Tom Brady, Gisele Bündchen to Build Mansion on Miami’s ‘Billionaire Bunker’
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If you’re looking for exclusivity, it doesn’t get any better than Miami’s Indian Creek Island. The private horseshoe-shaped land mass with just 34 homes has been termed a “billionaire bunker” — and with good reason. Residents include billionaire investor Carl Icahn, supermodel Adriana Lima, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who just snapped up Julio Iglesias’ vacant plot of land for $31 million. And the latest monied couple set to sprinkle their celebrity pixie dust over the sunbaked island are perennial luxury real estate aces Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, who just threw down $17 million for a teardown home.
As was first reported in the New York Post, the couple purchased a 5,172-square-foot, five-bedroom and five-bathroom property on a nearly two-acre lot on the tiny island. They plan to demolish the current structure and build an eco-friendly dream house loosely resembling the Brentwood mansion they sold to Dr. Dre in 2014. Having traded teams and climates from the wintery New England Patriots to the balmy Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the six-time Super Bowl winning quarterback has been seriously keen to put down roots under the Florida sun, where he and the Brazilian supermodel have been renting Derek Jeter’s titanic Tampa mansion.
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“You won’t catch me dead living in the Northeast anymore,” he recently said to ProFootball Talk. “I’m loving the warm weather and it’s been a great feeling.”
He’s not kidding. Along with plans to develop an environmentally-friendly new estate, Brady is also jettisoning his Manhattan residence, a mansion-sized condo in the much-vaunted Robert A.M. Stern-designed 70 Vestry, for $40 million —a phenomenal markup considering he only purchased the luxury unit two years ago for $25.46 million. Per reports, the couple plan to keep a smaller unit in the same building.) The Bündchen-Bradys also have their opulent Brookline mansion in Massachusetts up for grabs at $33.9 million.
The privacy-conscious Brady was evidently attracted to the idea of living on a guard-gated island patrolled by offshore marine guards. “I forgot people could drive up to your house,” he said to Howard Stern. “Here they can pull right up to the back of the house … I am a little bit of an introvert. I feel like my house is my place I can relax … In the backyard there’s a lot of boats that have pulled up and people at the front.” [sic]
The Indian Creek Island transaction appears to have gone down off-market. The Real Deal reported that developer Jackie Soffer, CEO of Turnberry, sold the waterfront teardown to her younger brother Jeffrey Soffer, who lives next door, for $17 million. Soffer, who is married to Elle MacPherson and a longtime pal of both Brady and Bündchen, then appears to have passed the lot to his friends for the exact same amount he paid. Where the rich are concerned, it’s clearly a small world.
The Miami purchase follows a recent tidal wave of fortuitous Florida real estate buys, as financial companies and celebrities are taking advantage of the warm weather, low taxes, and bigger properties — forsaking New York and heading to Miami. Bloomberg recently reported that financial giant Goldman Sachs is planning to move its asset division to the area. “It reminds me of the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ where they say, ‘If you build it they will come,’” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez noted in a recent interview of the migration to Miami.
In the Bündchen-Bradys’ case, they are already there. Let the building begin.
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