Shaquille O’Neal is aiming to score a buyer for his palatial Florida lakefront home with a $6 million price cut.
The legendary basketball player first listed his longtime home outside Orlando in May for $28 million and put it back on the market this week for $21.99 million. The retired 7-foot-1 center custom-built the mansion to fittingly epic proportions, with enough interior space to fit nearly seven regulation-sized basketball courts.
Not surprisingly, one of the home’s amenities is a 6,000-square-foot basketball court, where scores of other pros have played over the years, said Chris Franciosa, one of four new real estate agents representing the home.
“A lot of the visiting NBA teams have utilized his court,” said Mr. Franciosa, who is listing the home with three other agents from The Agency Collective: Dustin Fealy, Jared Ringel and Anne Marie Dietz. Mr. O’Neal could not immediately be reached for comment.
Other oversized features include a diesel-rigged saltwater fish tank, showroom garage for more than 17 cars and a 95-foot freeform swimming pool.
While replete with other buzz-worthy amenities—there’s also a cigar lounge with a walk-in humidor—it’s the coziness of the 12-bedroom home that’s harder to convey in photographs, Mr. Fealy said.
“One of the things that we all discussed was even with the abundance in size, Shaq’s ability to make it feel like a home. A lot of megamansions over 30,000 square feet have the feeling of an office building,” the listing agent said.
“It is a serene refuge he built for his family,” he said, adding that it would be impossible to replicate the home’s size and location with the current asking price.
Mr. O’Neal, 46, has owned the home since his days playing for the NBA Orlando Magic. He purchased the underlying lot in 1993 for $3.95 million, according to property records.
Some of the main gathering places for Mr. O’Neal and his family have been in the kitchen, which features a massive wrap-around breakfast bar, and the warm, wood-paneled office overlooking Lake Butler, according to the listing agents.
Mr. O’Neal’s new pricing comes at a pivotal time for the Florida real estate market, which has seen some impressive growth in luxury sales over the past year due, in part, to favorable tax laws in the state. Orange County, Florida, where Mr. O’Neal’s house is located, has seen the number of sales over $1 million skyrocket 20% in 2018, and luxury prices have increased more than 5%, according to data from Realtor.com.
He’s decided to downsize to a smaller Florida home now that he spends a considerable amount of time in Atlanta working as a TV sports analyst for the TNT channel, his real estate agents said.