If you've ever biked or driven north on Mandalay Avenue past the Carlouel gates until the road simply stops, you already know the stretch of sand I mean. It's the part of Clearwater Beach most residents have never actually walked. A locked entrance and a family trust have kept it that way since a wood-framed house went up there in 1987.
For two years, that gate has guarded one of the most expensive residential listings in Pinellas County history: a 42-acre estate at 1198 Mandalay Point, priced at $37.5 million. According to Tampa Bay Times reporting from late August, the party now circling the property isn't a private buyer at all. It's the state of Florida, and it wants to fold the land into Caladesi Island State Park.
The Enclave at the End of the Road
Mandalay Point sits at the literal tip of Clearwater Beach, a private, gated community of just 11 homes reachable only by a dead-end private road or by boat. The estate in question spans 42.57 acres between the Gulf of Mexico and the Intracoastal, bordered on its north edge by Caladesi Island State Park, one of the few stretches of Gulf coast in the region that has never been developed. The home itself, 3,434 square feet with three bedrooms, was built in 1987 by Edwin Rhodes Hunter, whose family owned the Clearwater Beach Hotel across the causeway. It sits 20 feet above sea level with a deep-water dock rated for boats up to 80 feet.
Just south of the gate is the Carlouel Beach & Yacht Club, established in 1934, which means the small circle of residents who've made the walk down that private road for dinner have been doing it for close to a century. For everyone else on the island, this parcel has functioned as a curtain over the last unclaimed edge of the beach, close enough to bike past, far enough behind a gate that most people never think to ask what's back there.
A Listing That Wouldn't Sell Itself
The property first hit the market in February 2024 at $37.5 million, a figure that topped the most expensive home sale in Tampa Bay history by roughly $15 million. It didn't move. By August 2025, the family had cut the price to $27.5 million, a $10 million reduction that suggests the trophy price found no private buyer willing to pay it. Then, in October 2025, the listing went right back up to $37.5 million.
That price history reads differently once you know what happened two months later. Public records show the state had already begun discussing a very different kind of purchase, one built around conservation rather than a closing date, and running on a timeline that never shows up on a listing page.
How a Private Sale Becomes a Park
Here's the sequence, as it's played out over the past year, based on public records and letters from local officials:
- November 2025: Clearwater's mayor, the city's tourism department, and the chair of the Pinellas County Commission each wrote letters urging the state to prioritize the purchase.
- December 2025: Brian Aungst, the Clearwater land-use attorney representing the sellers, formally pitched the parcel to the state, and public records show Florida's environmental agency began discussing the acquisition.
- February 2026: A 10-member state land acquisition council voted to add the property to the list of sites eligible for conservation purchase.
- June 2026: The state's environmental agency listed the 30-acre coastal portion of the property, not the full 42-acre estate, on its Florida Forever program, with an estimated purchase price near $30 million.
- September 29, 2026: The Florida Cabinet, the body that signs off on state land deals, is scheduled to take up the acquisition next.
Nothing about the house itself is settled. The state's own agency has said it's still in the feasibility phase, working through basic questions like whether the only existing road to the property, which currently runs behind a private gate, would ever function as public access.
What Changes at the North End
Caladesi Island State Park has always been a boat-only destination. Anyone who's taken the ferry out from Honeymoon Island or motored over from their own dock knows it as one of the few genuinely untouched barrier islands left on this part of the coast. If the state closes on the Mandalay Point parcel, it would create the first land-based route onto Caladesi in the park's history, connecting a beach most residents only ever see from the water to the same sidewalk they already walk to get to the yacht club.
The acquisition would also link into a longer chain of protected coastline, roughly 18 miles running from Anclote Key Preserve down through Honeymoon Island State Park to Caladesi. For a barrier island system that's watched most of its undeveloped land disappear into private compounds over the past several decades, this would be one of the last chances to add to that chain rather than subtract from it.
The Other Side of the Dune
State records tied to the acquisition note that the property's sandy beach could serve as nesting habitat for species including the American oystercatcher, the snowy plover, and the least tern, along with sea turtles. Anyone who's walked the public stretches of Clearwater Beach during the warmer months has already seen the taped-off nesting areas that Pinellas County posts every year between February 15 and August 31. What's notable about Mandalay Point is that it's never had to share its sand with anyone, which is exactly the kind of undisturbed ground these birds and turtles have a harder time finding every year along the rest of the county's coastline.
Worth Watching
The Cabinet meeting on September 29 is the next real checkpoint, not a finish line. State land deals of this size can stall for months after a vote, and the agency itself has said there are still unresolved questions about access and price. But for a neighborhood where most of the interesting land was claimed generations ago, this is one of the few moments where the story might end with more of the beach staying open rather than less.
Chenault Group has spent years tracking exactly this kind of change along Clearwater Beach and the surrounding islands, the kind of local news that never shows up on a listing sheet but shapes how a neighborhood actually feels to live in. If you want to talk through what's happening on this stretch of coastline, or anywhere else on the beach, Request a Private Market Consultation with our team.
