A Newport mansion gets auctioned online
I remember gawking at some of those spectacular Gilded Age mansions on the Newport waterfront a few years ago during a weekend getaway with my wife.
That was back in 2005, during the height of the real estate boom.
And if you had told me four years later, at least one of those mansion owners would be desperate enough to try and unload their Victorian masterpiece through an online auction, I would have thought you were babbling nonsensically.
After all, real estate was gold back then, especially grand old Newport mansions.
But as real estate values continue to spiral furiously downward, that’s just what’s happening now.
The Wrentham House, an 1891 stone and shingle mansion on Ocean Avenue in Newport, hit the online auction block on July 6.
The minimum bid for the mansion was $6.5 million, or less than half of the $14 million it was originally listed for.
The house has since been pulled, with the owners claiming to have finally found a buyer after four years of searching.
High end sales, whether of luxury condos or mansions, have been hard hit in the current downturn.
The bigger the loan, the more skittish the lender, while the loaded business execs and investors that once had the money to splurge on such deals are licking their stock market wounds.
All told, there have been just 20 sales over $1 million in Rhode Island through the first five months of the year, compared to 68 during the first five months of 2008, The Warren Group reports.
