British investor Pamela Starret listed the waterfront home for $95 million in 2024.
< 1 minTHE DEAL : In one of the first major home sales of 2026, a waterfront property in Palm Beach, Fla., has sold for US$72 million (approx $102 million AUD). The buyer wasn’t disclosed. undefined
THE SELLER : Pamela W. Starret, a British investor in the mining and energy industries, had owned the property since 2018, when she bought it for $21.355 million. Starret, who started wintering in Florida in the 1990s, spent about $25 million gut-renovating the house. She listed it for $95 million in 2024. Starret didn’t respond to requests for comment.
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD : On the Intracoastal Waterway on the North End of Palm Beach island, the property is next to a home owned by actor Sylvester Stallone.
THE SPECS : Originally built in 2005, the Neoclassical house measures roughly 16,000 square feet with six bedrooms. The roughly 1-acre property also has a $2 million travertine pool and cabana.
THE MARKET : There were a number of high-priced deals leading up to the New Year in Palm Beach, where the median sale price for luxury homes was $17.2 million in 2025’s third quarter, according to Miller Samuel.
In December, chewing-gum heir William Wrigley Jr., sold a North Palm Beach compound for $97.5 million , while a property a few doors down from Starret’s traded for around $66.1 million, property records show.
“We have had a pretty incredible flurry in the last couple of months,” said Gary Pohrer of Serhant, who had the listing with Ryan Serhant.
Margit Brandt of Premier Estate Properties represented the buyer.
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A five-bedroom Palo Alto home designed by Steven Ehrlich is listed for $44 million, making it the city’s most expensive listing. Built around a dramatic concrete spine, the home features four courtyards and a pool.
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For years, tech entrepreneur Asher Waldfogel and his wife, Helyn MacLean, dreamed of building a modern house in Palo Alto, Calif.
The couple, however, worried about clashing with the Mediterranean-style architecture typically associated with their neighborhood of Old Palo Alto.
So they tapped architect Steven Ehrlich to create a design that paid homage to its surroundings with stucco, mahogany and titanium zinc cladding. They spent $20 million over several years building the house, completed in 2005.
Now looking to be closer to their adult daughter on the East Coast, they are putting the five-bedroom home on the market for $44 million—the most expensive listing in Palo Alto.
Waldfogel is an angel investor who co-founded Redback Networks, a telecommunications-equipment company. MacLean previously had a career in fundraising.
The couple purchased the roughly 0.4-acre site for $7.1 million in 2000 and demolished a circa-1930s Spanish Colonial home. The house they built pinwheels around a central staircase. It has 7,900 square feet of livable space, with four distinct courtyards and a pool.
A key feature of the home is a cast-in-place concrete wall, or spine, that is two stories high and about 80 feet long. “There’s a little bit of controlled chaos in what comes out of the form,” unlike a perfectly uniform surface, Waldfogel said. “If you want that, you do it in plastic.”
Waldfogel said he and his wife are thinking about the next phase of life now that their daughter is grown, although they have not decided where they will move. They also have a home in Sun Valley, Idaho.
“Right now we’re just trying to emotionally let go and decide what to do next,” he said.
Palo Alto, an epicenter of venture capital and tech startups in Silicon Valley, is home to some of the country’s biggest tech titans. Sales volume and prices are rising, with a median sale price of $3.5 million for the three months ending in August, up 5.8% year-over-year, according to real-estate brokerage Redfin.
Arthur Sharif of Sotheby’s International Realty—San Francisco Brokerage has the listing.
