Las Vegas home owner selling $7.85M mansion for bitcoin
A casino owner-turned-commercial developer is asking $7.85 million to sell a Las Vegas home, and he’s willing to accept bitcoin, the online currency as one of the payment options for the deal.
Jack Sommer said he got the idea to seek bitcoin for his 25,000-square-foot mansion from his sons, who’ve been involved in this new form of currency. Bitcoin peer-to-peer trading began in 2009. Value is purchased through an exchange website with a mainstream paper currency, such as dollars or euros, though trading isn’t government-regulated.
“The advantage is that we’re expanding our market and adding some notoriety,” Sommer said. With the work Sommers has put in to his beautiful home in the posh Spanish Trail Country Club this can only help in finding a buyer who can appreciate it as well as meet the asking price. Some of this homes more unique features are the marble from China, Iceland and Brazil, stainless steel library shelves clad in American cherry wood. The mansion has a full basement, unusual for Las Vegas, staff quarters with Jacuzzis, and a secret garden. It also has 39 air conditioning zones fed from a 120-ton cooling tower.
He said he and his wife, Laura, considered the additions they’ve made to the home “an exercise in how many cool details we could put in.”
Sommer’s sales agent, Craig Tann, of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Nevada Properties team, said the home may be the first in southern Nevada to be marketed formally around bitcoin.
A range of businesses accept the currency. A California Lamborghini dealership sold a $103,000 Tesla to a Florida man for 91.4 bitcoin, the Review-Journal reported, and a Canadian man listed his Alberta home for the bitcoin equivalent of $405,000.
The currency hit a watermark when Bank of America Merrill Lynch said this month that one bitcoin could have a maximum value of $1,300, or more than the price of an ounce of gold.
A bitcoin on Friday was valued at about $870, up from $10 in January though the volatility in the value of this new currency does make it risky it is one Sommers and his wife are willing to take.