The $50 Million (And Up) Club

More ultraluxury homes are selling across the U.S. than ever before. Here’s what’s on the market now.

- James Tarmy

After saying goodbye to the gardens they’d tended, the rooms they’d decorated, and the views they’d woken up to for 30 years, Barbara Macklowe and her husband, Lloyd, put their house on the market. Like other couples in their 80s, they’d decided their residence and their lifestyle were no longer a match. “I’m definitely slowing down,” Barbara says. “My kids have their own homes, and my grandchildren are getting older.”

Unlike the homes of other octogenarians, though, the Macklowes’ property (seen on the previous page)—technically, their vacation house—listed at $60 million, about 173 times the median U.S. home sales price.

A rambling stucco and shingle confection surrounded by a profusion of flowers and trees, it sits on a thin slice of sand between the Atlantic and Georgica Pond in East Hampton, N.Y., one of the most valuable stretches of land on Earth. A few doors down, Calvin Klein just sold two lots for a combined $85 million. “I knew when I bought it, it was oceanfront and would always keep its value,” Barbara says. “But how could anyone tell that something like this would be worth that much?”

Until very recently, they couldn’t. Over the past 20 years, homes have occasionally sold for more than $50 million, but they tended to be exceptions. Only one sold above that threshold in 2013; the next year saw a flurry of super-high-end sales, but in 2015, $50 million-plus sales fell again to only one, a $57.3 million oceanfront estate, also in East Hampton.