If your eyes widened a month ago when a price tag of more than $2 million was put on a Wauwatosa home for the first time, prepare to widen those eyes a bit more. A second $2 million home hit the market this week, even more expensive than the one before.
The newly listed home is located at 1839 N. 74th St. on a corner lot just north of Wauwatosa East High School. With six bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms and 3,780 sq. ft. of living space, the home is listed for $2,250,000, a new record for single-family homes in Wauwatosa.
The previous record-holder is still on the market after nearly month. That home at 1651 Alta Vista Drive, on a prominent hill in the Washington Highlands neighborhood, was listed for $2,150,000 and features six bedrooms, five bathrooms and 5,500 sq. ft. of living space.
Both of these listings would have been nearly unthinkable a few years ago. Wauwatosa had never had a $1 million home until 2023, let alone a $2 million home. Since then, with the Tosa real estate market on the upswing in recent years, more than two dozen single-family homes in the city have sold for $1 million or more. It may be safe to assume that more are on the horizon.
The home on North 74th Street was profiled this week by OnMilwaukee's Bobby Tanzillo, who has developed a kind of local news cottage industry of real estate articles like this and this and this and this.
As Tanzillo notes, the 74th Street home, listed by Maura Strickler of Shorewest Realtors, was built in 1906 and includes an enclosed pool room and a three-car garage on a two-thirds-acre lot.
"The tile, fireplaces, leaded art glass windows and the woodwork (including wainscoting and built-ins, especially in the library) are beautiful, as are the multiple, still-functioning pocket doors (including one set with glass panes), but the heated pool is out of this world, next-level," Tanzillo writes.
The property was built in the Colonial and Georgian Revival styles by Edward and Ella Kearney in 1906, and an addition was completed in 1920, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Today, the property in the Olde Hillcrest neighborhood is "the kind of home you didn't think existed in Tosa," according to the promotional copy in its new listing. The home is also described there as "one of the most spectacular homes ever offered in Wauwatosa -- a red brick estate that defines elegance and grandeur."
Whether that kind of boast will translate into a sale remains to be seen. As most Tosa homeowners know, $2 million is still a lot of money, and it appears so far that no one has been willing to make an offer that high on the property at 1651 Alta Vista Drive.
For decades, “this Washington Highlands treasure has been loved by one family,” the listing agency Double Boldt Real Estate said in a pre-sale social media promotion of that property. “Now, for the very first time, it’s ready to begin a new chapter.”
All but three of the previous $1 million homes in Wauwatosa sold within the first two weeks of listing, according to sales records analyzed by Tosa Forward News. As of today, it the Alta Vista Drive home is still available for anyone willing and able to make an offer.
