Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s estate sells Mercer Island mansions

SEATTLE — The estate of Paul Allen sold a cluster of Mercer Island properties for $67.1 million last week, the latest in an ongoing sell-off of the late business leader’s real estate investments.

Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and Seahawks owner whose real estate company Vulcan built much of Amazon’s Seattle campus, died in 2018. Since then, his estate has sold off extravagant homes across the country.

The latest sale included eight properties on the western edge of Mercer Island. Among them: two waterfront mansions built in the 1990s, several other houses and two vacant lots, according to an affidavit filed in King County on Wednesday. The Puget Sound Business Journal first reported the sale.

The properties include a mansion Allen bought in 1983 and, in 1990, fought the city of Mercer Island to get the OK for an extensive remodel, The Seattle Times reported at the time.

The buyer, MIE Holdings, registered last month with the address of a Seattle law firm.

The sale price is significantly lower than the properties’ collective assessed value of nearly $106 million, according to county property records.

A 10,680-square-foot two-bedroom home on a 4.4-acre estate, for example, was assessed at $42.2 million, but sold along with another property for $28.35 million, according to the affidavit.

Allen’s estate also sold a vast property in the Santa Monica Mountains in California earlier this year for $65 million. Elsewhere, the estate has sold two New York apartments and properties in Beverly Hills, Atherton, California, and eastern Idaho, Bloomberg reported.