Vernon Hill II, the founder of Commerce Bancorp who famously tangled with Moorestown over the $21 million assessment of his enormous home there, has owned the Jersey Shore home since the 1990s
Vernon W. Hill II, the flamboyant founder and former chairman of Commerce Bancorp and the owner of what is believed to be the largest single-family home in New Jersey, has put his Loveladies vacation home on the market for $6.5 million, according to the Zillow listing.
Hill and his wife Shirley have owned the contemporary home with floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking Barnegat Bay since the 1990s. The home, offered fully furnished, has five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a pool fed by a waterfall from a second-floor balcony, a cabana and bar. Taxes are $32,838 a year.
Hill, described by Fortune magazine at "the P.T. Barnum of banking," opened his first Commerce Bank in 1973 at the age of 27 and, with an emphasis on customer service, turned the Cherry Hill-based Commerce Bancorp into one of the nation's fastest-growing banks.
In the early 2000s, he built the Italianate Villa Collina on 44 acres in Moorestown, which features a granite facade and terraces, marble walls and floor of the two-story foyer, three kitchens, two massage rooms, a hair salon, a wine cellar and a two-story room dedicated to the cultivation of lemon trees.
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Hill later fought a lengthy court battle with Moorestown over the home's $20.9 million assessment -- he wanted the assessment cut in half. But in 2013, a New Jersey Tax Court ruled that the home was actually worth $34 million, and the appellate division of the New Jersey Superior Court affirmed the ruling last year. The couple now pays $437,640 a year in property taxes on that home.
In 2007, just before Commerce Bank was sold to TD Bank Financial Group for $8.5 billion, Hill was forced to resign as chairman and CEO over a regulatory investigation into payments the bank made to his wife's architectural and design firm. In 2014, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that Commerce Bank did not have to award him a $17 million severance package. Hill went on to launch Metro Bank in the United Kingdom and took it public earlier this year at a valuation of $2.26 billion.
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