Quayle House-Hunt: What Price California Dreamin’?
REAL ESTATE WANTED: Upwrdly mobile govt. employee, wife and 3 young children consdrng prttime relocation. Seek affrdbl. Calif. home. Close to golf course desirable. Excllnt refs. Reply to: D.Q., The Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C.
In reality, Vice President Dan Quayle has no need to advertise. Brochures from enterprising real estate agents have been pouring into his White House office since he let it be known last week on a visit to Southern California that he and his wife, Marilyn, were smitten with the area and might like a second home/retreat here.
David Beckwith, Quayle’s press secretary, said this week that the office has also fielded “quite a few” calls from real estate agents, sandwiched in between those from reporters.
Some of the unsolicited brochures have gone home with Quayle in his briefcase. And that, Beckwith added, is as far as the California house-hunting has gone--that and “casual conversation” between the Quayles. Any further speculation as to if, when and where is “very preliminary,” he emphasized.
A vacation home for the Quayles in California, he said in a telephone interview, might mean buying or renting. Despite media suggestions that politically conservative Orange County or Northern San Diego County would seem eminently suitable, he said, “you could say Northern California with an equal amount of accuracy.”
It has not been lost on political observers that, should Quayle decide to seek the presidency in 1996, California with its 47 electoral votes, compared with 12 from Quayle’s home state of Indiana, might be a splendid state to adopt.
The Bottom Line
There is, of course, one drawback. The median price of a Southern California single-family dwelling--not even in a suitably vice presidential enclave--has soared over the $200,000 mark.
By contrast, the Ft. Wayne Board of Realtors reports that the median price in that part of Indiana, where the Quayles lived in his pre-Senate days, has just taken a big jump to $62,500.
The Quayles no longer own property in Indiana but do own the McLean, Va., home in which they lived during his years as a U.S. Senator, and they plan to lease it starting in August, Beckwith said. The Quayle family home now is the official vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington.
As vice president, Quayle has had to take what amounts to a small pay cut. In 1988, the Quayles jointly reported an adjusted gross income of $156,546. Of that, $89,500 was his Senate salary, $52,797 was in honorariums he earned speaking, a perk he has relinquished as vice president. (Legally, he was able to keep $35,800 in honorariums, the rest going to charity.)
But Quayle does not depend solely upon his salary and perks. His 1988 income included interest, dividends and a director’s salary from Central Newspapers Inc. He is a member of the Pulliam publishing family, and, it has been reported, he and his wife hold assets worth more than $1.4 million.
Still, Marilyn Quayle, though a lawyer, is not now working outside the home. Say the Quayles didn’t wish to dip into capital--can one afford to buy a house today in the right part of Southern California on one salary, in this case the vice president’s salary of $115,000 a year, plus $10,000 expense money?
Said Jeff Hyland, a partner in the Alvarez, Hyland and Young real estate firm, which did some scouting for the Reagans before they found their Bel-Air retirement home: “If he could come up with a 10% to 20% down payment, yes. We could find him a little starter house in West Hollywood for $400,000, with two bedrooms and one bath on a 4,000-square-foot lot, a fixer.”
At the other end of the scale, Hyland said, his company now has a listing that would be ideal for the Quayle family--the former Julie Andrews-Blake Edwards estate, near the Los Angeles Country Club. (Quayle is an avid golfer, his wife a tennis buff). That house, which once belonged to shoe magnate Harry Karl and actress Debbie Reynolds, has five bedrooms, nine baths and a kitchen said to be a dead ringer for the one at the Benihana of Tokyo restaurant.
The asking price? $8.7 million.
A Little Help From Friends?
But, then, perhaps the Quayles have friends in high Republican places who will help out. After all, it was 18 intimate friends, known collectively as Wall Management Services Inc., who chipped in to buy the Reagans’ post-presidency place at 668 St. Cloud Road in Bel-Air. That house, a modest 7,100 square feet on a 1.2-acre split lot, cost $2.5 million. It is the Reagans’ to occupy for three years, at the end of which they have an option to buy or re-lease.
The Reagans themselves didn’t do badly on the sale of their pre-presidency home in Pacific Palisades. In January, 1982, the three-bedroom ranch-style residence on San Onofre Drive, which they had owned since 1957, sold for more than $1 million, giving them a reported net gain of $476,080. Last year, Hyland said, that house sold again for $2 million--with no major improvements.
Where could a vice president of modest means buy for his family today in Orange County? Newport Beach would be ideal, suggested Jim Muller, vice president and branch manager for Coldwell Banker in Newport Beach.
But if the Quayles were trying to do it on vice presidential income alone, he said, “you’d have to get away from Newport Beach. There isn’t a home here he could afford on his salary.” Possibly affordable would be Irvine or Mission Viejo, what Muller called “pure suburbia.”
In one of those places, he added, Quayle “would be the guy next door, Mr. Jones. It doesn’t fit.”
On the other hand, he said, if the Quayles found some political angels as the Reagans did, “I have just an unbelievable house up in Harbor Ridge with a wonderful view of Catalina and the coast” at $4.3 million.
In between those extremes, at about the $1-million level, Muller suggested Newport Beach’s Big Canyon area. “It’s got its own golf club, its gate guarded, it has its own tennis courts . . . if you’re on the right knoll, you can see the ocean. For $1 million, you’d probably get a four-bedroom house” in what he described as a “pretty fancy tract.”
Meanwhile, back home in Indiana, David Gall, treasurer of the Ft. Wayne Board of Realtors, seemed a bit thunderstruck when told of Southern California real estate values. His recollection, he said, was that when the Quayles moved to Washington in 1981, they sold their Huntington, Ind., home for less than $200,000, maybe way less.
“Back when he left Ft. Wayne,” he said, “there weren’t a whole lot of homes that sold for over $200,000.” That was before General Motors came into the area with a truck plant and ITT and Magnavox also gave the area an economic boost, helping speed its recovery from the loss of International Harvest. At $62,500, the median house price is up $8,000 from 1988.
Gall mentioned a new development, Sycamore Hills, halfway between Ft. Wayne and Huntington, and said: “I could see the Quayles living there. It’s built around a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course” and has been very appealing to upper-level management types. A custom five-bedroom house, about 4,000 square feet, with full basement and three-car garage, top-of-the-line appliances, “everything you’d want,” Gall said, is fetching a virtually unprecedented $400,000 to $450,000.
