Inside America's Most Expensive Home: See the Florida Compound on Market for $295 Million

A 9-acre compound in Naples, Florida, is set to break the United States home sale record as it hit the market for a whopping $295 million.

Knewz.com has learned that the property belongs to financier John Donahue and his wife, Rhodora Donahue.

The 9-acre compound in Naples, Florida, is set to break the United States home sale record. By: Coldwell Banker Realty via New York Post

Located in the Port Royal neighborhood, the roughly 9-acre compound includes three houses and a private yacht basin and features about 1,650 feet of waterfront.

The property is being marketed by Dawn McKenna of Coldwell Banker Realty, Leighton Candler of the Corcoran Group, and Rory McMullen of Savills. McKenna has stated that if the property fetches even close to the asking price of $295 million, it would set a record for the most expensive residential sale in the U.S.

According to the late couple’s son Bill Donahue, the couple had been vacationing in Naples, Florida, since the 1970s.

It was in 1985 that John bought this property for $1 million. Back then, the plot was around 4.3 acres in size with nothing on it but a small fishing cottage surrounded by mangroves.

The property belonged to financier John Donahue and his wife, Rhodora Donahue. By: Coldwell Banker Realty via New York Post

The uninhabited piece of land in Gordon Pointe caught John’s eye when he was flying over Naples in the 1980s. According to The Wall Street Journal, the noted financier and founder of Federated Investors took one look at the plot and told his wife, “I want to go there.”

Over a decade after buying the 4.3-acre plot of land, the Donahues amassed around 60 acres under the estate, “where they built a beachfront retreat for themselves and their burgeoning family of 13 children and 84 grandchildren,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

According to Bill, the late financier had even briefly considered shifting his investment management firm Federated Investors from Pittsburg to Florida. “But he felt strongly that the money-management business should be in a financial setting,” the younger Donahue added.

The Naples, Florida, property features about 1,650 feet of waterfront. By: Coldwell Banker Realty via New York Post

Currently 68 years old, Bill is the one who runs the family foundation now, with the deaths of John in 2017 and Rhodora in 2022. The Naples property now sees the routine weekend gatherings of over 100 family members every Friday and Saturday.

Rhodora’s 90th birthday was also celebrated at the estate in 2015.

The expensive estate is not the only residence the Donahues built in Naples, Florida, as The Wall Street Journal noted: “The Donahues built three family residences at the end of a road now filled with multimillion-dollar homes.”

“They started with a roughly 11,500-square-foot main house with six bedrooms and a screened-in pool. A second house, built around 1990, spans about 5,500 square feet with five bedrooms and an outdoor pool. Around 2013 they added a third house measuring about 5,800 square feet with an outdoor pool and a T-shaped dock that can accommodate around six boats,” the news outlet added.

The property also features a private yacht basin. By: Dawn McKenna Group

“The Donahues’ holdings also included a portion of Keewaydin Island, a barrier island off the coast of Naples that is accessible only by boat. There, they built a roughly 16,000-square-foot house around 2005 to serve as another place for family members to stay when they visited,” the outlet further mentioned.

A Pittsburgh native, John relocated to Naples with his wife around 1990. After graduating from West Point in 1946, John served in the U.S. Air Force until 1950, following which he enrolled in a Forbes magazine stock-market correspondence course.

He founded Federated Investors with two of his friends from high school in 1955. The firm is currently run by John and Rhodora’s son J. Christopher Donahue with the name Federated Hermes, and manages $668.9 billion in assets