Unreal Estate: Divided Fortunes in Hamptons

SHELTER ISLAND, N.Y. (TheStreet) -- It has been a tough year for the Hamptons real estate market, but an even more trying one for the Passionists.

When the order of priests announced last May that it intended to sell its St. Gabriel's Spiritual Center for Youth on Shelter Island, the nearly 25-acre, 10-building waterfront compound looked like it would produce a nice nest egg for the aging clergy. More than a year later, after the last priest moved out and the order held its final retreat, the group had lost both its youth program and a sizeable chunk of its retirement plan.

"When I first started talking to them about selling last year, I gave them a number between $24 million and $27 million," says Christopher Burnside, a Bridgehampton-based broker for the Christie's subsidiary Brown Harris Stevens. "We reduced it by $5 million given the current climate."

Watch Burnside give a tour of St. Gabriel's Spiritual Center in this video.

In better times, a property with 1,500 feet of beachfront, a swimming pool, tennis courts and basketball courts in the Hamptons would have been a magnet for expendable money. Yet the St. Gabriel property and the 55-acre waterfront estate Tyndal Point in North Haven, which is starting to generate interest after two years on the market and a price drop from $80 million to $49.9 million, show how fortunes have been divided along Route 27, which links the Hamptons' toniest towns.

The former St. Gabriel's Spiritual Center offers 1,500 feet of beachfront, but hasn't attracted a buyer.

The Hamptons now has two housing markets: the oceanfront communities south of Route 27 and the wooded, bayside communities to the north. Both areas have taken losses in what Town & Country Real Estate broker Judi Desiderio declared "'THE BOTTOM' of the down-market trend" in the firm's second-quarter report released earlier this month, but northern towns have fared much worse than those along Long Island's southern coast.