$6.9 million Fort Worth mansion sells amid the coronavirus pandemic
A North Texas real estate brokerage firm pulled off two major sales for the month of June.
Ulterre, formerly known Giordano, Wegman, Walsh & Associates, is an exclusive affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate and it posted the sales of The Baldridge House and the Hyder Estate.
The historic Baldridge House on Crestline Road in west Fort Worth north of Camp Bowie Boulevard sold at the full asking price of $6.9 million, which the firm said was “among the highest sales prices to date in the entire Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.”
The six-bedroom, 11,725-square-foot Georgian mansion was built more than a century ago for rancher-turned-banker Earl Baldridge. The house was declared a Texas Historic Landmark in 1978 and it sits on 1.5 acres.
“We were so proud to have represented such a wonderful property, and such great homeowners. We negotiated and closed this sale successfully, in highly unusual times,” said Eric Walsh, co-founder of the firm.
Fort Worth’s luxury housing market was dubbed among the top markets to watch earlier this year according to a report by the real estate company Coldwell Banker. Many things have made high-end living in Fort Worth attractive, according to the report, like the presence of sports stadiums, trailheads, parks and other amenities.
Despite the pandemic’s economic fallout, Realtor.com indicates that the U.S. luxury housing market at-large showed promising signs of resilience for May amidst the pandemic’s downturn.
Clay Brants, global real estate adviser with Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty, says that Fort Worth’s high-end market took a slight nosedive in the very beginning of the pandemic because luxury properties were taken off the market.
“A lot of these people didn’t have to sell and they weren’t sure who was walking in through their house, so a lot of the people, including some of our clients, took their property off the market,” Brants said.
Brants has been a real estate broker selling in Fort Worth’s luxury market since 1986. He also ran his own real estate company before he sold it five years ago.
He says that Fort Worth’s high-end market quickly bounced back from that nosedive because of favorable interest rates and a shortage of inventory in the general real estate market that he says has been around for a few years already, causing a “favorable buying climate.”
“A lot of the industry experts in the real estate world have reminded us that this is a health crisis. It’s not a housing crisis,” Brants said.
He says part of what makes Fort Worth a booming market, both luxury and the general market, is the city’s “ridiculously low” cost of living, among other things.
Brants says he’s sold The Baldridge House twice before and said that the house was priced at $7.9 million when it first came on the market.
The second luxury property under Ulterre’s belt for June is the Hyder Estate, a 9,000-square-foot luxury enclave with a lot of privacy that was built in the 1920s in the historic River Crest neighborhood, sitting on more than one and a half acres of land.
The owners of the home were investor Elton M. Hyder with his wife Christine. His father, Elton Hyder, was a prominent Fort Worth attorney and philanthropist who served as the youngest assistant attorney general in Texas history in 1944.
According to the Christie’s International Real Estate website, the Hyder Estate was offered at $5.95 million in February 2019, but the home was sold in June for an undisclosed price.
The property is about 10 minutes away from Downtown Fort Worth and it’s tucked in a heavily treed golf course lot at the very end of West Seventh Street.
The mansion’s exterior is marked by red brick walls, tall white columns and more than 250 feet of frontage.
Aside from posting two significant sales for just one month, Ulterre also boasts selling and closing the Hyder Estate in less than seven days.
“We were able to negotiate, contract and close this magnificent property in less than seven days. Without such great sellers, this would have been an insurmountable challenge. However, with astute negotiations, careful planning and execution, we were able to pull this sale off extremely quickly, without a hitch,” said John Giordano, co-founder.
This story was originally published August 1, 2020 at 5:30 AM.