Woodbridge to Cut Up Site of Surgeon’s Dream Home
A wrecking ball will be the fate of an Anaheim surgeon’s unfinished dream home in the hills above Tustin--a 26,000-square-foot dwelling now strewn with graffiti and beer cans.
The four-story mansion, with 9,000 square feet of balconies and a separate office building with a six-car garage, is on a three-acre hilltop in Cowan Heights with a 360-degree view of the canyons and the ocean.
On the market for a year with an initial asking price of $2.25 million, it sold for $1.25 million, said listing agent Scott Lawrence of Robert Lawrence & Associates in Santa Ana.
The buyer, Woodbridge Development Co. in Mission Viejo, plans to chop the property into five lots, build homes of 5,200 to 6,300 square feet and sell them for $1.2 million to $1.4 million each, Woodbridge Vice President Charles Galaway said.
The demolition alone will cost about $150,000. Galaway said fixing up the mansion would have been so expensive that Woodbridge would have had to ask $6 million to $7 million for it.
“We just felt that economically it made sense to build something smaller,” he said. Woodbridge is a specialist in semi-custom homes on big lots.
The surgeon had taken out a $2-million construction loan for the house before falling on hard times, which led to foreclosure proceedings in 1991, Lawrence said.
The 10-bedroom, 14-bath home was taken over by the federal Resolution Trust Corp., the agency that dealt with the wreckage of the savings and loan industry. The RTC sold it to Beal Bank of Texas, which thought it was getting an apartment building because of the size of the loan, Lawrence said.
E. Scott Reckard covers real estate for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7407 and at scott.reckard@latimes.com.
