A Belvedere home with panoramic bay views that listed earlier this year for just under $31 million could be going, going, gone later this month.
The property at 337 Belvedere Avenue––an 11,000-square-foot estate set on slightly more than half an acre with six beds, 10 baths, a 60-foot indoor pool and two elevators––is slated for auction. It’s a rare move in the upscale Marin waterfront town of 2,000 or so just over the Golden Gate Bridge, where properties routinely sell for eight figures.
(Source: Jason Wells)
A speedy sale for the downsizing owners is the main motivation for the auction, according to listing agent Olivia Hsu Decker of Sotheby’s, who represented 337 Belvedere Avenue when it first came to market in 2019 for $29.5 million and again last fall when it returned at $35 million. The price dropped to $31 million in March.
Public records identify the property owners as Sharon and Clark Winslow, CEO of Winslow Capital. The couple has a vacation home in Hawaii, another home in Colorado, and their grown children live abroad. The empty nesters, who bought the home for $19 million in 2008, have waited out the traditional sales process long enough and are ready to move on, with the Sotheby’s Concierge auction set to start on June 22 and close on June 27.
“A high end home in the $30-$40 million range normally takes [a] much longer time to sell, as the number of buyers are limited and they often wait for the price to drop in a traditional sale process,” Decker said via email. “But the auction puts a deadline to bid, and there is the urgency to buy if a buyer wants the property.”
The Winslows are also listing the lot next door at 333 Belvedere––a parcel that made national headlines when they bought it in a distressed auction sale in 2012 for $4.2 million and tore down an existing house to get better views from their main residential estate.
They were last asking $8.5 million for the adjacent property, which also is slightly more than half an acre and now has a garden and walking paths. That price appears to be the mark the sellers will seek in the upcoming auction, where the side-by-side properties will carry a price tag of $39.5 million
Would-be buyers can bid on both the main property and the empty lot––or either one. So far, Decker said, there has been interest in all the options, despite the possibility that the new owners of 333 Belvedere could try to build something that would block the all-important bay views for the new owners of 337 Belvedere.
“If the lot buyer appl[ies] for permit[s] to build a home blocking the view of 337, the owner of 337 can object,” she said via email. “But the lot is large enough and [the owners] can build a decent home without blocking the views.”
In 2018, the Winslows bought another Belvedere lot for $7 million and went as far as getting plans approved for an 8,000-square-foot estate before deciding to scrap the idea and sell the lot with the approved plans instead. They wanted to close the sale by the end of 2019 for tax purposes, and they achieved that timing with an auction handled by Concierge Auctions, Decker said. That convinced the sellers to try Concierge again with their larger Belvedere estate and its adjoining lot after both failed to sell after getting price cuts earlier this year.
There is an undisclosed reserve price on the estate property and the lot. So far Decker has held two well-attended auction preview events and had two interested parties come back for a second look, she said. Decker said she has never sold a house in this price range via auction, though she has worked on several international high-end auction deals through the Sotheby’s Concierge service before. She sees the quick sales process as a good fit for motivated sellers.
“I watched some super-expensive art works, antiques and jewelries sold at Sotheby’s auctions and I believe [an] auction is a good way to sell rare luxury homes,” she said.
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