Another sign that our area’s luxury market is booming: A 9,000-plus-square-foot home in the Lighthouse Cove enclave on the south tip of Longboat Key sold this week in an all-cash transaction for $7.9 million. It’s the highest priced sale year-to-date for a single-family home in the Sarasota County portion of that exclusive island.

Nicknamed “The White House,” the five-bedroom, eight-bath home sits on an acre-and-a-quarter behind the gates of the Longboat Key Club. It has 450 feet of waterfront overlooking New Pass. “The property is spectacular; it’s really, really one of a kind,” says Janet Coughlin of Bright Realty, who represented the buyer. The Ackerman Group of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate was the listing agent.

Coughlin says the buyers are a Boston couple with two teenagers who had a part-time home in Naples for quite some time and were looking to buy a more permanent residence there. “They drove up here [to Sarasota] for dinner for the first time, looked around, and they said, ‘this place is interesting,’” she says. They contacted her about a Lido Shores property but fell in love with this home when she showed it to them. Sarasota real estate "is a bargain" compared to Naples, Coughlin says. "The same house there would easily be $12 million or more."

The Ackerman Group listed the home at $8.2 million, then dropped it to $7.9 million. “As soon as that happened, people were coming out of the woodwork” to view it, says Coughlin. “We ended up in a multiple bid situation with four total offers. My buyers had fallen in love with the property; they didn’t want to lose it.”