Top Transactions: Locust Hills home sells for $5.5 million.

Byline: Anne Bretts

Editor's note:The Top Transactions feature focuses on the latest top home sales in the Twin Cities area, as well as noteworthy new listings, new residential developments and housing trends.Finance & Commerce checks certificates of real estate value filed with the Minnesota Department of Revenue as well as data from the Northstar Multiple Listing Service, Realtor.com, county records and other sources.

A four-bedroom, seven-bath, 8,574-square-foot home at 640 Locust Hills Drive in Wayzata has sold for $5.5 million to an unnamed buyer.

Steven and Keri Nelson sold the home to buyer identified only as Talon Realty LLC, which lists the address and phone number of a Minneapolis law firm. The Nelsons now list an address in Long Lake.

Julie Regan of Lakes Sotheby International represented the seller. Meredith Howell of Coldwell Banker Burnet represented the buyer. The sale closed May 17.

The Nelsons bought the home five years ago for $6.05 million from one of the original homeowners in Locust Hills, a 47-lot planned community developed a decade ago out of one of Lake Minnetonka's last remaining estates.

"It's an iconic location," said David Newman, one of the developers. The 70-acre site lies on the southeast corner of County Road 101 and McGinty Road, two of the city's main traffic routes, with 15 acres of the site in Minnetonka. It includes woods, wetlands and shoreline on Lake Minnetonka's Grays Bay. At the time it also included a well-known home that would need to be torn down.

"It was a challenging development," Newman said. Newman, president of the Bancor Group in Blaine, partnered with Peter Pflaum, owner of Minneapolis-based Plum Investment Co., and Dan Herbst, owner of Pemtom Land Co. in Eden Prairie. They led a group of investors who bought the estate from the children of the late W.R. Sweatt. He had been chairman of the board of the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co., known today as Honeywell. The property included a 1930s home, stable and riding trails.

"At the end of the day we got support, but it took a long time to get there," Newman said. Using what's known as conservation development, the buyers proposed forgoing large lots to cluster homes on small lots on...