It hasn’t happened for the longest time, but Billy Joel has a buyer for his Long Island estate — or at least part of it.
The gatehouse, where the music legend occasionally stays when he’s at the waterfront Centre Island property, is going into contract this week for $8.5 million, said Emmett Laffey, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Laffey International Realty, which is listing the Piano Man’s compound.
A couple who lives on Long Island’s North Shore is buying the home, he said.
More of a mansion than a humble turn-of-the-last-century structure at a driveway’s approach, the gatehouse contains 5,565 square feet on 4.95 acres on the beach with five bedrooms, four bathrooms, two kitchens, a heated pool — and an apartment with three bedrooms and a bathroom, according to the listing.
Annual taxes are $90,000, said Laffey, who added it will take 45 days to close on the sale.
The gatehouse is located on one of four lots that make up Joel’s 26-acre MiddleSea, which came back on the market in September, Laffey said. The asking price for the main house and its remaining land, which includes a helipad and a dock, will drop to $39.9 million, he said. It had been listed for $49.9 million.
It isn’t clear where Joel, who could not be reached for comment, will reside after the sale closes.
The main house recently underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation that was expected to take only two years, but stretched into more than five, Laffey said. Joel originally listed the spread in May 2023 while the house and its property were still a work in progress, Laffey said.
“As an unfinished property, you can never sell this magnitude of a home,” Laffey said. “It was … a construction scene. Any buyer in this category — they have to see the finished product.” The sale, Laffey added, “was going nowhere.”
Joel never moved back into the main home after the work began, although he has lived in the complex.
“When he’s there, he’s either in the gatehouse,” Laffey said, or the guest house near the main home.
Joel bought the main property in 2002 for a reported $22.5 million, expanding to the original estate’s footprint a century earlier, he said.
The main house is on 14 acres, and the two other of the four lots “look like a state park,” and are 3 acres each, empty and slope down to Oyster Bay.
“For today’s buyer, his original home is more than enough for everybody,” Laffey said, adding, “If the buyer wants those extra acres for privacy, they have it. And if they want in the future to build on them, they can do it. So the breakup value of the whole estate is where the value is.”
The gatehouse is about 1,500 feet away from the main house.
“It’s so perfect to split it off because it has no bearing on the mansion and the two lots,” Laffey said.
Other highlights at the gatehouse include two master suites, one on the first floor and the other on the second with a balcony — both facing the water. An outdoor kitchen in a screen-in patio offers a place to lounge, dine and cook on a built-in gas grill. An electric gate works with an intercom and a camera for security.
For its part, the 20,000-square-foot main house comes with beach and guest houses — the latter with a bowling alley — a garage that can accommodate six cars in the maintenance house and a wine cellar.