$5.5 million gets you a giant fixer-upper.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: The Rutledge Team selling a Asheville's Biltmore house - Brief article

Long, long ago--at least in cybertime--there was the dot-com boom. Five years after it went bust, its echo is producing the ultimate handyman's dream. It's 23,000 square feet, and the two-lane bowling alley is nice on days when the tennis court is damp.

The Tuscan-style abode in north Raleigh doesn't challenge the 175,000 square feet of Asheville's Biltmore House, the nation's largest private home, for sheer volume. But this one is for sale. The house recently was the largest on the market in North Carolina. The asking price of $5.5 million is modest but comes with some small print: The buyer has to finish the house.

"It's a dream interrupted," says David Rutledge, president of The Rutledge Team, the Raleigh real-estate company selling the house. The dream belongs to Michael Le, chief executive of International IT Services, a software-development company founded in 2001 just after the boom began to fade. It has prospered anyway, partly by shifting work to China...