Over the past few years, the upscale town of Manalapan in Florida’s Palm Beach County has posted outsize real-estate prices and attracted big names like Larry Ellison and Sean Hannity.

Now, a local developer is pushing the limits of the values Manalapan real estate can command, listing a planned spec mansion for $285 million.

At that price point, the property is among the priciest ever listed for sale in the U.S., falling just shy of a roughly 9-acre compound in the Port Royal neighborhood in Naples, Fla., which listed for a potentially record-setting $295 million in February 2024 and is still on the market. The current record for a U.S. home sale is around $240 million, set in 2019 by the sale of a New York City apartment to billionaire hedge funder Ken Griffin.

The seller of the Manalapan property is Stewart Satter, a local developer who briefly served last year as the town’s mayor. He stepped down from that position after only a few months, he said, after new financial disclosure rules required that he disclose his income and wealth, which he was uncomfortable providing. Satter made his fortune as the founder and chief executive of Consumer Testing Laboratories, a company that tested products for Walmart and its suppliers. He sold that company in 2016 and develops real estate as a hobby, he said.

The roughly 4-acre property, which sits adjacent to Ellison’s compound, spans from the Intracoastal Waterway to the Atlantic Ocean. There is a private tunnel underneath South Ocean Boulevard, which runs down the middle of the property.

Satter purchased the land for $27.5 million in March 2024, razed an existing circa-1985 Mediterranean house on the site and tapped local luxury home builder Robert W. Burrage of RWB Construction Management and architecture firm Choeff Levy Fischman to design a new house.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal