Private Equity Chief Buys Dana Heir’s Palm Beach Home
Charles Dana and George Wiegers with 170 Seagate Road (College of Charleston, Getty Images, Google Maps)
A Denver-based private equity chief bought a Palm Beach home for $9.4 million.
Records show Charles A. Dana III and Rose Dana sold the house at 170 Seagate Road to Seagate LLC, a Colorado corporation registered to George Wiegers. The deal was off-market.
Wiegers is CEO of Wiegers Capital Partners, a private equity firm headquartered in Denver. According to Mergr, he is a former partner of Lehman Brothers and Dean Witter. He and his wife, Betsy Wiegers, are philanthropists, and won Vail Valley Foundation’s 2019 Citizen of the Year award.
Charles Dana III is the grandson of Charles A. Dana, the founder of Ohio-based auto parts manufacturer Dana Incorporated and the Dana Foundation, which is a primary benefactor of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Dana III sits on the board of the Dana Foundation, and serves as a trustee of the cancer institute. He also has held trustee positions with a number of charitable organizations, including Doris Duke’s Newport Restoration Foundation, according to his profile for the College of Charleston’s board of governors. He owned the Newport Shipyard for 21 years, selling it in 2019 to Texas-based Safe Harbor Marinas for $20 million, the Newport Daily News reported.
Dana III and his wife bought the 2,675-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-bathroom home for $3.5 million in 2017, records show. The home sits directly across the street from the Sailfish Club, one of seven private clubs in Palm Beach. With its address on Seagate Road, the house also comes with deeded cabana access. The home was designed by Palm Beach architect John Volk and built in 1946, according to Zillow.
Volk designed residential and commercial structures in Palm Beach throughout the early and mid-20th century. According to the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach, he led noted projects at the Everglades Club and the Bath and Tennis Club, two of Palm Beach’s historic private clubs.
Wiegers’ latest purchase of the nearly 0.3-acre property reflects the dramatic shift in Palm Beach’s residential market pricing.
Properties on cabana streets at the island’s north end have recently become the hottest item. At the end of August, a Chicago real estate chief sold a home on Dolphin Road, a cabana street, for $14.4 million. Also last month, one of Goldman Sachs’ top commodities traders bought a home on Nightingale Trail, another cabana street, for $16 million.
Both homes were new or recently constructed, in contrast to the mid-century construction of Wiegers’ Seagate Road purchase.
Recent sales across Palm Beach County marked some of the biggest deals statewide. Among them: billionaire Larry Ellison’s June purchase of a $173 million Manalapan estate.
