Did this billionaire with Miami Beach ties just use a company to buy a Palm Beach house?

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Billionaire investor Barry S. Sternlicht appears to be linked to the $13.8 million off-market purchase of a house that sold recently on Barton Avenue in Midtown Palm Beach, courthouse records show.

The buyer of the ocean-block house at 150 Barton Ave was a Delaware-registered limited liability company named FL Prop LLC, the deed shows. That entity has the same Miami Beach address as a waterfront house owned by a company affiliated in property records with Sternlicht.

The billionaire founded and is chairman and CEO of Miami-headquartered Starwood Capital Group, a private-equity firm that specializes in “global real estate,” including residences, hotels, office space and industrial properties, according to its website. The company and its affiliates have bought and sold several commercial and apartment developments in Palm Beach County and also own the Mall at Wellington Green in Wellington.

The property that just sold on Barton Avenue includes a two-bedroom, Mediterranean-style house built in 1939 and a guesthouse with two more bedrooms, property records show. Combined, they have 5,210 square feet of living space, inside and out. The lot measures four-tenths of an acre and is the fourth property west of the beach.

The house is next door to one that sold in December to a different buyer, a trust, for $10.5 million. In all, four houses have sold on Barton Avenue since the start of December.

The house that just changed hands at 150 Barton Ave. had been in the same family since it last sold in September 1988 for about $1 million, property records show. It had been home of the late Hope “Hopie” Parkhurst Kent Annan and her second husband, the late John “Jack” W. Annan, a private investor. He died Nov. 13 at 94, more than four years after his wife’s death at 87 in April 2020.

The house was sold by Hope Annan’s son and daughter from her first marriage, Eliott Hewlett Kent and Allison K. Bourke, who acted as trustees of a marital trust in their mother’s name, according to the deed recorded Jan. 13.

Hope Annan — who was at the time Hope Kent — bought the house in September 1988, several months after the death of her first husband, A. Atwater Kent Jr., who ran his family’s investment firm.

Buyer in Palm Beach linked to Miami Beach home built in 2018

The deed for the recent sale of the Barton Avenue house lists the buyer’s address as 2374 North Bay Road in Miami Beach. The Miami Beach house is owned by a company, BSS Miami LLC, which is linked in courthouse records to Sternlicht and has the billionaire’s initials in its name.

With a mailing address at Starwood Capital Group’s office in Greenwich, Connecticut, BSS Miami bought the Miami Beach property in 2015, property records show. The contemporary-style house on North Bay Road was completed in 2018.

Sternlicht’s net worth is estimated by Forbes at $2.8 billion. Starwood Capital manages $115 billion in assets, “making it one of the world’s biggest real estate investors,” according to a brief profile of Sternlicht at Forbes.com. Sternlicht created the W boutique hotel brand and established Starwood Property Trust, a leading mortgage real estate investment trust.

In 2014, a Starwood company bought the Mall at Wellington Green for $341 million, and in 2022 an affiliate paid $130 million for the Marketplace at the Outlets on Palm Beach Lakes in West Palm Beach.

Property records show that Sternlicht in 2013 used a trust in his name to buy a waterfront house at 3660 Jappeloup Lane in Wellington for a recorded $2.15 million. That house was sold in September for $5.25 million, courthouse records show.

At least 65 other billionaires — including President Donald Trump — are linked to property in the town of Palm Beach, according to an exclusive Palm Beach Daily News analysis of the latest Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people.

The trust on the seller’s side of the sale of 150 Barton Ave. has an address in care of the Palm Beach law firm Alley, Maass, Rogers & Lindsay. The trust’s trustees and a representative of Sternlicht could not be immediately reached for comment.

In the 1988 sale, the sellers were Hildegarde “Hillie” Mahoney and her late husband, businessman David Mahoney. Before the Mahoneys bought the property in 1987, the house at one time had been part of a compound comprising four adjacent houses — Nos. 150, 160, 170 and 180 Barton Ave. — owned by Thaddeus R. Trout, property records show.

The original design of the house at 150 Barton Ave. is usually attributed to the late Palm Beach architect John L. Volk. It was commissioned in the 1930s as an open-air pool pavilion for the late Jules S. Bache, who owned the house next door at what is today 160 Barton Ave., according to files kept by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.

The house at No. 160 — known as “The Ballroom” because of the role it served in Trout’s former compound — is listed for sale at $24.9 million by agent Hillary Masters of Nest Seekers Palm Beach.

Other recent sales on Barton Avenue in Palm Beach

Of the three other properties on the street that recently sold, only one was in the ocean block — a house at 138 Barton Ave., immediately east of the one that just changed hands. That off-market sale of No. 138 was recorded Dec. 10 and saw Susan Kirkbride deed her longtime residence to the Barton Avenue Trust. Neither Kirkbride nor the trust’s trustee, Palm Beach attorney Stuart J. Haft, would comment about the sale.

The other two sales were in the block of the street that runs between South County Road and Cocoanut Row. Via a deed recorded Jan. 7, New Jersey car dealer Walter “Rod” Rodman Ryan and his wife, Dianne, sold — for just under $14 million — their renovated house built in 2002 at 224 Barton Ave. The buyers in that deal were banker Alpert P. Hegyi, and his wife, Cecilia, who served as trustees of a land trust named after the property’s address. Agents Chris Deitz and Michael Costello of Compass Florida held the co-listing for the house at No. 224, while agents Lisa and John Cregan of Sotheby’s International Realty represented the buyers.

In the third sale, recorded Jan. 9 for 245 Barton Ave., real estate investor and Sotheby’s International Realty agent Elizabeth “Betsy” Sorrel sold, for a recorded at $15.9 million, a 1950s-era, five-bedroom house she had renovated. The Florida limited liability company that bought No. 245 is managed by Vernon Nicholas Leopard, state business records show. A man by that name, who goes by “Nick,” founded and is CEO of Accordion Partners, a New York-based financial consulting firm for the private-equity industry. The Cregans negotiated for Sorrel opposite broker Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate.

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This is a developing story.  Check back for any updates.

Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Is billionaire with Miami Beach ties linked to Palm Beach house buy?