A modest three-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom home on the outskirts of downtown Omaha, Neb., seems like just your average family home. But the history behind the property involves the city’s most celebrated man, business mogul Warren Buffett.
The English-Tudor house served as the 91-year-old’s makeshift office for one of his first solo investment funds, Buffett Associates, back in 1956. Nearly seven decades later, the more than 3,400-square-foot home, located in the upscale Dundee neighborhood, is hitting the market for $799,000.
Buffett and his then-wife, the late Susan Buffett, rented the residence for just $175 a month (which equates to $1,821 today), according to the biography “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life,” by Alice Schroeder.
James and Nancy Monen purchased the home in 2005 for $397,000. When they were looking to buy the house, they had no idea about Buffett’s connection, the Monens told the Wall Street Journalwhich was the first to report on the upcoming listing.
“One day I was going to Target and there was a for sale sign in the yard. We were the first ones to show up, and bought it right then and there,” Nancy told the Journal, adding they only found out about Buffett’s prior residence from the seller during the process of buying the home.
In 2019, Buffett, along with two of his children, Peter and Susan Alice, stopped by the home unexpectedly, asking Nancy if they could see the “little room” off the upstairs primary bedroom. That was the very room where Buffett started his business ventures that eventually turned him into the money-making man to the tune of $125.1 billion today.
They were “enchanted” by the sunroom along with the rest of the 103-year-old house they’d lived in six decades ago, according to an interview Nancy did with local paper, the Omaha World-Herald. Buffett and his family took photos and waxed nostalgic during their visit. Before he left, he wrote “The birthplace of Buffett Associates May 1956,” on the arched room door off the little room, signing his name Warren E. Buffett.
At the time, investors of Buffett Associates pitched in a total of just over $100,000 collectively, a representative for Buffett told the Journal.
Since the Monens have owned the house, they have rented the home to visitors attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting, nicknamed “The Woodstock of Capitalism.”
Jessica Dembinsky of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Ambassador Real Estate, who holds the listing, revealed that the demand for homes is still very high. Specifically estimating they were about “6,000 houses short of where the demand is currently.”
And with all the features of Buffett’s one-time home and its savory history, the property is expected to be snatched up quickly.
“One of my favorite facts about the house is that it was designed by well-known Omaha Architect, Frederick A. Henninger. It was built in 1918,” Dembinski told The Post. “Every single bedroom on the second floor has its own en-suite bathroom, something quite out of the ordinary for this area of town and the age of the home.”
“The home also has three fireplaces, multiple outdoor entertaining spaces including a screened-in porch, copper gutters and several of the original leaded windows.”
The Buffetts lived in the home for two years before paying just $31,500 to buy a different Omaha house only a two-minute drive away, or about $313,000 today. Buffett still lives in the fairly modest five-bedroom, three-bathroom residence today with his second wife, Astrid Menks.
Records show he updated and renovated his current home in 1989.
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