It might seem at first like a figure of speech to call the New York mansion reportedly "tied to" retired baseball legend Derek Jeter a castle, but one look at the property and you'll agree there's nothing else you can call Tiedemann Castle. The lavish, castle-inspired estate is now scheduled to hit the auction block next month, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The lakefront Tiedemann Castle is tucked away in Orange County in New York, about 60 miles from Manhattan, and will go up for auction instead of a more traditional sale in order to give the seller, who may or may not be Jeter, more control over the sale timeline and add "some finality to the process" of parting with the home. The minimum bid will be set at $6.5 million, a much lower price point than the $14.75 million it was listed for in 2018, and if that bid isn't met the property won't be sold at all.
It's not known for sure that Jeter owns the property now, but an LLC tied to the former Yankee reportedly bought it back in the early 2000s. The price paid back then for the four-acre estate, which was first built all the way back in 1903, isn't known to the public.
Jeter's connection to the property goes even further back than that transaction, as he spent some of his summers there as a child. William "Sonny" Conners, Jeter's grandfather, was adopted as a child by the Tiedemann family, who lend their name to the property to this day.
Diane Mitchell of Wright Bros. Real Estate is the listing agent and is involved in the auction process. She calls the castle "a special property in so many ways, which is why we feel that it is so appropriate to sell by private auction—let the buyer name their price."
It's generally been assumed and reported for some time that Jeter is the owner of the castle, and if the preceding evidence isn't enough to convince you, the home's distinctive baseball diamond-shaped infinity pool might do so. You can take a look at that pool as well as the rest of the incredible property in the video below, from the Luxury Houses YouTube channel: