Big price tag equals big interest in Bracebridge Hall in Cecil

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Nov 14, 2006 by Jen Degregario

A $34.5 million price tag has not kept investors from inquiring about Bracebridge Hall, a sprawling waterfront estate now on the market in Cecil County.

Potential buyers have been making tentative offers for the 38,000- square-foot mansion and conference center, which sits on 560 acres of land along the Sassafras River near Wilmington, Del. One investor wants to turn the complex into a boarding school, another into a housing development. Other well-heeled inquirers have proposed uses ranging from a corporate-retreat facility to a personal residence.

"With all the calls we've had - the price has never been an issue," said Laird Bunch, a partner with Brandywine Fine Properties, the affiliate of Sotheby's International Realty in charge of marketing the property. "We've had schools call us. We've had embassies. We've had governments. We've had some pretty high- profile buyers."

Bracebridge Hall, located at 314 Grove Neck Road, is among the Eastern Shore's most upscale addresses, Bunch said. In 1990, a wealthy Florida real estate developer named William Crocker built the house for himself and his wife. But after becoming terminally ill in the late 1990s, Bunch said, he sold it to MBNA Corp., a national credit-card issuer that later merged with Bank of America.

MBNA bought the property for a "bargain" $5 million, Bunch said. The company then added an 18,000-square-foot conference center to the original 20,000-square-foot Georgian manor, which it used for company retreats.

Seven years later, the company resold the complex for about $14 million to a group of Maryland investors.

That group, Bracebridge Estates LLC, includes Stephen A. Geppi, founder of Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., and Edward St. John, head of St. John Properties, a commercial real estate company.

With its 10 bathrooms, nine bedrooms, helipad, tennis courts and farm facilities, Bracebridge Hall "is an extremely rare property," Bunch said. But for buyers unimpressed by the complex alone, potential to develop its surrounding acreage could sweeten the pot.

Bracebridge Estates has lobbied Cecil County to increase the estate's zoning density to allow 107 additional houses to be built there. The county Office of Planning and Zoning this summer gave conceptual approval to the plan. The planning commission is expected to finalize the rezoning measure in the months ahead, said Eric Shertz, a plans reviewer for the planning department.

The property's sale and eventual development could have a profound impact on Earleville.

"Earleville is very rural; the majority of it is protected farmlands," Shertz said. "Something like this is definitely going to impact the roads and everything along those lines."

But growth has been mounting in Cecil County for some time, as developable land becomes increasingly scarce in adjacent Delaware and Harford County. At $260,000, Cecil's median home price has nearly doubled since 2000, according to data from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc.

"Land in that area is just being sucked up by builders," said Brad Smith, an agent in the Elkton office of Long & Foster Real Estate. "Right now there's a lot of farmland and a big amount of acreage up for sale."

With its southern edge tracing the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, parts of Cecil have become meccas for upper-crust folks looking to vacation in spots more secluded than typical East Coast getaways. Chesapeake City, for example, has been luring such residents for years.

"The Eastern Shore is getting more and more popular," Bunch said. "We have more and more people from New York coming in -who are sick of the Hamptons."

Bunch is entertaining one "serious" offer for Bracebridge Hall as well as a number of tentative offers. He expects to sell the property at some point in the months ahead.

"There's nothing like it on the Eastern Shore," he said.