Owner of Private SF Island Cuts Sale Price 77%

Red Rock Island is cool, but what can you do with it?
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 6, 2015 5:40 PM CDT
Owner of Private SF Island Cuts Sale Price 77%
Red Rock Island.   (Wikimedia Commons)

Want to make San Francisco Bay's only privately owned island your own? Easy, if you've got $5 million and don't mind a big dome-like rock with trees and grass and not much else, Yahoo reports. Owned by an attorney living in Thailand, Red Rock Island went on the market three years ago for $22 million and was touted for its possible gas reserves. But with San Francisco residents seemingly ready to oppose drilling on the 5.5-acre property, the price fell to $9 million. Now comes the new price, without any promise of natural-gas riches. "It's kind of in strange limbo at this point," the real estate agent in charge of the deal tells ABC News. "It's been dormant for probably three years."

Its history is perhaps more exciting: Also known as Treasure Island or Golden Rock, it was once said to house pirates' loot, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. It was also used by Russian hunters in the 19th century to catch otters. Then Frank Lloyd Wright's son, Mendel Glickman, snagged it for just $50,000 in 1964 with the hope of extracting gas and creating a getaway hotel. Now his son David, the attorney in Thailand, owns it and wants to sell. Bureaucratic headaches may await the next owner, but "even if all the new buyer does is plant a flag that says 'mine' on the top-most point of Red Rock Island (172 feet above sea level, incidentally), the bragging rights here are pretty extreme," says the Chronicle. (More San Francisco Bay stories.)

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