If you have tried to buy a house in the recent past, you will know that it’s not for ants. You need strength and willpower to deal with the mountains of disastrous looking properties you have to sort through. Then you have to deal with the price tags.

Sure, looking for your new house in Cape Town may seem easy, but imagine you were shopping in LA, where the price tags are well into the hundreds of millions of rands. Don’t believe me?

This is Singleton House and it just sold for, wait for it, $59 355 550. That, according to my terrible calculator skills, is R730 million. As Kiernan just commented from across the office, that ain’t cheap.

 The 15,520 square-foot mansion has 10 bedrooms, 12 and a half bathrooms, and four fireplaces. A grand, oval-shaped entry hall with an Asian-inspired mural is overlooked from wrought iron balconies, and the floors are walnut parquet and white marble.

I have good news: It has a firepool:

 The 7.65 acres of grounds on three parcels of land feature lawns, terraces, gardens, a pool, a tennis court, and an expansive motor court allowing parking for up to 20 cars (plus an additional four-car garage for those toys that need safekeeping).

The mansion was originally built in 1970 for Henry Earl Singleton, “an electrical engineer, businessman, and cattle rancher”. Described as an “old-school version of a Silicon Valley CEO”, Mr Singleton was “the co-founder of Teledyne, a tech startup involved in semiconductor device fabrication and development of control systems as well as integrated circuits”.

The Singleton family is the number 7 top land owner in the USA.

Poor guys.

[Source: Fortune]