Someone Paid $70M for a Home—to Tear It Down

What's crazier than paying half a million for half a house? Paying $70 million for 20,000-square-foot home only to tear it down. That's apparently the plan in Florida, where a Fort Lauderdale home sold for the 8-figure price tag, setting a city record in the process. Sellers' agent Tim Elmes tells the Wall Street Journal the waterfront home, located in the Harbor Beach neighborhood on Harborage Island, is an oversize estate that Paloma Partners Management founder Donald Sussman cobbled together beginning in 2015 by purchasing a $27.5 million main home and then forking over $14 million for the adjacent lots; a $6 million renovation followed.

The unnamed buyer will get 1,035 feet of waterfront on the Intracoastal Waterway, a theater, gym, two offices, and a coffee bar in the primary bedroom, though of all those things, it seems only the waterfront will remain. Elmes says the purchaser intends to raze the six-bedroom house and build something smaller in its place. Sussman and his wife are doing something similar: They apparently plan to stay in Fort Lauderdale but will downsize. (See photos of the home here.)