A New Jersey home is drawing attention for its price tag. The 22,000-square-foot estate that was recently sold for $6 million became the highest-priced home ever to sell in Wall Township.
The listing agent, Sal Ventre of REAL Brokerage, calls the incredible property “a residential resort.”
Wall Township is a suburban town about an hour’s drive south of New York City.
“The house is so much more than a house,” Ventre tells Realtor.com®. “It has 65 rooms—with a movie theater, arcade, an underground nightclub, four to five bars, a full gym, a sauna, steam room, and a massage studio. When I was walking through it for the first time, I said, ‘This isn’t even like a house. It’s a resort.’ That’s how the term ‘residential resort’ was coined.”
The 10-bedroom home is nestled on 23 acres and has 17 bathrooms.
It also features a barber shop, both an indoor and outdoor pool, a 14-stall horse barn, a four-hole golf course, two four-car garages, and a tennis court, basketball court, racquetball court, and volleyball court.
In addition, the property has a pair of two-bedroom, two-bathroom garage apartments, as well as a 1,500-square-foot pool house.
Pricing challenges
Ventre says pricing the home proved to be difficult because it was tough to find comps.
“There are just zero comps for a place like this, especially in Wall,” says Ventre. “There’s nothing exactly like it.”
He looked at comps outside the area in Colts Neck and Rumson, and he also evaluated how much it would cost to rebuild a property like this from the ground up in Wall Township if you were to construct it today.
In July 2022, he listed the property for $12,999,000, and made five price cuts over three years. The final asking price was $6,999,000.
Anthony Smith, senior economist at Realtor.com, says valuation of trophy homes is “more art than science”—and Ventre wholeheartedly agrees.
Shocked reactions
Ventre says he got a lot of interest in the property over the years since it’s such a unique and fascinating home.
When people toured it, he says, “you’d usually get the same reaction: in shock, taken aback, in awe, almost speechless. A lot of ‘wows’ and ‘this is crazy.'”
Ventre says that after would-be buyers had time to let everything sink in, most people would say they loved the place but that it would simply require too much maintenance and be too much for them to handle.
“There were also a lot of time wasters and fake buyers who would disappear when you’d ask for a legitimate proof of funds,” he recalls. “You’d have people who wanted to bring a wife or girlfriend in just to try to look cool. As a result, the sellers were very strict on vetting who could come into the home.”
Power of social media
Believing the home was unlikely to attract a local buyer, Ventre turned to social media and YouTube to broaden his audience.
Power of social media
Believing the home was unlikely to attract a local buyer, Ventre turned to social media and YouTube to broaden his audience.
“That way, we covered all our bases nationally and internationally,” he says.
Eventually, a buyer from Ghana saw the YouTube video, then reached out to set up a private showing before making an offer.
According to Ventre, the businessman plans to use the estate as a vacation home and as a place to entertain business associates.
Now that the home has sold for a record seven-figure price, Ventre says, “It will probably be the most memorable sale of my career. Although it was a very tiring three- to four-year journey, I am really grateful for every minute of it.”
