Last year, investor Ron Baron paid $103 million for a 40-acre oceanfront estate in East Hampton, the tony town where New York billionaires spend their summers.
The price set a record, even in a community that counts Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn and Steven Spielberg as homeowners.
Now the view in East Hampton is changing, in more ways than one.
As the New York Observer reports today, the median home price in the Hamptons has fallen 19.4 percent in the past year, dropping from $1,030,000 to $830,000.
If Baron’s property follows suit, that would mean he has lost $20 million in a year.
His companies have also taken a hit. Bloomberg reported this week that the $2.4 billion Baron Partners Fund has declined 50 percent this year.
And then there is the matter of the sand dunes.
The East Hampton Star reported yesterday that town officials are concerned that Baron may have violated environmental laws by leveling a sand dune on his property.
Baron’s lawyer, Eric Herschmann, told the Star that his client has a “commitment to nature” and had not broken the law.
Yet work on the site has stirred concern among local residents. “To see that lost to East Hampton, 300 years of history, gone like that, it is devastating to me personally,” town planning board chair Sylvia Overby told the newspaper. “It seems like he wanted to see the ocean without walking through those dunes.”
Forbes last year ranked Baron as No. 317 on its list of the 400 richest Americans. His estimated net worth was then $1.5 billion, an amount that has likely declined with the financial crisis.
He founded Baron Capital in 1982 and hosts an annual conference that draws thousands of mutual fund investors.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment