Top Story - February: Longboat Key property becomes most expensive listing in tri-county history

The numbers instantly indicate this real estate listing isn’t like many others.

Even on Longboat Key.

It has 19,300 square feet of living space.

Three stories.

It's on 1.2 acres.

Ten-car garage below the living spaces.

Six bedrooms, six full bathrooms and two half-baths.

List price is $26.5 million, a record listing price for Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties.

Mike and Michele McKey’s beachfront mansion on Longboat Key, within the gated borders of the Longboat Key Club in Regent Court, was added to the MLS system for sale in early March. Final staging and photography took place in February, but the home was available to show ahead of those final preperations for qualified buyers or their agents.

Michael Moulton, the listing agent and a broker-associate with Michael Saunders & Co. on Longboat Key, said arriving at that price wasn’t particularly difficult — easier, perhaps, he said than pricing a $1 million home.

Land value, location and today’s costs of reproducing the property all play a role.

“I feel as high as this is, it’s still a very good value,’’ he said, adding colleagues have remarked they could envision a still-higher price, especially while considering a comparable property in a location such as Naples.

“This is the Port Royal location of Sarasota,’’ he said, referring to the tony Southwestern Florida spot where $50 million estates are not uncommon.

 The Serenissima estate – it means “most serene” in Italian – sits directly on 140 feet of beachfront, in a quiet portion of an already-quiet community.

On the first floor, potential buyers will find living quarters — kitchen, dining room, sun room, and a “grand salon.”

One flight up are a pair of master suites, along with an office and sitting room. Staircases are formed with solid slabs of marble. There’s also an elevator.

On the third floor are guest quarters with adjoining bathrooms and spaces suited for movie-watching, game-playing or reading.

Built in 2005, the Venetian-style masterpiece soars over its beachfront surroundings, but is just across the street from the Longboat Key Club golf course.  

Moulton said the owners planned and built the mansion to their specifications and are now interested in downsizing, or “right-sizing” as he called it.

The owners have been preparing Serenissima to show for months, Moulton said. Meanwhile, the time to sell appears good, as Moulton explained that well-heeled people from Europe and elsewhere are arriving in the area all the time.

“Sarasota is on the map,’’ he said.