2024-02-12 13:00:54
In the 1980s, investor John Donahue was flying over Naples, Florida, when, according to family legend, he spotted a piece of uninhabited land on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. He pointed to the tip of the peninsula known as Gordon’s Point and told his wife, Rhodora Donahue, “That’s where I want to go.”
And that’s exactly what he did. In 1985, he paid a million dollars for a 17.4 dunam plot of land that had nothing on it except a small fishing cabin surrounded by a grove.
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In the next decade, the Donahue family purchased about 242.8 dunams, and built a mansion on the beach for themselves and for their descendants, 13 children and 84 grandchildren, according to their son Bill Donahue.
Today, after the death of John and Rudora, the family is putting up for sale the crown jewel of the estate – a complex of approximately 36.4 dunams in the Port Royal neighborhood of Naples that includes three residences and a private yacht dock – for an amount of 295 million dollars, which may break records.
The property, which includes a strip of beach about 500 meters wide, has been advertised for the most expensive price ever in the US, and if it is sold for a price close to the asking price, it will set a record as the most expensive residence sold in the country. So says Don McKenna of Coldwell Banker Realty, which is marketing the property Together with Leighton Candler from the Corcoran Group and Roy McMallan from Savills.
The mansion housed more than 100 family members for special events
John Donahue grew up in Pittsburgh, and after graduating from West Point in 1946, served in the Air Force until 1950, when he enrolled in a correspondence stock trading course on behalf of Forbes magazine. In 1955, together with two friends from high school, he founded the investment management company Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Today the company is known as Federated Hermes, and is run by Donahue’s son J. Christopher Donahue and manages $668.9 billion in assets, according to its website.
Bill said his parents were a couple back in high school and had been married for 70 years. Bill passed away in 2017. His widow passed away in 2022.
The couple began vacationing in Naples in the 1970s after receiving a flyer from a Florida real estate agent in the mail, Bill said. The family lived there for about a year when his father considered moving the investment management company from Pittsburgh to Florida. “Everybody liked the idea,” said Bill, 68, “but he He thought that the money management business should be in a place with a financial atmosphere.”
In Gordon’s Point, the family built three residences at the end of a lane that is now full of homes worth millions of dollars each. The house is central to the area, covers about 1,068 square meters, with six bedrooms and an indoor pool. A second house, built around 1990, covers about 510 square meters, and has five bedrooms and an open pool. Around 2013, they added a third house with an area of about 539 square meters, with an outdoor pool and a T-shaped bay that can moor six boats.
The Donahue family also owns part of Kiwaidin Island, which is off the coast of Naples and can only be reached by boat. There, they built a 1,487 square meter house around 2005 that serves as an additional place where the slave can stay when they visit the area.
Bill said his parents moved to Naples from Pittsburgh around 1990. The family has grown over the years and now has more than 175 great-grandchildren, and 100 or more people routinely gather at the Naples estate on Fridays and Saturdays, Bill said. Over the years, the mansion regularly celebrated Halloween and Easter parties, and the family celebrated big and small milestones there, from the high school graduation ball and weddings to Rhodora’s 90th birthday in 2015. “I’m sure there were many times when every bed in every room was occupied,” Bill said.
The Gordon Pointe in the Port Royal neighborhood of Naples, Florida / Photo: Shutterstock
The terrain at Gordon’s Point was a magical playground for the tight-knit family, grandson Craig Foxhoven said. As a boy growing up in Naples, he would rush to the estate on weekends to meet up with cousins who came from the north (many of the cousins are still very close). On Saturdays, he recalls, they would spend entire days at the beach, swimming, playing ball, fishing and sailing on one of the family’s three boats before ordering food out for dinner. At Easter, in particular, “it was a big deal that everyone would go up to the roof and watch the sunset,” Foxhoven said.
Inside the house, Rhodora turned a closet into a gift-wrapping room. “It was her command center. Her grandmother never missed a birthday greeting,” said granddaughter Claire Baker, who moved to the complex around 2020 with her husband and daughters to help care for Rhodora. “She used to call me her social secretary.”
Even toward the end of her life, Rhodora knew all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren by name, according to granddaughter Annette “Nettie” Mercer. But to be fair, she added, “Many of the daughters of the family are called Rhodora and many are called John.”
In addition to family gatherings, Bill said his parents hosted many celebrities, such as former President George W. Bush and his wife Barbara Bush. “The room they slept in was called the presidential suite,” he said. Golfer Arnold Palmer has attended events at the estate, and political luncheons for lawmakers have included former governor Jeb Bush. As devout Catholics, the Donahues also hosted visiting priests. “They always used to say, ‘Family, Faith, and Unity,'” Bill said. “They really believed it.”
Bill said that for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in 1996, they traveled with about a hundred of their children and grandchildren to Rome to meet with Pope John Paul II. His father presented them one by one to the bishop. “The Pope kept saying, ‘All these are yours?’ He said it maybe five times,” Bill recalled.
The decision to sell the house
In recent years, the family began to think about selling the house in Naples. In 2019, they sold the house in Kivaidin and part of their land in Gordon Point for more than $45 million, said Robert McEwan of CBRE, who managed the sale at the time.
Bill said that now that his parents had passed away, it was time to sell the acreage. While he lives in Pittsburgh, both he and most of his brothers and sisters own additional homes in Naples, including seven of them who live there permanently. The family also owns a farm with an area of about 2023 dunams in Pennsylvania, where the whole tribe can gather for events.
“We all enjoyed the place, but it’s time to move on,” he said. Decisions about real estate are made in the family office, he said. Each of the brothers has a seat on the board, which he heads.
The house that sold for the highest price: Ken Griffin’s penthouse
The current record for the sale of a house in the US was set in 2019, when Ken Griffin of Citadel bought a penthouse on the Avenue of the Billionaires in Manhattan for about 240 million dollars.
A Los Angeles mansion known as Casa Encantada was listed for sale last year for $250 million, but did not sell. Today they are asking for 195 million dollars. A penthouse on the Avenue of the Billionaires in New York that was offered at a price of 250 million dollars in 2022 also dropped to a price of 195 million dollars.
The real estate agents say that the size and location of Donahue’s property, and the presence of a private yacht mooring, justify the asking price. Along with the fact that putting together a similar property would be more difficult today. The complex has about 222 meters of beach facing the Gulf of Mexico, and another 283 meters in Gordon Strait and the Bay of Naples, in addition to a 70-meter yacht berth.
The homes are well built and were virtually undamaged during Hurricane Ian in 2022, McKenna said. Still, new owners are expected to renovate or rebuild the houses. “Anyone who buys a house in this price range is going to make it their own thing,” Kendler said. “It’s too much fun to avoid.” At least six houses can be built on the lot, she said.
Naples has always been home to the wealthy, but in recent years property values have climbed even more, McKenna said. In 2022, a sale of 62 million dollars set a new record for the city.
In Port Royal, it is difficult to find a house to buy for less than $10 million, she said. “Some of the richest billionaires own homes there, and you don’t know about it,” she said. She knows some who invested 200 million dollars to purchase land and build houses on an area of several dunams. “They didn’t trade lots, but there are customers who spend such sums,” she said.
In the last 45 days, two houses were sold in Port Royal, each on an area of less than 4. One house sold for $30 million and the other for $34 million, she said. A 6 dunam plot of land near Donahue’s is currently being offered for $63 million, according to Zillow.
Although the luxury market is not as vibrant as it was during the pandemic, real estate agents said the wealthy are still looking to buy. Unlike the panic purchases during the coronavirus, Kendler said, “Now there are smarter buyers in the market, and they are looking for things that are irreplaceable.”
The Donahue family has committed to selling the property as one unit, Bill said, and hopes to find a buyer who will enjoy it as much as they did. “If we took it apart, no one would put it back together,” he said.
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