Hudson luxury home sells for $3.4 million

MONTREAL - A posh Hudson estate initially priced at $6.9 million in 2008 was purchased for less than half that amount Tuesday during Quebec’s first absolute auction.

The sale of the eight-bedroom, 17,000 square foot waterfront estate for $3.4 million includes a 10 per cent commission for the U.S.-based Grand Estates Auction Co. which organized the event.

A spokesperson for Great Estates said the Montreal-area mansion, which features an indoor pool, separate guest house and even a secret passage, attracted 23 bidders, while generating more than 500 inquiries and 200 showings.

Auctions, while popular in the United States and Australia, are a rarety in Canada. An absolute auction - where there is no reserve bid - involving a luxury estate is believed to be unprecedented.

The auction comes at a time when Canadians are increasingly considering alternatives to real estate brokers when selling their homes.

Last week, Propertyguys.com Inc., which helps people sell their own homes, joined forces with flat-fee brokerage Realty sellers Real Estate Inc. The merger will help owners outside of Quebec pay a flat fee and list their properties on realtor.ca, which generates the listings for the vast majority of home sales in Canada, the companies say.

But market alternatives like auctions and sell-it-yourself websites are unlikely to replace traditional sales by brokers, said Don Campbell, president of the Vancouver-based Real Estate Investment Network.

“It’s not going to catch fire here,” Campbell said of luxury estate auctions. “It’s too much of a risk to the vendor. In our country it doesn’t make sense for a vendor to go to auction.”

While Campbell’s heard of cases of B.C. farmlands and foreclosed homes being purchased in Canada through auctions, he wasn’t aware of any previous example of a luxury estate being sold to the highest bidder.

And unlike the case in Hudson, most auctions in Canada have a reserve bid, or a minimum selling price.

“I’m really and truly trying to figure out why you would want to sell it in an auction,” he said of the Oakleigh Estate in Hudson.

Initially listed with Profusion Realty Inc. for $6.9 million in 2008, the home was reduced to $5.4 million after it failed to sell. Louise Rémillard, president of Profusion, an exclusive affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate for the Greater Montreal area, said the sellers wouldn’t lower their price at the time, even though the home had a municipal evaluation of under $3.5 million.

“There’s really nothing in real estate that price can’t fix,” Rémillard said. “When is listing is priced correctly it sells.”

The owners of the mansion, John Hooper, 70 and Diane Bradshaw, 65, said they decided to auction off the home they built in 2000 after it failed to sell for more than two years through traditional means.

With a limited pool of local buyers with the means to buy such an estate, luxury homes often languish for more than a year in Montreal before being sold, brokers acknowledge. An even greater challenge for sellers like Hooper is that sales of luxury homes in Hudson, like other off-island suburbs, have been slow this year, largely because of increased congestion on Montreal-area roads, brokers say.

This year, the highest priced home for sale in Hudson was purchased for $825,000, Multiple Listing Service data show.

Hooper, an entrepreneur and scientist, who helped build the now defunct company Phoenix International Life Sciences Inc., could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.

But in an interview last week, Hooper said he was eager to sell the estate so he and Bradshaw could travel the world.

Rémillard, who specializes in high-end real estate, said she believes the couple sold the home below market value, especially considering that the latest school and property taxes on the estate amount to $41,000 a year.

The current municipal evaluation of the estate is more than $4.3 million.

“Had he sold before he wouldn’t have had two years of headaches,” she said. “Forty-one thousand dollars a year will give you a lot of opportunities to travel.”

alampert@montrealgazette.com

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Hudson+luxury+home+sells+million/5090756/story.html#ixzz1RwVqSWzA

Rupert Murdoch UK Phone Tapping Scandal Leads to More Arrests

As predicted by the Morton Minute two weeks ago, there have been more arrests in the long-running phone tapping saga that has embroiled the British media.

The latest journalist to be questioned and arrested is Laura Elston, the former royal correspondent for the Press Association news agency. This follows the questioning of Terenia Taras, a freelance journalist from Leeds in the north of England who was a former girlfriend of Greg Miskiw, a senior executive at the News of the World tabloid, the newspaper at the centre of the investigation by a 45 strong team from Scotland Yard.

In a separate development, a judge has ruled that Scotland Yard must hand over the notes and other documents seized from convicted private investigator Glen Mulcaire to public figures including actors Steve Coogan and Jude Law who are suing News International, the owner of the Sunday tabloid.

With so many police officers on the case and so much information being uncovered, this case will run and run.

"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right."
Isaac Asimov