Real Estate Amongst the Candidates
From Their House to the White House
McCain, Clinton Are
Property Millionaires;
Obama Also Profited
By CHRISTINA S.N. LEWIS
May 9, 2008; Page W1
Like millions of Americans, the three presidential candidates rode the real-estate wave. But for them there’s been no hard landing, and well-timed home purchases in prime neighborhoods have left two of them — Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton — with millions in real-estate gains.
The McCain family owns at least seven properties, including a spread in rural Arizona. In the past four years the Republican’s wealthy wife, Cindy, has spent roughly $11 million on real estate, buying three condos in Phoenix and two in California, across the bay from San Diego.
THEIR HOUSES
See detailed information on the past and present residences of:
• John McCain
• Hillary Clinton
• Barack ObamaSen. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton likely own the most-expensive property among the three candidates, a stately home in the Observatory Circle neighborhood of Washington that cost $2.85 million in 2001 and now is worth about $5 million. (Value estimates are based on an averaging of property-valuation Web sites, local broker assessments and real-estate listings and records; the candidates’ campaigns were contacted about the findings.) But the Clintons also once owned the most modest property, their first home together: a tiny house in Fayetteville, Ark., that cost $20,500 in 1975. It has since been converted into a Clinton museum.
Meanwhile, Sen. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, paid $1.65 million for their Chicago house in 2005 — the rough market peak — and have seen its value stagnate, if not decline slightly. The purchase came after the success of Mr. Obama’s best-selling memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” That same year, the couple sold their Chicago condo for $415,000, $137,500 more than they paid for it in 1993.
But the Obama campaign has faced questions about whether the house purchase was subsidized by Chicago real-estate developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko. Sen. Obama bought the house for 15% less than its $1.95 million asking price — equal to the price the sellers had paid for it in 2000, when neighborhood values were lower. On the same day as Sen. Obama’s purchase, Mr. Rezko paid the full $625,000 asking price for an adjacent lot being sold by the same owners — 51% more than the sellers had paid for the vacant land in 2000. Some have asked whether the price paid by Mr. Rezko for the vacant land made the owners willing to sell Mr. Obama the house for less than its fair-market value. The sellers declined to speak to a reporter and Mr. Rezko’s lawyer didn’t return a call.
The McCains’ Phoenix condo (left); the Clintons’ Chappaqua, N.Y., house (center); the Obamas’ Chicago home.
Sen. Obama has categorically denied he received any discount from the fair-market value. The Obama campaign says he was the home’s highest bidder and that the sellers required the purchases to close on the same day. Real-estate records indicate the house purchase price was roughly consistent with sales of similar-sized homes in the area around that time. (Sen. Obama later also purchased a narrow strip of the vacant land from Mr. Rezko, for roughly $100,000.)
The McCain homes all are owned by Mrs. McCain, heir to a beer-distributor fortune, or by trusts for her benefit. The McCains bought luxury properties in the 1980s and ’90s and have seen dramatic gains from the real-estate boom. In 2006, the family sold their longtime Phoenix house for $3.2 million, nearly 29 times what it cost 20 years earlier, when Mrs. McCain bought it from her father. Their Arizona getaway is along a creek — rare in the desert — and is worth $4 million, nearly four times what it cost to assemble the three parcels in the 1990s. “They’ve made very wise real-estate investments,” says Gregory Hague of Hague Partners, an Arizona Realtor that wasn’t involved in the McCain purchases. With their multiple residences and seven children (three from Mr. McCain’s first marriage), Mrs. McCain paid $273,000 for household help in 2007, according to their recently released tax returns.
The Clintons also have created wealth through property. Near the end of Mr. Clinton’s presidency they bought two expensive homes, the Washington house and one in Chappaqua, N.Y., a wealthy suburb north of New York. That has resulted in big paper gains, though the values have fallen recently. In the 1970s and early 1980s the couple owned a series of relatively modest houses in that state but didn’t own a home at all during Mr. Clinton’s eight years as president.
John McCain
