CAMBRIDGE — Seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, an ivy-slathered garage, in a Georgian Revival estate augmented with a hulking steel addition. That’s what $18 million, the asking price for 55 Fayerweather St., could get you in Cambridge.
Or, just up the road at 172 Brattle St., maybe a renovated historic home with a headline-making backstory is more your speed, if you’ve got the desire to own a piece of history. And enough to meet the $16.8 million it’s listed for.
Or if you’d like to make history yourself, consider the property at 12 Reservoir St., with its pool and koi pond, guest apartment, and elegantly manicured lawn. That’s what $35 million, which would be among the priciest homes ever sold in Greater Boston, buys in Cambridge.
Housing is expensive in this city for everyone who chooses to live here, be they just-out-of-college renters or well-off home-owning families. At the ultrahigh end of the market, the super rich are often willing to sacrifice some comforts and in-home amenities for a prestigious Cambridge address — the president’s battle with its most prestigious institution notwithstanding. For many, it’s still the ultimate extravagance.
“In Cambridge, they’re getting less land, less house, but they’re also getting proximity to the things that mean so much to them,” said John Petrowsky, a Cambridge real estate agent of nearly 40 years. “People are willing to pay more to be here.”
Elsewhere, $35 million can buy a lot of house.
In Weston, just 12 miles west of Cambridge, the home of former Celtics co-owner Jim Pallotta was listed last year at $38 million. It has 12 bathrooms, a basketball court, a movie theater, and enough acres of land — 19 — to contain whatever else its new owner might want nearby.
In Cambridge, the home with an asking price of $35 million sits on just an acre-and-a-quarter.
But for the right buyer, it’ll be worth it, said Ed Feijo, a Cambridge agent who, along with fellow high-end specialist Gail Roberts, is selling the palatial property.
“That’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity house,” Feijo said.
Space is limited in Cambridge. So is the supply of housing, at all income levels. Homes at the upper end of the market free up only occasionally, the rarest of collectibles. The best of the best of them can be owned by the same family for generations.
When they do hit the market, those families expect to be paid a lot to part with them. But how much? That’s where it gets complicated.
Typically, someone selling a home can compare their property against similar ones in comparable areas. For an oceanfront property with 11 bedrooms — or, say, a grand historic home a short walk from Harvard Yard with a rich and colorful history — there may not be much to compare.
“When you get to the high end, the comps are really difficult,” said Cassidy Norton, associate publisher for real estate information firm the Warren Group. “It’s a finer science.”
Few single-family homes clear the $10 million mark. About 70 of them have been sold in Massachusetts since 2020, according to an analysis for the Boston Globe from the Warren Group. Three were in Cambridge, most recently a $10.2 million home on Appleton Street, which sold in April.
Among the intangibles to account for is history. If a home once had a famous owner, was built by a renowned architect, or comes with precious built-ins from long ago, it can count for a lot.
Some homes have their own tales to tell. Like the home on the market at 172 Brattle, which shut down Brattle Street when it was trucked seven blocks up the major artery in 1965, a journey chronicled in the Boston Globe, among other outlets.
“What you have in Harvard Square are people who really appreciate historic fabric and want to be part of a story,” said Maggie Gold Seelig, the broker selling the $16.8 million Brattle Street home.
Walkability also drives up the prices, even for buyers wealthy enough to buy giant plots of land they could roam all by themselves.
They like the suburban feel of parts of the city, but with urban amenities and culture, Seelig said.
They want a place where “you can walk to Formaggio. You can walk to a bakery or a pizza place, grab a coffee from multiple coffee shops, walk to a stationery store, walk to ice cream,” Seelig said. “That doesn’t come with many great suburban locations.”
If they have to forgo a horse stable to do it, so be it.
They also, Seelig said, want their kids to be able to walk to school, specifically one of the city’s elite private ones, and bid high on properties so their kids can be close by.
“That puts a lot of stress on the real estate in Harvard Square,” Seelig said. “There’s often not enough supply for the demand.”
There is also ample demand for the prestige of an address near Harvard or MIT, including from grads who choose to start a business or a lab here, and want to recruit and rub shoulders with peers — or, after becoming successful, want to flex their wealth near their alma mater.
“Proximity to Harvard and to MIT have meant a lot, both psychologically and financially, to many people,” said Petrowsky, the longtime broker.
All of Cambridge is enriched by this in the long run, Petrowsky said, and what the wealthy will pay to be here — when they can afford to be anywhere — is just one sign of the health of a local economy that is driven in large part by people’s desire to be close to knowledge centers, he said.
So he worries what it would mean if Cambridge’s universities are wounded too deeply by its ongoing battles with the Trump administration.
“I hope that things will get better, that science will be re-funded, that education will achieve its preeminent position in our society, and that our democracy will flourish,” Petrowsky said. If that happens, he said, “we will see that these houses do sell to motivated people who want to live near the most prestigious institutions in the world.”
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.