$1.2M house Joe Biden sold in 1996 worth $1.65M three decades later

Joe Biden sold a house to a supporter for $1.2 million in 1996 – but 27 years later it is estimated to be worth just $1.65 million, DailyMail.com can reveal. The current appraisal raised questions about whether Biden received a high price for the property from a donor nearly three decades ago.

It was bought by a credit card company executive who also hired Biden’s son Hunter the same year and then paid him for years. Biden bought the 10,000-square-foot mansion in Greenville, Delaware in 1974 for $185,000. At the time, he had recently become a senator with a salary of $42,500. He then sold the house in 1996 for $1.2 million, more than six times what he paid for it.

However, according to real estate website Redfin, it is currently only worth $1.6 million in 2023. Zillow currently has it valued at $2 million. Both Redin and Zillow have an average error rate in valuations of only about 7 percent. Delaware’s housing market has nearly tripled since 1996, according to data from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency. That would indicate that if the house was worth $1.2 million in 1996, it should be worth well over $3 million now.

Even at the higher current estimate of $2 million, if its value were tracked with the rest of the Delaware housing market, it is expected to have been worth about $700,000 in 1996. Built in 1930, the home features five bedrooms, three fireplaces, a colonial-style exterior, a swimming pool and a pool house, set on two acres.

Biden called it “The Station” and it was the headquarters for his first presidential campaign in 1988, when he dropped out after being caught plagiarizing British politician Neil Kinnock in a speech. The story of how Biden sold the mansion was a minor controversy in Delaware politics in the 1990s, when he was a senator. He sold it for his asking price of $1.2 million to the vice chairman of credit card company MBNA, then the largest employer in Delaware.

The same year, MBNA employees contributed $62,850 to Biden for his Senate re-election campaign, and the homebuyer donated the maximum $2,000. Also that year, Biden’s son Hunter was hired by MBNA and became senior vice president. Later, between 2001 and 2005, Hunter was rehired by the company as a consultant with a monthly fee. During those years, Joe Biden supported new bankruptcy legislation in Congress that would benefit credit card companies, even though it was opposed by a majority of Democrats in the Senate, including Barack Obama. At the time of the controversial 1996 house sale, a pollster for Biden’s Republican opponent in his Senate re-election race suggested that the price paid for the house had been too high. This was vociferously denied by both Biden and MBNA. Read the full story: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12681367/Joe-Biden-Hunter-house-million-money-delaware.html?ito=msngallery

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