Even at those sky-high price points, the newly listed properties still aren’t the very priciest on the market in the Lake Tahoe region right now — a 20,000 square foot mansion was recently listed for $100 million also on the Nevada side.

If sold, any of these new ultra-luxury compounds could easily unseat the most expensive property that has been listed to date in Lake Tahoe: the historic Thunderbird Lodge, an east shore waterfront property on 6.51 acres that sold in 1998 for $50 million. At that time, it was the highest price ever paid for a private home in the U.S.

Crystal Pointe
Courtesy Of Jeff Dow

That there are now several listings on the market with the potential to set a record high price show how Tahoe real estate has transformed in a short period of time.

Driving the trend is an influx of uber-wealthy buyers from the technology industry, local agents said.

“There are more buyers in this potential price range than there ever has been because there are more millionaires and billionaires than ever before,” said Lowe. “Our region has expanded to become the new Silicon Valley… Reno is one of the biggest tech havens in the country.”

Crystal Pointe
Courtesy Of Jeff Dow

Wealth among billionaires is up $1.7 trillion — a gain of more than 58% — over the pandemic, according to figures from Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies that tracks wealth trends in the U.S. Some of those billionaires have had their sights set on Lake Tahoe, magnifying an already significant wealth gap and housing crisis in the region. Since the pandemic, the area has seen a dearth of affordable housing, traffic issues from a proliferation of tourists and new residents, and home prices that have more than doubled around the lake, The Chronicle reported.

Many of the wealthy buyers who are flocking to Lake Tahoe are buying up property on the region’s east shore, or Nevada side, and are doing so in large part for tax reasons, real estate agents say: The state has no inheritance tax, no estate tax and no personal income tax. Microsoft, Switch, Tesla, and Apple all have offices in Nevada and many of their executives are scooping up properties on the lake, according to Lowe. Larry Ellison, for instance, purchased a home on the Nevada side in 2021.

Wovoka
Courtesy Of Scott Thompson, Vista Estates Visuals

With its relatively smaller developed shoreline, the east side of Lake Tahoe has also always had low inventory. That factor has added to its allure, realtors say, and is part of why South Lake Tahoe continues to be the more “affordable” area in the region, by Tahoe standards.

The advantages for buyers in Nevada and the proliferation of remote work — which has allowed some buyers to relocate permanently — have catapulted Lake Tahoe’s east shore in particular to never-before-seen figures, agents said.

“We’re breaching new price points because these aren’t necessarily just second homes,” said Mike Dunn, Vice President for Chase International. The company set a record for sales over $20 million in 2021, according to the its 2021 luxury report.

The $64.5 million Crystal Pointe property, at 300 Highway 28, Crystal Bay, is a lakefront estate of two properties across 5.14 acres. The property was built directly on the water from an amphibious barge, a crane, and a helicopter — a production that took years, Chase real estate agents said.

The main house, which has a kind of mountain castle aesthetic, has five bedrooms and was completed in 1997. The permitting process for the four-bedroom beach house took more than a decade to complete and was finished in 2016. Combined, the homes total more than 16,232 square feet and are accessible through a glass funicular.

The lodge-like estate with 525 feet of shoreline also includes a caretaker’s apartment, an attached guest house, 13 fireplaces, elevators, ponds and waterfalls, four buoys, multiple gardens and a cellar that can store 1,687 bottles of wine.

Wovoka, the $55 million property coming on the market soon, is at 1192 Highway 50 and, like Crystal Pointe, also includes two lakefront properties on Tahoe’s east shore in Nevada. The estate includes a “Mountain Impressionist”-styled main residence, a five-car garage with a guest house, a waterside studio, two treehouses and a waterfront log guest house.

The 4.85 acre lot has 11,000 square feet of living space in the main residence, a private flat-top breakwater jetty with a cribbed pier, 370 feet of lake frontage, three buoys and an outdoor saltwater infinity pool and spa.

“This particular property is of such scarcity,” said Chase International Realtor Clif Chase, who listed Wovoka. “It really forms a compound… it has any lake amenity you could have and they’re all private — there’s no shared pier here.”