sold in 1998 for $50 million. A year later, developer-owner Del Webb transferred the historic 1930s-era lodge and its 140 acres to the US Forest Service and a nonprofit preservation society in exchange for almost 4,000 acres near Las Vegas.

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