Only 10 luxury homes in the Sarasota-Bradenton area are listed at $10 million or more. One of the smallest, on the market since Feb. 1, has the beauty of a Clifford Scholz design but there’s only 5,355 square feet of it.

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So where does Realtor Roger Pettingell, who has listed it at $9,995,000 through Coldwell Banker, see that value?

Right outside the hurricane-rated windows.

The winter home of Jane Levan, built in 2003 by Perrone Construction at 622 S. Owl Drive, sits on two prime Bird Key luxury home lots. Better, it sits on one of them; the other is a trimmed and treed landscape that is something like a small Selby Gardens. A house once stood on it.

Together, the Bird Key luxury homes give the Levan property 450 feet of seawall, with Dolphin Waterway, Bird Key’s north-south canal, on one side and open bay on the other. Views sweep from the Plymouth Harbor tower south to Big Pass.

The house “is not sized just for the sake of size,” said Pettingell, the top-selling Coldwell Banker agent in the state in 2016 with $77 million in sales volume. “It is classic, comfortable and meant to take advantage of all the views.”

The second lot could be sold separately and built upon. Judging by recent sales, the vacant Levan parcel is probably worth close to $4 million. Those recent sales include the $5.25 million sale of a 1950 Paul Rudolph house on the Harbor Acres bayfront for which a demolition permit is pending and the listing of a bayfront Bird Key lot with a 1970s house that might be renovated if not replaced by a new owner. The Levans paid $3.9 million total for the two lots in the early 2000s, according to county records.

That leaves $6 million of the $10 million list price for the house and its lot. That appears to be in the waterfront ballpark, although it is still the most expensive current Bird Key listing by far. Nothing else on the key is listed at more than $5 million.

“It’s the best lot,” Pettingell said, “and they have well over $5 million in the structure of this house.”

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