Though seven-figure listings may have dominated this year’s luxury real estate, some mega-homes were forced to downgrade their expectations and their list price. At the same time, other properties and projects still in development held out high hopes for wealthy buyers willing to pay any price for their very own slice of paradise. Palaces, manors and landmarks – they were all up for grabs this year! Say Hello to El Fueridis In Brian De Palma’s 1983 film, Scarface, gangster Tony Montana builds a cocaine-fueled empire that soon lands him in a Miami mansion littered with the flotsam and jetsam of his lavish life of crime. With a beautiful wife, a pet tiger, and more illicit drugs than he can apparently handle, Tony eventually become a victim of his own hubris, uttering his famous last words before tumbling off his ornate balcony into a fountain inscribed with the words, “The World Is Yours.” Though the film was set in Florida, the house is actually located on the opposite coast. The 100-year old haunt, known as El Fueridis to friends and neighbors, was designed by LA Public Library architect Bertram Goodhue and has always been hip to the Hollywood scene. Its “Persian-style” gardens and 24-carat gold ceilings once hosted the wedding of Charlie Chaplin and Oona O’Neil. More recently, the 10,000-square-foot mansion has languished on the market for over a year, its ten acres and innumerable fountains unable to coax potential buyers to fulfill the $35 million asking price. A thirty-percent discount seems to have done the trick: the property finally sold for $12.26 million earlier this year. The Largest Log Cabin on Earth Beyond Abe Lincoln’s wildest dreams, this expansive – and expensive – Granot Loma is technically a “log cabin,” but it’s aspirations are...

Yardi proposal writer Lexi Beausoliel and her husband, Matthew, can call themselves homebuilders – multiple times over. Each year, the Santa Barbara couple makes at least one trip to the Colonias of East Tijuana, Mexico, to assist with a Southern California home building non-profit called Project Mercy. Since 1991, volunteers participating in the project have constructed hundreds of homes for impoverished Tijuana residents living without a nearby water source, indoor plumbing and other basic utilities that Americans take for granted. Due to the positive impact of the experience, this summer the Beausoliels decided to kick it up a notch. Rather than organizing just one team of volunteers to complete just one home, they decided to aim for five – enough to build five houses for families in need, completed in a single day. In addition to the manpower, they are hoping to fundraise nearly $20,000 to cover the building cost. “Instead of just one house, we can build a small community,” said Lexi Beausoliel, who credits her spouse as the driving force behind the quadrupled effort. “(Matthew) has had such a great experience doing this, and felt like it would be really impactful to gather our friends, colleagues, and families together to build a group of homes in one day. It will be like building a village.” In order to qualify for the assistance of a Project Mercy volunteer team, the residents receiving the homes –who own the land where the simple residences are constructed – must contribute significant sweat equity by pitching in on projects in advance of their own build day. And they don’t cease contributing when their own properties are complete, either. “Families that we have built for the year before always come back and help. It’s really cool to see...