The new home at 316 Shrewsbury Avenue, Red Bank. (Photos by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
Red Bank’s real estate market – and housing affordability crunch – crossed a remarkable benchmark last week when a single-family home on Shrewsbury Avenue sold for $1.1 million.
Builder Gus Bontempo of Sage Homebuilders inside the home he built at 316 Shrewsbury Avenue. Views of the kitchen and a bathroom, below. (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
Several local realtors not involved in the sale said the newly constructed home at 316 Shrewsbury Avenue appears to be the first on the town’s West Side to fetch more than $1 million.
“We continue to see new sales records being broken. It’s a testament to how great the West Side of Red Bank is to attract these numbers,’’ said Allison and Mark Gregory, of Resources Real Estate, in an email.
A notice of settlement filed with Monmouth County last week identified the buyers as Harold Vanberkel and Hajnal Herskowitz.
The lot is the site of an older single-family home that was damaged by fire in 2018 and condemned. It was purchased for $200,000 by Gus Bontempo of Sage Builders, who briefly had plans to live in the new home himself.
But halfway through construction, Bontempo said, he was approached by a couple who offered to buy it with modifications to plans and an upgrading of amenities.
The 5,000-plus square-foot home features four bedrooms, five baths and a large roof deck on the top floor, as well as high-end marble kitchen countertops and a freestanding two-car garage.
Bontempo said the nationwide housing crunch isn’t the only thing driving prices into the stratosphere: the cost of construction is also skyrocketing. Before the pandemic, he said, local home construction costs ran about $150 per square foot. Now it’s closer to $230 per square foot.
“We broke even on it,’’ he said. “It’s not even the numbers, it’s the cost to build.”
Chris Havens, also of Resources Real Estate, said the sale price surpassed the previous record for a single family home on the West Side by an eye-popping $350,000. 
Decisions by the Red Bank zoning board also likely pushed the price higher and density of the project lower.
In 2018, a builder submitted a plan to convert the lot into a three-family apartment house. But that plan was withdrawn amid opposition from neighbors who opposed it, saying the change would be out of character with their neighborhood of single-family homes between Drs. James Parker Boulevard and West Sunset Avenue. They raised concerns about adequate parking and noise.
Additionally, then-zoning board member Sean Murphy said the board wanted to encourage more single family homes, rather than multifamilies, in the area.
Mark and Allison Gregory said the sale was not an anomaly. A home at 68 Locust Avenue also sold last week for $789,000, or $239 a square foot. Another being buit at 10 West Westside Avenue is expected to bring similar offers. And a classically styled mansion at 90 Shrewsbury Avenue recently sold for $825,000, Monmouth County records show.
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