The World’s Most Expensive Homes

While we might be quibbling over the price hikes and falls besetting us mere mortals, there’s a whole other property market out there, where the odd million (or ten) quid fluctuation in the asking price matters not a jot. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the world’s most expensive properties, a demonstration quite clearly, of what happens when money simply doesn’t matter.

Situated along Australia’s Gold Coast and across the French Riviera, in the U.K. and throughout continental Europe and nature preserves in Zambia, the unique prices reflect the uniqueness of the bricks and mortar and boy are they using different bricks to the rest of us. For the third consecutive year, Forbes.com has compiled its list of the world’s most valuable properties on the market in every continent, excluding Antarctica, restricting the list to homes and apartments and not including apartment buildings or plots of land. Some commercial property was included, such as ranches and vineyards, but only if the property also featured a residence worthy of the list.

And to be ‘worthy’, it seems that the property simply has to be extremely expensive in relation to the national average. For example, South Africa’s priciest property is currently on the market for $18 million, a mere snip compared to Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s Aspen ski lodge which lists for $135 million; 6,000 miles away, a 64-room Istanbul waterfront mansion asks $100 million. Fancy playing dress-up? A 13th century Romanian castle, once home to Vlad the Impaler is yours for $140 million. Or go one step further and pay top whack for a pad that hasn’t even been built yet: logging tycoon Tim Blixseth is asking $155 million for his planned Montana lodge and he claims that several members of the Forbes 400 have already expressed interest in what will be a 53,000-square-foot stone-and-wood mansion in the billionaire’s members-only Yellowstone Club. Due for completion in 2008, this year’s top property can be found in Beverly Hills, California (where else?). For a princely $165 million, you get a 75,000-square-foot villa once owned by William Randolph Hearst.

However, there’s more to this than meets the eye. With this amount of money involved, there has to be, right? Buyers tend to follow the same pattern of being wealthy globetrotters looking for a third or fourth home and their cultural makeup has shifted in recent times, with increasing numbers of the newly rich from China, India and Russia joining their European counterparts in the race for who owns the priciest pad. However, the reality of this otherworld is that it is widely considered to be more than a little gauche to actually announce the asking price of your luxury home – unless you can be sure it is the priciest on the block by far. Many owners sell to pre-selected buyers and hide the asking and true sales prices for tax reasons. Therefore, it is hard to gauge exactly how many of these über-luxurious piles are out there for the taking.

Potentially destabilising factors that fill the property pages for the average buyer, such as mortgage and vacancy rates and market fluctuations, have little to no effect on high-end buyers or sellers. This truly is a league of its own and yet there seems to be room for improvement, even at this end of the scale. When the Forbes list began in 2005, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion was the only American property listed above $100 million – there are now three and his is in second place by a whopping $50 million.

With the rich still in love with all things property, many of them are seeing their investment in bricks and mortar vastly outperforming their bond or equity investments. With many markets reaping the reward of the hype of inflated valuation, there is a lot of money going around the world these days, flooding in from newly wealthy countries, in particular China and Russia. And while these pricy properties tend to be located in the so-called ‘wealth ghettoes’ of the Hamptons or the commercial districts of London and other economic powerhouses, simple supply and demand means that the prices at the top end of the property market are set to keep on climbing, not matter what happens lower down the property ladder.