PE boss James Caccavo drops $11M on waterfront Manalapan spec home

He flipped his Gulf Stream estate at an 85% markup in June

71 Curlew Road and James and Kimberly Caccavo (LinkedIn, Steelpoint Capital Partners, Google Maps)
71 Curlew Road and James and Kimberly Caccavo (LinkedIn, Steelpoint Capital Partners, Google Maps)

James and Kimberly Caccavo have had a busy year buying and selling homes. The couple’s latest move was landing a Manalapan spec home for $10.5 million.

James, founder of the private equity firm Steelpoint Capital Partners, and Kimberly, founder of Face Your Grace, an e-learning service for women entrepreneurship, bought the home at 71 Curlew Road. The seller was listed as an LLC named for the address and managed by Stephen Varga, records show. Varga is a homebuilder, and the son of the late sculptor Frank Varga.

Nick Malinosky and Randy Ely of Douglas Elliman’s Randy and Nick Team represented both the buyer and the seller in the deal.

Varga bought the half-acre property for $1.9 million in 2020, records show . He bought the property from the heirs of the Vassilaro & Son coffee empire –– recognizable as the coffee stocked in New York City coffee carts and diners, and served in the iconic “We Are Happy to Serve You” blue cups.

Varga tore down the existing house and built a 6,850-square-foot, five-bedroom, six-bathroom home that was completed this year, records show. The house includes 150 feet of water frontage, two half-bathrooms, and a four car garage. Purchase of the home includes a membership to the nearby La Coquille Club at the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, the listing shows.

Varga said he had multiple buyers interested in the property, and suggested it performed well price-wise. He’s also said he’s actively looking for another site for a similar project.

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“They’re not making any more waterfront,” Varga said, noting that buyers want new construction and water frontage in a market where those two elements are scarce.

The Caccavos also flipped an oceanfront estate in Gulf Stream for $27.5 million in June, almost double what they bought it for the year prior.

And they sold an oceanfront estate for $90 million last December, swapping it for an oceanfront property in Highland Beach for $34.7 million just a few months later.

Manalapan, a wealthy enclave just south of Palm Beach, has been home to some of the priciest sales in Florida in recent years. In June, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison bought the historic 16-acre Ziff family estate for $173 million from fellow tech billionaire Jim Clarke.

A musical instrument maker bought a Manalapan estate for $25.7 million last August, just a few months after buying a home in Jupiter for $8.6 million.