- September 21, 2026
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At a time when multimillion-dollar condo sales are becoming almost rote, there comes a story about a unit in a Marco Island residential tower about 20 miles south of Naples that just couldn’t sell.
Not that Realtors didn't try.
The unit is a penthouse in the Belize at Cape Marco tower on Marco Drive. It’s 13,528 square feet and takes up about half the 25th floor. It has six six-bedroom, six full baths, two half baths, six terraces and a private air-conditioned two-car garage. A private elevator opens to a grand foyer finished with alabaster, granite and marble inlays.
Clearly, not your average condominium unit.
Nor is this an average story about a condo sale.
According to Collier County property records, the unit was first bought by Salvatore and Yvonne Balsamo on July 7, 2004, when the couple, whose address was a Massachusetts town southwest of Boston, paid $8.9 million for it.
But they never moved in. So for the next 22 years Grand Penthouse 2506 sat vacant and on the market, says Cathy Rogers with Premier Sotheby’s International Realty’s Marco Island office.
Rogers took on the listing nearly three years ago — just the latest agent trying to sell unit 2506. Sotheby’s, citing MLS data, says over the years eight other agents were hired to list the property but failed. Most, if not all, the firm says, lasted all of six months.
There were several reasons it was so hard to sell, says Rogers.
One of those challenges was the size of 2506, says Rogers.
“Even though (the listing) said it’s big, people would come in and they would just go, ‘Wow, this is huge.’ And it was,” she says. “I think that was the biggest drawback. It was so big, and it took, you know, a big family.”
But the size wasn’t all of it.
Rogers, who has been selling real estate for 21 years following a 30-year career as a flight attendant with United Airlines, says that because Salvatore and Yvonne Balsamo never moved in, for years the unit remained designer-ready.
(Why they didn’t move into 2506 is yet another story. Yvonne Balsamo, who died earlier this year, told Rogers she and her husband had another condo on Marco Island. She wanted to move into 2506. He liked where they were. “She said, ‘I lost,’” Rogers says.)
Being design ready means, in layman’s terms, that the unit was unfinished. It was just concrete. The walls were unpainted, there was no flooring, no crown molding. Potential buyers would walk from room to room having to use their imaginations to see how they would live in the space.
By the time Rogers landed the listing, the unit was built out, but it was empty of furniture. While an improvement, she says it was still far from the perfect scenario.
To try to overcome that difficulty — and help spur a potential buyer’s imagination — Rogers created images showing the space furnished, enlarged them and put up stands with the big photos in each room.
Eventually, Balsamo asked, “Cathy, what can I do?”
“I said, “Well, you know what, Yvonne? If you look at what's selling, they're furnished. I mean, it would be a lot to furnish this, but I think you should furnish it a little bit, that way people have a vision,” Roger says.
“She furnished almost all of it. It made a huge, huge difference.”
While finishing the unit and adding the furniture undoubtably helped, marketing the property continued.
Knowing that there is a specific clientele for a unit like 2506, Rogers undertook a marketing campaign with ads in major national publications aimed at that specific audience. She even advertised it in an airline magazine. She also was aggressive digitally and would hold brokers opens, trying new things when needed.
She did get a couple of offers during the process. But they were too low.
Grand Penthouse 2506 finally sold Aug. 28 for $7.2 million — 22 years, 1 month and 21 days after it initially sold.
The buyers, according to county property records, are Anthony V. and Farideh Reck. Chris Sullivan with Re/Max Alliance Group Marco Island represented the Recks. Sullivan did not respond to an interview request with her or her clients for this story.
And, as it turned out, after all the years on the market, the countless showings, the revolving doors of agents, the buyers were people who already had a condo in Belize at Cape Marco — unit 1206 according to county records.
The Kentucky couple had looked at unit 2506 before, Rogers says. “I knew her, and she was like, ‘Well, we weren’t thinking about buying it. We just walked through it and thought, you know, we can make this work.’”
As for Rogers herself, big dollar deals are nothing new to her — Sotheby’s website shows her closing over the years a dozen or more deals topping the $3 million mark.
Neither are interesting deals, clients and buyers. One time, a man looking at an 11,000-square-foot property agreed to buy it and offered to buy it on the spot. There was one condition: He had to move in the next day. (His suspicious offer was turned down.)
But 2506 was different, Rogers says. For one, she developed a close, personal relationship with Yvonne Balsamo. And then there was the challenge of taking on a listing that, at the time, seemed daunting and hanging on to it longer than any other agent had before her.
“I don’t know that I learned anything from it,” Rogers says. “Just sticking with your game plan. Keep on it. Don’t give up. I didn't give up. I never gave up.”
And that pretty much sums up the story of Grand Penthouse 2506 and how it finally sold after more than 20 years. It took perseverance. Patience and perseverance.
