After 20 days on the market, there were multiple offers for a home on Via Tuscany in Winter Park.
“It’s located in The Vias, an area that has kind of an Italian flare. This house was one of those custom Italian villas to fit into that neighborhood,” said listing agent Brian Teach with Coldwell Banker Realty. “This house was specifically designed for this lot and this location.”
The 7,644-square-foot home recently sold for a recorded amount of $5.5 million and Teach said the total sale price was $5.7 million.
“This kind of property either sells right away or it takes a year. The fact we had success so early on, I think agents noticed it was special and buyers out looking at other properties noticed it was special and that’s why it sold so quickly for the amount it did.”
Kelly Price with Kelly Price & Company represented the buyers.
According to public records, the seller is Steven Kyle Brown and the buyer is a trust associated with Regina Rabitaille.
Around 2012, builder Phil Kean was finishing the home for another owner who was unable to complete the project when the seller bought it and was able to add special touches like zebra wood, colorful backsplash tiles, and unique lighting.
“There are two big chandeliers within the main living space and each was custom made by hand in Italy and were roughly $45,000 each,” Teach said. “The level of detail in this house was not what you would typically find in most residential properties.”
Teach called the six-bedroom home sleek and modern with a masculine design touch.
“In my experience, and I do a lot of high-end [listings,] this one was special because the owner has a very particular eye, so the level of detail — the thoughtfulness of just about everything — was what made this house really special.”
Teach told GrowthSpotter this house checked many boxes for the buyers including the fact it had an elevator, an indoor/outdoor feel, a main floor primary suite, and a lot of flexible space.
“There was an entire third level of this property which [the seller] basically used as storage,” he said, adding the new owner is converting it into multi-purpose space for children. “It basically ran the length of the house, roughly 1,300 or 1,400 square feet so it was just a massive space.”
There is also a guest suite with a separate exterior entrance that has a full kitchen and living space.
“We what we noticed with other buyers is a lot of times people have visitors and don’t want them in their space. [The guest suite] made this really unique because most homes don’t offer that,” Teach explained.
Another design feature is in the 304-bottle wine cellar behind glass near the stairs.
“It also had an in-home dispensing system so you could pick the amount of wine that you wanted and it would go right into a glass,” Teach explained. “Everybody said they’d never seen a pour system in residential use before, so that was something else that made this house unique. We’ve all seen wine cellars, but never one with the in-house dispensing system.”
The home sits on a double lot, something Teach said is also uncommon in the area.
“This house had a whole huge area of green space because it was a double lot and this is a very linear house, a long house, but you still had an area for a driveway, garage, pool, and plenty of green space for entertaining, pets or whatever. That made this pretty unique.”
Teach co-listed the property with Lenny Migliaccio with Re/Max Town Centre in South Florida.
“Two brokerages represented the property and we did that to kind of maximize exposure knowing that we were doing something out of the box,” he explained. “I’ve noticed over the passing of time that real estate is no longer a zip code or a subdivision or a city. It’s kind of all over, so I branched out to South Florida. That way, you’ve got two people with established careers and two brokerages doing different marketing materials.”
The tactic worked. Teach said this home was one of more than a dozen sales worth more than $1 million in the Winter Park zip code in the past couple of months.
“The fact that a property like this sold for over $700 a square foot within 20 days and we had three buyers fighting over this, I think says a lot about our market. It’s still a very healthy market.”
Have a tip about Central Florida development? Contact me at Newsroom@GrowthSpotter.com or (407) 420-6261. Follow GrowthSpotter on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
