Detroit’s Most Expensive Home Price at $2.5 Million

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 1:10PM EST · Published Feb 16, 7:03AM EST

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Detroit’s Most Expensive Home Price at $2.5 Million — © Thinkstock

In a city with tens of thousands of vacant homes, many of which will be bulldozed or sold for a few thousand dollars, a 13,000 square foot house is for sale for $2.5 million. Even the price and sales prospects of such an expensive mansion tell a great deal about the real estate market in Detroit. The home, built in 2009, went on the market for $7.2 million in April 2012. Based on the new price, the house at 2 Sand Bar Lane should be a bargain, except that it is in Detroit.

The house is gargantuan and sits just off the Detroit River. One of the drawbacks to owning the home is that the river is a source of pollutants that have plagued the western part of Lake Erie. According to MLive:

Roughly 80 percent of the water and 40 to 50 percent of the phosphorus entering Western Lake Erie comes through the Detroit River.

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The home listing promotes proximity to the river:

PRIVATE 75 FT BOAT SLIP

For those intrepid enough to want to boat onto the river. For those who don’t, the home has views of the river from most rooms, as well as “magnificent views of Belle Island and Canada.” In many large U.S. cities, or their nearby suburbs, a home with six bedrooms, five baths, two master suites and an elevator would be worth millions of dollars more. In the richest suburbs in places like Greenwich, Conn., such a house would be worth in the tens of millions of dollars.

As for 2 Sand Bar Lane, the home may stay on the market for years, or it may sell for a fraction of its current listing price.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.