Last April (2016) billionaire entertainment and pro sports magnate Ed Snider succumbed to cancer in his colossal Montecito estate (more on that place in a minute) at the ripe old age of 83. He left behind a colorful legacy of multiple successful businesses, millions of dollars donated to philanthropic causes, expensive homes across the country, and a turbulent personal life.

In case you didn’t know, Mr. Snider was the owner and founder of the National Hockey League’s Philadelphia Flyers team. He was also — at one time or another — full or partial owner of both the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles and the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers.

Arguably Mr. Snider’s most notable business venture, however, was his founding of Comcast Spectacor, a business conglomerate that owns Philly’s Wells Fargo Center, runs a property management company, and operates a food service business plus an event ticket distributor. In 2012, Mr. Snider’s net worth was pegged at an Oprah-style $2.5 billion. Somehow in the midst of all his work, he found time to divorce his first three wives and sire six children.

At the time of his death, Mr. Snider had been married for only about three years to his fourth (and final) wife, Philadelphia socialite Linda “Lin” Spivak Snider, who was more than 30 years younger than her late hubby. Did he find true love at long last, at the twilight of his life? We may never know!

We don’t know much else about the Widow Snider except from what online images tell us. She seems to be a well-dressed, attractive brunette who appears younger than her actual age (late 40s). She’s been married at least once before — sorry, we ain’t got no sordid details on the ex-husband — and she must not have wanted to stay in her late husband’s Montecito estate. We say that because we know she paid $7,400,000 last October (2016) for a mini-compound in the tony Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. We’re just getting around to discussing it now because we’re way behind like that. Capiche?

Oh, but before we go in on the house, one interesting detail. Yolanda discovered tons of evidence online — including this — that indicates Mrs. Spivak-Snider gave birth to a baby in summer 2016, just a couple months after her husband passed on.

What?! Really? Yolanda does not mean to be nosy or unclassy, but we’d love to know whose kid this is. Mr. Snider’s? (Man, he was frisky for an 83-year-old cancer victim!). Was it someone else’s? (Escándalo!) Is she a surrogate mama or something? Please, Bueller, do let us know.

Anywho, Ms. Spivak and the enigmatic baby will be moving into this house. If they don’t decide to demolish it, that is.

Located a block south of Sunset Boulevard and just about a block east of the super-prime Brentwood Park neighborhood, the compound is privately situated on an unusually large (for the neighborhood) 1.35-acre lot. The only thing visible from the narrow street out front is a wrought iron gate and a black-topped driveway that passes over a whimsical wooden bridge on its way to a huge black-topped motorcourt and two-car garage.

Outdoor spaces are quite charming and include lots of mature trees, a rose garden, a kidney-shaped pool, and large lawns. There are brick and concrete terraces with multiple outdoor dining options and a pizza oven.

Four structures are hidden on the property’s extensive grounds: a 4,198-square-foot main house with 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms, a 2-bed/2-bath guest house of unknown square footage, a second guest house (also of unknown square footage), and a rather cool-looking greenhouse/solarium as shown in the right photo above.

Unfortunately, the inside of the house completely loses Yolanda with its overly fussy Grandma-esque frou-frou decor. (No offense to any grannies out there!). According to the listing, the property had not been on the market in 47 years, and it shows. There is chintz and drapery and knick-knacks in nearly every room, and that red carpet coupled with the pink ceiling treatment in the family room is giving poor old Yolanda a searing case of heartburn.

Like a horrific car crash, Yolanda can’t seem to tear her eyes away from these photographs. The pool table/library room has a cheetah-print carpet, the kitchen has cocks on the green barstools and a cluttered pot rack, and the formal dining room has a ton of random crap and a barrel for churning butter. That reminds us of one of our favorite scenes in Bridesmaids, naturally.

Yolanda is quite certain that a fancy lady like Ms. Spivak will not move into this house without giving it a full renovation, if not just razing it and building anew. We shall see, shan’t we?

Reportedly Mr. Snider’s favorite home was his custom-built Mediterranean-style mega-mansion in tony Montecito, CA. It was here — as previously mentioned — where Mr. Snider passed on. And while discussing death generally gives us the willies, we really can’t think of a more idyllic setting to spend your final hours on this earth.

Back in 2012, Mr. Snider listed his house for a throat-constricting $52,000,000. Although there were unconfirmed rumors that the property was put into escrow at an unknown price with a pharmaceutical tycoon named Jack McGinley, the deal was never consummated and the home eventually delisted. Within three months of Mr. Snider’s death, however, the home bounced back onto the open market with a familiar asking price ($52 million). The 21,345-square-foot behemoth remains available for sale.As a bonus, the house comes with a very famous next-door neighbor — Oprah herself.

At the time of his death, Mr. Snider owned several other properties including a 15,000-square-foot mansion in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia), a family compound up in Maine, and a townhouse in New York City’s Gramercy Park that was sold last September (2016) for $7,300,000 to Revlon CEO Fabian Garcia. The Maine and Pennsylvania homes appear to remain in the Snider family’s possession.

We’ve yet to see Ms. Spivak (or her alleged baby) sashaying around town, but if/when she moves to her Brentwood crib, she’ll be neighbors with lots of rich folks, including billionaire SnapChat founder Evan Spiegel. His $3.3 million starter house is just a few doors away, though he’s already moved on to bigger and better Brentwood digs.

Listing agents: Beth Styne & Brendan Morris-Banfield, Coldwell Banker
Ms. Spivak’s agent: Adi Werthman, Hilton & Hyland

After a very long slog on the market, Bebe clothing founder Manny Mashouf finally managed to dump his sublimely-located Holmby Hills villa for $30,000,000 this month (February 2017). That’s a far cry from the arguably downright greedy $45 million he originally wanted but it’s still a monster haul, of course.

Mr. Mashouf originally purchased the house back in 2004 for just $14,000,000 from Bratz dolls mogul Isaac Larian. Yolanda’s research indicates that over the years, Mr. Mashouf borrowed vast sums of money against the house. We can’t conclusively say that those loans are indicative of financial troubles, but Bebe certainly ain’t the money-maker it used to be.

Anyway, and as you might expect, Yolanda was naturally curious about who the buyer could be. Turns out it’s somebody we never would’ve expected — a local Beverly Hills businessman named Danny Harris. Our Mr. Harris’s primary source of wealth derives from his ownership of Alo, the world’s biggest yoga-centered clothing brand. How LA is that?

Alo Yoga, for all you folks not fluent in Sanskrit, is actually a very big deal. All the top yogis wear this stretchy stuff. The it girls of today — Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid — bitch slap each other for the latest designs. The brand has more than a million followers on Instagram, is sold in virtually every big-name department store, and recently opened their very first brick-and-mortar retail store in the heart of Beverly Hills.

Alo, in case you were wondering, stands for Air, Land, and Ocean. How wonderfully New Age!

Despite the fact that Alo has only been around since 2008, back when yoga was really beginning to come into its own, Mr. Harris and his business partner Marco deGeorge have been clothing manufacturers/distributors since the 1990s. Their business headquarters in Downtown LA (the Garment District) also produce the Bella + Canvas brand.

Mr. Harris and his wife Pam are both green-conscious and admit to practicing an alternative lifestyle. They eat only organic food, practiced yoga before it came into recent vogue, and recycle virtually all the household and business waste they produce.

Nowadays, that sort of lifestyle isn’t so “alternative” (in fact, it’s common now in LA). But it was a big deal when Alo was just a twinkle in Mr. Harris’s eye, for sure.

Mr. & Mrs. Harris both originally hail from up north — Santa Clara, CA. Despite their vast wealth and the popularity of Mr. Harris’s apparel companies, they keep an exceedingly low profile. Perhaps this big purchase means they’re finally ready to join LA’s snooty social scene; perhaps not.

Now, onto the house we go. Y’all already know that it is an enormous mansion and is really not the sort of thing we imagine a yoga mogul would own, but to each their own. (The property is partially solar-powered, so there’s that…) In listing materials, the 2002-built house is described as a “Mediterranean estate” that “embraces the beauty of Italian renaissance design”.

The 20,782-square-foot monster mega-mansion sits on 1.21-acres and includes 8 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. The property is hedged and gated for privacy, and a slim motor court out front welcomes the pizza delivery man to the imposing entryway.

Inside, things get dramatic right away with a two-story, 26-foot-tall foyer with wood-beamed ceilings. Like all proper mansions, the house’s main floor sports a living room, a great room, a kitchen (with highest-high-end appliances), a billiards room, a separate card room, a wet bar, and even a maid’s bedroom tucked privately away in a corner.

Upstairs, things get family-style with a humongous master suite that includes a sitting area, 2 fireplaces, 2 private terraces, 2 master bathrooms, 2 walk in closets, and one private gym. Elsewhere up there are seven more family/guest suites.

It’s all very nice and luxurious and everything but there’s nothing here that really thrills Yolanda. Are we just jaded? Hmmm. Somehow we can’t help feeling that the folks who built this place had more money than design inspiration. About the only thing this house “says” to Yolanda is that “I’m huge” and obviously “my owner is rich”. And maybe that was the point. But we prefer our real estate to tell a more colorful tale.

In any case, it appears the property went under some sort of renovation sometime in the past year. A bit of a contemporary facelift, if you will. Maybe no more than a new coat of paint.

One really cool feature, we must say, is the sunken north/south tennis court. Yolanda loves tennis and we likewise love a good sunken court. We’d love to transport that thing up to our own humbler abode. But we digress.

The Harrises new neighbors on their Holmby Hills street include British property developer Nick Candy, fellow fashion tycoon Tom Ford, and Persian-Jewish businessman Younes Nazarian.

As far as Yolanda knows, Mr. & Mrs. Harris currently reside in a leased residence on a very good street in the Beverly Hills flats.

Finally — and just for fun — we thought we’d see how many pairs of yoga pants Mr. Harris had to sell to afford his airport-sized manor house. Alo’s least expensive model is the Kaleidoscope Print Airbrush Legging, which currently retails for $53. Our Mr. Harris would have to sell 566,038 pairs of them airbrush leggings to afford his new house. Yowza!

And that’s just the purchase price. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of dollars in closing costs, realtor fees, property taxes, etc. And remember, Mr. Harris has a partner in his business so he’s only getting half the profits. And then there are manufacturing costs. Put it this way: Mr. Harris is selling so much clothing Yolanda can barely even comprehend it. And we’ve been around the block a long ass time.

So all you yogis can take this and think about it next time you don your Alo outfit and contort yourselves into the kapotasana position. You hear?

Listing & Selling agents: James Harris, David Parnes, Kelsey Kroon; The Agency

High-end real estate everywhere in LA is hotter than ever, but real estate in the once-gritty-but-now-gentrified-and-blazingly-expensive seaside community of Venice (CA) is particularly so. Yolanda has written about the area more than once — including our discussion of actress Emilia Clarke’s stunning new spread — but admittedly we don’t give the neighborhood as much attention as it deserves.

So instead of discussing yet another honkin’ mansion in the Platinum Triangle, let’s rectify all that. Off to the beach we go.

Venice has long been known for its large artistic community and boho-chic residents. Recently, however, the advent of Silicon Beach has caused many wealthy young tech yuppies to move in. Supposedly they crave the offbeat lifestyle and value the architecture of the many contemporary residences. There’s also plenty of trendy hotspots in the area, although we’re much too old to know anything about that. In any case, they’ve driven prices exceedingly high.

Take this 4,930-square-foot non-oceanfront blocky contemporary by noted architect Frederick Fisher. Placed on the market with a gutsy asking price of $5,775,000 last June (2016), the house sold in just six weeks for $5,675,000 to a mysterious LLC. The new owners then proceeded to spend another fat wad of cash redoing the home’s interiors.

Although Yolanda naturally assumed the buyer was a young tech whippersnapper, we’ve learned that is not the case. Rather, the wealthy new owners are a couple in their 60s named Jim & Sujo Offield. Our Mr. Offield, bless his heart, happens to be a great-grandson of William Wrigley, Junior. In 1891, Mr. Wrigley founded what has become a $4.4 billion chewing gum empire. The Wrigley family — including the great-grandchildren and beyond — remains exuberantly wealthy, as they reportedly still owned a significant number of the company’s shares around the time the company was sold to Mars in 2008 for $23 billion.

Anyway, here’s the house.

Located on a wide street that’s an easy walk to both trendy Abbott Kinney and the beach, the house is partially shielded from view by come tall trees and dense foliage. It’s also got a rather forbidding facade, with a courtyard gate blocking the entrance and minimal windows. Though it’s got nearly 5,000-square-feet of living space — bigger than many mini-mansions — it surprisingly packs in just 2 bedrooms and 2.75 bathrooms.

Once inside the front door, things turn yellow — very yellow. Still, it’s spacious, there’s plenty of natural light, and the floors are white oak. The combination living/dining room was completely redone by the Offields, Yolanda understands.

There’s also a private library with bookshelves and a bountiful selection of books. Out back is a bamboo coutyard with a reflecting pool (?). Nice place to sit and contemplate or host a few friends.

The kitchen may look dated, but it’s full of all the highest of high end appliances: SubZero, Wolf, Miele.

Upstairs there’s a whole semitrailer-sized load of books. Seriously. Property records show the sellers of the house were two non-celebrity gentlemen, and we must applaud them on their book collecting skills. Even Yolanda cannot compete. We also like that convenient wooden ladder, as it reminds us of one of our favorite movie scenes.

The house was built back in 2003, although (just between y’all and Yolanda) it rather looks as though it was constructed sometime in the 1980s. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — although many might argue otherwise — but like we said, Mr. & Mrs. Offield have already completed a thorough renovation of the interiors.

Our gum-rich Mr. Offield resides primarily in Fort Lauderdale (Florida) and property records show he has owned and sold multiple properties in that town, occasionally taking financial losses on them.

In June 2012, Mr. Offield paid $4,690,000 for a nearly 8,000-square-foot waterfront Mediterranean McMansion. Although the house had lots of snazzy features — an outdoor BBQ area, massage room, salon, workout area, wine storage, and a bizarre blue great room with a neon sign saying “Passions” — the house was resold in November 2015 for just $3,725,000. That means poor Mr. Offield took a million-dollar gut punch on the property, not counting maintenance and tax expenses.

Don’t cry for the Offields, though. They can afford it.

You seem, the richie-rich couple were not selling because they were downsizing in Fort Lauderdale. Oh no. Instead, Mr. & Mrs. Offield moved to a brand-new 7,707-square-foot contemporary waterfront crib that they custom-built and completed in early 2016. The property includes an infinity pool w/ attached spa, a “designer chefs kitchen” with walk-in cooler and Sub-Zero/Wolf appliances with wine storage,  five party-ready “VIP suites”, each with their own wet bar (!!), and an elevator.

As fickle rich people often do, however, Mr. & Mrs. Offield changed their minds about their chosen place of residence. They all up and decided to move to the West Coast! Thus, their new-fangled Florida crib was put up for sale with an asking price of $9,000,000 in August (2016). With no takers, the asking price then dropped precipitously to $7,750,000 last December, where it remains. Given that the couple paid $4,670,000 for the land and then spent a considerable amount of money to construct this property, we doubt that they will be able to gain any significant return on their investment.

Que sera and all that.

P.S. Lest you think that this is the only interesting architectural residence owned by a Wrigley heir in California, let Yolanda assure you this is absolutely not the case. The family has a real penchant for idiosyncratic homes. Down in high-priced Laguna Beach (CA), a 1919 Arts & Crafts spread belonging to Mr. Offield’s late brother — Paxton “Packy” Offield — was listed for sale shortly after his death with an asking price of $11,900,000.

And then there’s Alison Wrigley Rusack, who in 2005 dropped a baller-style $50 million on the historic Florestal estate in Santa Barbara. According to our Montecito-based informant Barbara Bane, Mrs. Wrigley Rusack has majorly overhauled the entire property, including an expansion of the 1927 Colonial Revival main house from 16,000 sq ft to 23,000 sq ft. There also appears to be a private lake on the grounds, which is pretty cool in of itself.

The Wrigley family, for those young’uns that may not know, were also the folks who developed SoCal’s lovely Catalina Island into a major tourist destination.

Listing agent (Venice): James Bremner, Gibson International
Mr. & Mrs. Offield’s agent (Venice): Aaron Kirman, John Aaroe Group
Mr. & Mrs. Offield’s agent (Fort Lauderdale): Donald Colonello, Douglas Elliman

This one here is gonna be short but sweet, as Yolanda unfortunately does not possess any pictures to share with y’all.

Everyone knows that LA’s tiny Holmby Hills neighborhood pocket — Holmby lies between Beverly Hills and Bel Air and is essentially bisected by Sunset Boulevard — represents the ne plus ultra of SoCal residential real estate. And it seems that just about everyone is racing to snatch a piece of the prime pie.

Just a short jog up the very same street where Tom Ford spent $38,750,000 for Betsy Bloomingdale’s estate and Danny Harris dropped $30,000,000 for Manny Mashouf’s supersized villa, there’s a much smaller Colonial-style house. Although it was never officially listed on the MLS, property records show it secretly traded hands for $14,800,000 just this month (February 2017). The buyer happens to be a young dude named Justin Mateen, who with his childhood friend Sean Rad co-founded the mega-popular dating app Tinder.

Although it may seem admirable that Mr. Mateen achieved the feat of founding an enormously successful startup at such a young age, his business career has been mired in controversy. You see, Mr. Mateen was unceremoniously booted (well, “resigned”) from Tinder back in 2014, not long after sexual harassment charges were levied against him by Tinder’s lone female co-founder, Whitney Wolfe.

The news made headlines not just because of the high-profile entrepreneurs involved, but also due to the explicit text messages between Mr. Mateen and Ms. Wolfe (released by the latter). The contents of those appear to back up her story.

At this point, and by nearly all accounts, Mr. Mateen’s ties with Tinder have been totally severed. Yet Mr. Mateen’s LinkedIn still indicates his current position is “co-founder and CMO at Tinder”. Hmmm! Maybe he just forgot to update it? Anyway, we’re not quite sure what he’s been up to in the past couple years. Ms. Wolfe, on the other hand, has gone on to found Bumble, a sort-of feminist take on Tinder that is reportedly worth at least $500 million itself.

Yet we digress. Mr. Mateen’s new house was built in 1949 and measures in at a generous (but smallish for the neighborhood) 6,596-square-feet of frill-free living space with 5 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms. Property records indicate that it has not changed hands on the open market in at least the last 30 years (possibly longer). We find no indication that the house holds any history of celebrity or architectural pedigree.

Hmmm. Could Mr. Mateen be planning a teardown? Who knows, but we just don’t see him as the type to live in an old-fogey house like this.

As y’all may know, Tinder co-founder Sean Rad — he is back in the CEO position — recently paid nearly $9 million for a house just above the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Perhaps Mr. Mateen has equal financial resources, though Yolanda does not actually believe that all Mr. Mateen’s cash comes from Tinder. Perhaps we are wrong. Maybe we are wrong. But we don’t think so.

Mr. Mateen is, you see, also the scion of an enormously wealthy family in Beverly Hills. His father, Kamyar Mateen, is a successful Persian-Jewish real estate investor who currently resides in large mansion in one of the city’s most coveted locations.

We’re not sure which architect designed the gargantuan mansion on the property, but it looks like something our favorite boi Richard Landry might dream up. Records indicate it was built by Papa and Mama Mateen in 2005, weighs in at a colossal 15,286-square-feet, and contains 6 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. There are no fewer than three gated entrances to the .62-acre estate. Other features include a massive garage, a pool house/cabana, a pool and pond and grassy lawns, and a small guest house or some sort of pavilion way out back.

The triangle-shaped property is located in an A+ in the Beverly Hills flats, practically directly across the street from Donald Trump’s West Coast abode and a quick (but harrowing) skip across Sunset Boulevard to the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel, with its divine Wagyu Burger.

And that’s something we can all swipe right on.

Distanced as it may be from the central hub of LA — well, wherever that is — the mountainous and semi-remote community of Topanga Canyon nonetheless possesses a small but significant dose of celebrity wattage. Yolanda actually thinks that the secluded and difficult-to-access locale (Topanga lies in the rugged hills between Malibu and the San Fernando Valley) plays a big part in that. Celebrities that aren’t named Kardashian love hiding out from the paparazzi. And then, of course, there’s the neighborhood’s longtime rep as a bohemian enclave with all sorts of famous artsy folks. Current residents reportedly include Lisa Bonet, Robert Trujillo, and Rick Schroder.

Now add today’s house to the celebrity-owned pile. Renovated and/or assembled by music producer Danny Elfman in the 1990s, the house passed through the hands of several different owners — an actor, an interior designer, a venture capitalist — before eventually becoming that so LA thing of all LA things: a rehab center called Doron’s House.

In April of last year, the house-cum-treatment-center was put up for sale with an asking price of $2,595,000. After several months, the pricetag parachuted down to $1,995,000. In January (2017), at long last, the property transferred for $1,938,000 to a mysterious blind trust. Naturally, Yolanda’s friend Vlad the Revealer was curious about the identity of the new owner, and it wasn’t long before we discovered the shy individual is a talented young(ish) actor named Pablo Schreiber.

38-year-old Mr. Schreiber already sports quite the varied acting resume — he’s a Tony-nominated Broadway actor and has starred on big TV programs such as Law and Order: SVU and The Brink. However, Mr. Schreiber is best-known to Yolanda (and most other folks) for his darkly funny portrayal of George “Pornstache” Mendez on the addictive Netflix show Orange is the New Black.

From the narrow public road out front, the property presents as little more than a comically modest one-room shack. It’s all a facade, however, as the “room” is actually just a doorway to Narnia — or rather some steps that lead down, down, down to a mini-compound comprised of a multi-story main house and an itsy-bitsy casita. All told, there are 5 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms in a total of 4,680-square-feet of living space.

In addition to the wonderful seclusion and privacy, perhaps the best feature of the property is an all-natural year-round waterfall and creek that gurgles on down the rocky hillside next to the house. And in keeping with the natural/rustic theme, there also ain’t no garage.   single-car wooden carport and attached shed up near street level.

Things are kept weird inside with leopard-print carpeting, a rather disturbing shade of lavender in a bathroom, and a caveman-like area with a primitive fireplace and chimney.

Other parts of the house have clearly been renovated. There’s a large living room with a vaulted ceiling and piano-black hardwood floors.

The kitchen is far too Flinstones-y for Yolanda, but we suppose it works with the overall vibe of the property. Elsewhere there’s a charming windowed dining room and a brick-tiled patio.

There’s plenty of nature space on the .75-acre property. A pea-gravel terrace sports a standalone stone fireplace and the house itself appears to have at least one tree growing through it. Native sycamore trees add to the scenic beauty.

Mr. Schreiber, bless his real estate heart, is not new to the Topanga community. Just last year he paid a scant $317,000 for a mobile home not far from his new mini-compound. Yes, you read that correctly. Mr. Schreiber lives in a Topanga trailer park. Or — more accurately — he lived in a Topanga trailer park. Property records show his mobile home was quietly sold again for $360,000 in November 2016. Way to keep it real for a whole eight months, Mr. Schreiber.

Oh, and that Mr. Schreiber would be drawn to an offbeat community like Topanga ain’t particularly a surprise. After all, he was birthed in a British Columbian hippie commune to an actor father and a psychotherapist mama (who also sired his arguably more famous older brother Liev Schreiber). Doesn’t get much more hippie-tastic than that.

Listing agent: Armine Badikyan, National Properties
Mr. Schreiber’s agent: Derek Weil, Pritchett-Rapf & Assoc.

While the rest of the world — or at least the rest of the US — has had their attention laser-focused on President Trump’s controversial new healthcare plan, Yolanda’s nosy nose has been stuck in other folks’ real estate beeswax, as per usual. One property that caught our eye recently was a spiffy newly-renovated contemporary dangling at the edge of a cliff about halfway up a legendarily steep, narrow, and treacherous Hollywood Hills road known as Sunset Plaza Drive.

LA folks in the know may recall that this road was the site of a major landslide/disaster last year, and a portion of it directly below this particular house was actually closed to vehicular traffic for several months because of a developer allegedly flouting construction rules and digging too deep on his lot.

At that time, the seller of this house — a guy named Erez Chaim — told NBC that authorities were not responsive to the situation. “Nobody’s returning calls. Nobody cares” is the way he put it. Perhaps that influenced Mr. Chaim’s decision to sell this place; perhaps not. Skeptics will note that this property was also on the market for several months in 2015, prior to the all the drama.

Anyway, the house still sold for an impressive $5,050,000 last month (February 2017) and the new owner is a fellow named Jaume Collet-Serra. As it happens, our Mr. Collet-Serra has some serious Hollywood connections — he’s the director and producer of several films in the action/horror genres, including House of Wax (2005),  Orphan (2009), Unknown (2011), Non-Stop (2014), Run All Night (2015), and the Blake Lively-starring The Shallows (2016).

But before we digress much too far, let us discuss the house.

The 4-bedroom and 4.5-bathroom house has approximately 3,000-square-feet of glassy and sleek living space. As for the smallish .14-acre lot, it’s steeply sloped and thereford sits hard-up on the street, but privately behind walls and a hedge. The selling point of the residence, of course, is the stunning views that encompass the Pacific Ocean and Century City.

For being in an area where the narrow streets and close quarters make are notoriously unfriendly to cars, this property has a notable amount of offstreet parking. In addition to the two car garage, there’s a adjacent uncovered carport area capable of storing one wideset Lamborghini or perhaps two smaller automobiles.

Fleetwood glass doors open up to rooms soaring 15-foot ceilings inside. As y’all would expect, the kitchen features top-of-the-line Miele stainless steel appliances, Italian cabinetry, and a glass-topped island. Other public areas, according to the listing, include a theater/screening room with a built-in projection system and the requisite dining areas.

The master suite is luxuriously outfitted with a soaking tub, double sinks and a steam shower with direct access to the outdoors.

Mr. Collet-Serra is not new to the Hollywood Hills area, so he’s likely prepared for the inherent challenges associated with living up in them yonder hills. Way back in 2002, he paid $1,050,000 for a small residence on an exceptionally-steep street behind the legendary Chateau Marmont, just a quick drive away from his bigger new place.

Much to Yolanda’s surprise, a thorough evaluation of property records indicates that Mr. Collet-Serra lost this house to foreclosure in 2009, back when the market was still swirling down that recession-fueled toilet. And just as an FYI, Mr. Collet-Serra’s former residence lies just a couple doors up the street from little Miss Kendall Jenner’s big house, and other famous homeowners on the very same block include Jimmy Kimmel and Sandra Bullock.

But anyway, Yolanda congratulates Mr. Collet-Serra on vastly improving his financial status since the recession, and mazel on the new house and all that.

Listing agent: Ginger Glass, Coldwell Banker
Mr. Collet-Serra’s agent: Jonathan Massaband, Capital Investment Realty Grp.

In the busy past week Yolanda has received queries from no fewer than four different peeps who were all just dyin’ of curiosity about the same damn thing: what’s really the real estate deal with monosyllabic entertainment superstars Beyonce & Jay-Z? Are they actually about to close on The Manor, one of LA’s largest and most famous — or most infamous, if you prefer — mega-mansions?

It’s been reported far and wide that Mrs. Knowles-Carter and Mr. Carter are either planning to buy, are in escrow, or have even already bought the preposterously monolithic museum of a monster manse.

Now, you’ll forgive Yolanda if she’s more than a bit skeptical at these reports. After all, these two are mentioned as an interested party or an unsuccessful bidder just about every time a big ass LA mansion sells for $30 million or more. They’re always “looking” but never buyin’ and it’s gotten more than a wee bit tiresome. You’ll forgive us if we’re a tad jaded at this point.

The origin of these latest stories, as far as we can suss out, is an article that was printed in the British gossip rag The Sun about two weeks ago (February 2017). In addition to kindly informing us all that Mr. & Mrs. Carter were buying the house and that “having a statement pad in Hollywood is at the top of their list“, the article’s author also included what the actual sale price would be: an oddly specific 85 million British pounds, which equates to $103,370,200 at today’s currency exchange rates. That would narrowly make this the most expensive residential real estate transaction in LA history, of course.

Now, kiddies, far be it from a rude upstart like Yolanda to question a report from a gossip veteran like The Sun. But we’re a big believer in mathematics and 2 + 2 just ain’t equal 4 in this scenario. For one, Mrs. Ecclestone-Stunt actually turned down a $150 million offer on the house just a couple years ago. We have that on top-notch authority. Furthermore, everyone says she likes LA just fine and would only consider selling for the right price. Why would she suddenly settle for about 30% less than the number she rejected just a little bit ago? Celebrity star wattage?

Puh-lease.

As anyone with even a modicum of interest in high-end LA real estate should know, the 56,000+ square foot beast of a mansion was built in 1988 — on the site of Bing Crosby’s former home — by prolific TeeVee show producer Aaron Spelling and his uppity wife Candy. It was Mrs. Spelling, y’all may know, who “helped” their architect draw the plans for the monster mansion.

The 5-acre property backs up to the hoity-toity Los Angeles Country Club in the hoitier-toitier Holmby Hills neighborhood and sits on what is often considered to be the hoitiest-toitiest street in all of Southern California: South Mapleton Drive.

According to Mrs. Spelling, the fact that the house wound up being the biggest damn mansion in all of LA — and one of the largest in the entire world — was a complete accident. She just drew the plans too big, y’all! Whoopsies! Just a lil rookie mistake! Know what we’re sayin’?

Uh huh. Totally, gurl.

In summer 2011, the beast grabbed all the headlines yet again when it was sold for $85,000,000 — in cash — to Formula 1 racing heiress Petra Ecclestone Stunt. Our Mrs. Stunt then balled out even more when she hired no fewer than 500 construction workers and spent at least another $15 million to transform the stuffy shopping mall with its old lady frou-frou decor into a slick but rather cliche warehouse filled with about 500,000 acres of black and white marble.

In early 2012, not long after moving into the house, Mrs. Ecclestone Stunt conducted a rather bizarre interview in the house with W Magazine during which she said a lot of thoughtful things like “We’re learning how to do a roast chicken,” and “I’ve got quite masculine taste,” and even “I don’t think I’ve ever worn gloves.”

Now on the market for $200 million, Mrs. Ecclestone Stunt is indeed ready to big the comically oversized premises adieu. But only for the right price. Remember that.

Anyway, it’s worth noting that the house sits on the very same street — on the very same block — as a smaller Nile Niami-built mansion that was sold back in 2014 to Jay-Z’s longtime friend (?) Puff Diddy for the princely sum of $39,000,000. Wouldn’t it be just like Beysus and Jay to upstage their (friendly) rival like this? Sorta lends some credibility to the story, don’t it?

Nope. We just don’t buy it (pardon the pun).

Don’t get us wrong. Everyone knows that Mr. & Mrs. Carter are stupendously rich and can afford just about any house they want. Fer Christ’s sake, Forbes recently pegged their combined net worths at about $900 million bucks. But do they actually want a house like this, or do they just want their names plastered in every real estate gossip rag forever and ever, until this worldends? The only property they actually own — as far as Yolanda knows — is a historic but relatively modest house in New Orleans and a $7 million penthouse in Manhattan’s Tribeca nabe that Jay-Z bought in 2004, long before they were even married.

Now we hate to get catty here, but we simply must. If any of y’all are easily offended, close your eyes and your ears at this point.

You see, Yolanda doesn’t think that Mr. & Mrs. Carter are the type of folks who would take kindly to people forgetting — even for a second — how very, very rich they are. We know we risk getting stung by the Beyhive with that comment, but so bee it. These two relish attention and that’s just the way it is. Yolanda knows these things, okay? That’s why we always gotta read about them in the real estate columns. Yolanda likes to call these two the Kardashians of LA property.

Of course, we could be totally wrong. Maybe they’re signing the closing papers right now. Maybe Yolanda will be eating crow very soon. Could be!

But for now, and until are proven incorrect, we’re calling this rumor some good ol’ bullshit.

For any of you stock market followers (or whatever), put on your thinking caps and y’all may recall that exuberantly wealthy Silicon Valley widow Laurene Powell Jobs recently raised eyebrows when it was revealed that she was no longer Disney’s largest single shareholder, as she had been since Steve Jobs’ 2011 death.  Quietly and rather unexpectedly, she sold about half of her 128 million+ shares at the tail end of 2016.

According to a spokesperson, the massive stock sale was not due to Mrs. Jobs’ lack of faith in Disney’s future fortunes. Rather, she just wanted to diversify her portfolio and look into other alternative (unspecified) investments.

Although what exactly she did with all that cash remains a mystery, that stock sale certainly provided Mrs. Jobs with the moolah to invest in or buy just about anything the world has to offer. At Disney’s current stock price of $110.92, her 64 million sold shares are worth in excess of 7 billion bucks. It’s a good thing, too, because homegurl has been on an epic, billionaire-baller-style real estate spending spree for the past couple years. She now owns a $15 million horse ranch in Wellington (FL) — directly across the street from Bill Gates’ equestrian compound, a $16 million horse barn in Los Altos Hills (CA), a $20 million vacant lot in Woodside (CA) upon which she is building a fancy yet rustic compound, and a multi-million dollar house in Palo Alto (CA) which has long served as the Jobs’ family’s main residence.

As far as Yolanda knows, however, easily the most expensive property in Mrs. Jobs’ portfolio is the epic yet unfinished compound she owns on Malibu’s coveted Paradise Cove. Less than two years ago — back in April 2015 — the super-rich heiress dropped a stunning $44,000,000 (in cash) for three-acre parcel that encompasses an unfinished blufftop Traditional-style house and two small guest houses on the beach below it. No real estate agents were involved (or harmed!) in that transaction.

Yolanda has long suspected that Mrs. Jobs might also want acquire the landlocked property next door, which is situated between the Pacific Coast Highway and her big blufftop spread in such a way so that Ms. Powell Jobs probably requires some sort of annoying ingress/egress grant over it to reach her driveway. What sort of billionaire would put up with that inconvenience?

Sure enough, kiddies, she finally got around to it. Records show Mrs. Jobs’ LLC closed on that small adjacent property for $16,500,000 this February (2017). Naturally, the deal was completely off-market.

Yolanda confesses we know little about the house in question other than what aerial images and tax records tell us. It appears to be a somewhat standard-looking two-story 4,058-square-foot house with a red tile roof and an attached four-car garage. There’s no pool and the landscaping appears mostly unkempt.

The sellers of the property — a Joseph & Carol Lang — originally purchased the non-fancy but well-located house on 1.26 acres back in 1997 for — ready for this? — just $800,000. What that means, y’all, is that Mr. & Mrs. Lang made very some serious bank when they sold to Ms. Powell Jobs for $16,500,000. That’s more than 20 times the amount of their initial investment, after all.

Although Ms. Powell Jobs has now spent a combined $60,500,000 for a multi-parcel, multi-acre, multi-structure compound, the property is still nowhere near complete. We can assure you all that she needs to — and will — spend many millions more to finish the residence itself, not to mention all the landscaping and furniture and interior design flourishes that are still absent.

Just so you get an idea of how mind-boggling Ms. Powell Jobs’ spending is, keep in mind that the biggest sale ever in Malibu is the $74,500,000 that billionaire Jim Jannard paid billionaire Howard Marks for his 5-acre blufftop spread back in early 2013. And that, y’all, was for a completely rebuilt compound with 20,000++ square feet of living space, fully landscaped, with interiors done up by White House decorator Michael S. Smith. The sale price also included just about every stick of furniture in the place.

When the dust finally settles on Ms. Powell Jobs’ completed Paradise Cove spread, Yolanda thinks it is highly likely that she will have spent far more than even Mr. Jannard. How y’all like them apples?

One more thing, kiddies. What do y’all think Mr. and Mrs. Lang — the non-famous couple that Ms. Powell Jobs just paid the big bucks for their little house — did with their $16.5 million windfall? Leave the country? Move to Hawaii?

Nope. Apparently they like Malibu so much that they decided to stay. And they also decided to go big — very, very big. Just 10 days after winning the proverbial lottery, the couple paid a whopping $9,100,000 for a massive mansion that’s basically just up the road — in the celebrity-studded Point Dume area.

Talk about a 180 from their old place. This bloated baby’s got marble, onyx, and gold leaf galore. Rather honestly described as a “rare neoclassic estate” and “truly unique” in marketing materials, the 8,379-square-foot mansion has 6 swagged-out bedrooms and 7.5 gilt-trimmed bathrooms. But Yolanda will stop describing this strangely squat single-story sprawler now. No offense, kiddies, but the poor dear is rather hideous.

But wait — there’s at least one good thing about it! Although this house is landlocked, it sits high on a knoll that provides pretty ocean views down to Paradise Cove, which their old property did not. So they’re livin’ large thanks to Apple and Disney. Meanwhile, Forbes estimates that Mrs. Jobs is worth 20.2 billion bucks, way up from a paltry $16.7 billion just a year ago.

Know what they say about the rich getting richer and all that?

Back in early 2015, acclaimed British music producer/DJ Mark Ronson — a Grammy winner for Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black and Uptown Funk (featuring Bruno Mars) —  wrote a song entitled “Leaving Los Feliz“. It is, Yolanda gathers, an anthem about ditching the “scenesters” in the hipster ‘hood for more bucolic pastures or some such nonsense (sorry, we’re much too old to appreciate young hip popular music, but we digress).

Anyway, Mr. Ronson may not like Los Feliz in his songs, but apparently real life is a different story. A couple months ago, a historic residence in the heart of the neighborhood sold for a big-time (for the area) $4,295,150. The buyer’s identity is shielded behind a boringly-named LLC, but a little legwork in response to a query from Yolanda’s longtime buddy Vlad the Revealer at Celebrity Address Aerial reveals that the new owner is none other than — you guessed it — Mr. Ronson.

Yolanda decided to do a little more digging into Mr. Ronson’s background. Married to French singer/actress/model Joséphine de La Baume since 2011, he reportedly divides his time between London and New York and has established himself as one of the top He’s worked with a slew of big-name muscians, including Lady GaGa, Adele, Christina Aguilera, and Duran Duran.

Designed in 1935 by architect William Asa Hudson — best-known for also designing the romantic and slightly iconic Beverly Hills Hotel bungalows — the gorgeous Spanish Revival casa measures in at a generous 5,218-square-feet with 4 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms. To be honest, Yolanda is unsure if that square footage includes the 1,100-square-foot guest house or not. We rather think it does, but for once we ain’t gonna act like we really know it all.

The house is situated on a generous .32-acre lot in what is often considered to be the best neighborhood pocket of Los Feliz. Gates, walls, and high hedges completely shield the structure from the often-busy street our front. Dense, semi-tropical landscaping pervades the property.

A proper entrance vestibule leads via hand-painted tile floors to a sweeping staircase that makes Yolanda swoon. Around this or that corner are a family room with some of those nifty sliding doors and a formal dining room.

A second, almost impossibly steep service staircase leads down from the upstairs to the fully-updated kitchen with its Carrara marble kitchen with its stainless steel Viking appliances, butler pantry, and even servant quarters (nowadays rich folks like to call them the hired help instead. Sorta like how secretary has become an “executive assistant” or even the dreaded “chief of staff”).

The master suite is remarkably lavish with its glossy hardwood floors, enormous living room with fireplace, a bathroom decked out in more Carrara marble, and a walk-in closet.

Elsewhere upstairs are two more bedrooms and an outdoor sitting area shaded by an royal blue awning.

The backyard sports a veritable forest of pine trees, grassy lawns, and a large swimming pool. Unfortunately for Mr. Ronson, there ain’t currently a recording studio on the estate, but with his money Yolanda is confident he can easily adapt the two-story guest house to suit his needs.

Listen, kiddies, we’ve gotta run because Yolanda is just oh so busy these days but eat your milk, drink your Wheaties, write a song about making a dragon wanna retire and you can have a house like this, too.

Listing agent: Jeffrey Young, Sotheby’s International Realty
Mr. Ronson’s agent: Rayni Williams, Hilton & Hyland

When she’s not producing/distributing/marketing critically-acclaimed blockbusters or going on Twitter rants about Donald Trump, you can almost assuredly find 31-year-old billionaire software heiress Megan Ellison in the property gossip columns. In less than ten years, by Yolanda’s tabulations, young Miss Ellison has bought and sold no fewer than a dozen multi-million dollar properties in the good ol’ US of A, including three modern marvels up in the Bird Streets neighborhood, two homes up on Mount Olympus, and — most recently — three less fanciful homes down near the stuffy flatlands of Beverly Hills.

As first revealed by Our Mama over at Variety, it was only last December (2016) that Miss Ellison plunked down an unabashed $15,500,000 for the ultra-private 5,000-square-foot, 1.12-acre compound of Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. It is our understanding that Miss Ellison has already moved into this home.

Since Miss Ellison is notorious for compound building — she’s bought up compounds in the Hollywood Hills, and even multiple units in the Police Building in New York City — it’s really little surprise that she almost immediately began expanding her holdings on what is often considered to be one of the nicest streets in Beverly Hills.

In November 2016, a lovely and original mid-century modern that’s conveniently right next door to Miss Ellison’s new house popped up on the market with an asking price of $6,995,000. By January — just one month after she closed on her new place — the house was in escrow, and in March the property transferred for the sum of $6,895,000 to a mysterious blind trust that Yolanda just happens to know (for a fact) is a front for Miss Ellison.

Originally constructed in 1957 by architect Alfred T. Wilkes, the low-slung abode has sensually curved walls of glass that center around an irregularly-shaped pool and small concrete terrace. Records show the dashing but dated ol’ damsel has a not-huge-but-commodious 4,251-square-feet of living space with 4 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms.

Photographs included with the purchase price show that the seller invested time (and money) into having an architect conjure up some renderings that indicate the property could be transformed into a modern showpiece with 5,600-square-feet of living space.

The slick but rather generic makeover would also include a new pool, a substantial reworking of the patio area, and a detached spa adjacent to a lounge/firepit area.

Last year, as y’all may know, Miss Ellison paid $13,500,000 for another low-slung cottage in Beverly Hills. But only about three months after her purchase, our fickle gal quickly flipped it up onto the market. The house sold in short notice — but for just $12,250,000 to a mysterious corporate entity that Yolanda has heard whispers is a front for an overseas financier named Jason Peers.

And yes, for those of you not keeping track, Miss Ellison sold her other house just months after buying it at a staggering $1,250,000 loss. That’s a brutal bank account beatdown but probably irrelevant to our gurl, whose daddy happens to be the world’s seventh richest living person (according to Forbes) with a net worth of $55.2 billion.

And for all you curious cats — yes, Miss Ellison continues to own the idiosyncratic “coke palace on the hill“, for lack of a more apt descriptor. Yolanda has been repeatedly told that the reason Miss Ellison has moved out to Beverly Hills is because she plans to tear the huge house down (and possibly the smaller one next door, too) in order to replace it with something more modern, more glamorous, and probably even bigger.

Why? Well, if you’ve got billions in the bank…. why the hell not?

Listing agent: Marshall Peck, Douglas Elliman
Megan Ellison’s agent: Lisa Optican, Mercer Vine

Normally Yolanda doesn’t pay much attention to the noise and other assorted foolishness that trills its way into our ears. We generally prefer facts backed up by research and property records. Today, however, we’ve gotta make an exception. The everyday rumors we hear are ridiculous and ridiculously false, but this one is so outlandish we think it might actually be true. Make sense?

Now try to keep up, and keep in mind this is pure gossip at this point, so take that for what it is and stick it in your juice box.

A couple little (anonymous) birdies have chirped that there is a big, big deal going down in the blissful (yet often traffic-choked) seaside locale of Malibu, CA. That in of itself is not entirely unexpected, of course. Every year there seem to be at least a couple big transactions ($30+ million) that go down in the ‘Bu. What really piqued Yolanda’s interest, however, is that the house at the center of the rumors is quite likely the most impressive — and visible — mega-mansion in the city, and certainly one of the most notorious. We’ve written about it at least twice before, actually.

You see, kiddies, the prominently-positioned property has a (somewhat) long and sordid history of broken hearts and shattered real estate dreams.

The 15,000-square-foot Mediterranean- or Spanish hacienda-style sprawler was built in the early 1990s by a real estate developer named William O’Connor and his mysteriously wealthy wife Karen. Custom designed by the late architect William Pauli, the horseshoe-shaped structure sits at the end of an epically-long driveway that meanders down most of the 15+ acre lot. The home boasts stunning ocean views, an infinity pool, a tennis court, a guard house, several other ancillary outbuildings, and even two koi ponds that are so big they might as well be mini-lakes.

Our Mr. O’Connor — an avid amateur golfer — even installed a five-hole course on the ocean view estate’s grounds. But alas, as it is wont to do, the harsh fall quickly came. Within a couple years of the construction being complete, Mr. & Mrs. O’Connor were already involved in an extremely messy divorce that eventually left Mrs. O’Connor a millionaire many tens of times over and Mr. O’Connor comparatively penniless. Not to be blunt, but he’s also dead now. Hope those few years of blissful golf games were worth it! Cheaper to keep her, Mr. O’Connor.

Anyway, the rich Mrs. O’Connor quickly changed her name to Karen Rabe and continued living in the oversized house until sometime around 2006. It was that summer, you see, when she sold the property in a top-secret off-market deal for $30,000,000 to African playboy Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president/dictator of the tiny but oil-rich African country of Equatorial Guinea.

As an aside, Ms. Rabe (formerly Mrs. O’Connor) all but vanished off the face of the earth after selling the property. Or so it seemed! It took Yolanda months, but we eventually tracked her down to Newport Coast (CA), down behind the dreaded Orange Curtain. It is down there where Yolanda is quite certain she now resides — in a luxurious $9 million mansion in a guard-gated community. In case anyone was wondering, Ms. Rabe’s name does not actually appear in property records — the house is owned through a blind trust. Make of the trust what you will, but we know it’s Ms. Rabe so that is that.

Just last year — back in April 2016 — Ms. Rabe caused a big ol’ stink down in Newport Coast’s high-falutin’ society pages when she filed a gigantic lawsuit against renowned art dealer Guy Wildenstein. Why? Apparently Ms. Rabe was none too pleased when she found out that her $875,000 Alfred Sisley painting was actually not a Sisley but rather a forgery probably not worth $875.00.

The horror, y’all! Can you imagine anything worse than waking up one morning to find that your beloved $875,000 painting isn’t who you believed he was at all?! Our stars! Have mercy.

But we digress. Our Ms. Rabe sold her big ass Malibu house to our shady Mr. Obiang in 2006. Although initially kept on the DL, it wasn’t long before federal authorities caught wind of the purchase and zeroed in on Mr. Obiang’s outlandish spending.

Teddy Jr., as we’ll call him, is known for calling himself as a prince and indulging his nearly-insatiable taste for luxury with exotic sports cars, private jets, and Michael Jackson memorabilia.

In October 2014, to exactly no one’s surprise, the US Justice Department seized the home in a blaze of glory and publicity. We’re not sure when Mr. Obiang actually moved out, but it was most assuredly long before that date. From there, the property fell into a sad state of abandonment and neglect. Take a look at these photos to see how the ol’ gurl’s landscaping shriveled up and died.

Last year, as Yolanda first revealed, the house was sold in an off-market deal for $33,500,000 to Mexican investor Mauricio Oberfeld. The low-profile but astoundingly rich Mr. Oberfeld kept his plans for the property quiet until just about a month ago, when the folks over at The Real Deal spilled the proverbial jelly beans on his full-scale renovation/restoration of the epic but long-abandoned property.

Naturally, Yolanda was insatiably curious to see the results of Mr. Oberfeld’s efforts. Although the house was built 25 years ago and has changed hands several times, as of now it has never yet been offered for sale on the open market. Many features of the property — including the interior, for starters — remain unknown, even to Yolanda.

But now here’s where things get a mite interesting, y’all. We’ve heard from a couple little anonymous birdies that the house is already in escrow with a high society Hong Kong couple named for the shockingly high amount of $75,000,000.

The couple in question are art collectors-slash-philanthropists named Eugene Chuang and Karen Lo. And while they may not be household names, there is little doubt that Mr. Chuang and Ms. Lo are enormously wealthy. Yes — billionaire baller-style wealthy, in fact.

Yolanda’s research shows that Ms. Lo happens to be the sister of a lady named Sharon Lo, who is married to a billionaire fellow named Lawrence Ho. Our Mr. Ho happens to be the dude who just paid a whopping $65,000,000 for an apartment in New York City’s much-ballyhooed 432 Park Avenue development.

Karen Lo and Mr. Chuang are quite obviously loaded to the max themselves. Back in September 2009 — near the height of the global economic recession — Ms. Lo paid $450 million Hong Kong dollars (nearly $58 million USD at today’s currency exchange rates) for a 39% stake in Cordoba Homes Limited, which owns residential and commercial Hong Kong properties.

But we digress again. If that $75 million number seems obscenely high — well, it is. Ain’t no way around that one. On the other hand, however, it doesn’t seem so crazy if we’re just comparing it to other massive Malibu residential real estate transactions. A similarly-scaled but arguably less well-located blufftop property in the fairly remote Encinal Bluffs neighborhood of Malibu sold to billionaire Jim Jannard in early 2013 for a whopping $74,500,000. That remains the highest price ever paid for a Malibu home.

If you ask us, kiddies, the Sweetwater crib is actually more impressive than Mr. Jannard’s spread, despite the fact that it’s on the “wrong side” of PCH. But that’s just our worthless opinion.

And then there’s billionaire widow Laurene Powell Jobs, who so far has spent $60,500,000 on a totally unfinished 3-acre compound in the Paradise Cove area of Malibu. And what about Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, who threw down a silly $50,500,000 for a development-ready property just two doors away from Jim Jannard’s compound? They’ve already split the property up and have the larger parcel back up for sale at a ridiculously optimistic $60 million!

So these sorts of ludicrous monetary sums are not exactly unheard of in Malibu, which is why this rumored sale price is not entirely surprising to Yolanda. But before y’all go around repeating this nonsense like it’s true-blue fact, a word of caution.

We know Malibu, kiddies. Malibu — beautiful as it may be — is a very Americanized and very white neighborhood. Ain’t nothing necessarily wrong with that, it’s just the way it be. You won’t find the diversity out here that you would in Beverly Hills or Bel Air or even whitewashed Brentwood. We aren’t being xenophobic, truly. That’s just the way the ‘hood out there is. Hence why we can’t help but be a leetle bit skeptical when we hear that foreigners like Mr. Chuang and Ms. Lo might be buying this.

Not because they’re brand-new to purchasing high-end Los Angeles real estate. They aren’t.

Back in spring 2013, Ms. Lo went and threw down more than 8 million bucks for two adjacent high-floor units in LA’s iconic Sierra Towers building. The seller of both units, y’all may be interested to know, was none other than Her

Rumors at the time strongly hinted at the fact that Ms. Lo planned to combine both units into one giant apartment in what is arguably the best — or at least most star-studded — apartment building in all of Los Angeles. Other Sierra Towers residents include Sandra Bullock, Courteney Cox, Joan Collins, and Ozzy & Sharon Osbourne.

Ms. Lo’s plans must have changed, however. Less than two years after paying $8,175,000 for both of Cher’s Sierra Towers apartments — $5,250,000 for the duplex unit and $2,925,000 for the single-floor one — she flipped the smaller apartment for $3,425,000 to real estate uber-agent Kurt Rappaport. A scant two months later, Mr. Rappaport flipped the apartment (again) for $3,500,000 to goth-lookin’ local jewelry designer Loree Rodkin. But we digress. Our Ms. Lo continues to own the larger Sierra Towers unit, according to property records. That apartment, in case y’all are curious, is (was?) the Towers‘ only duplex.

But still we return to first base. Does Ms. Lo have the money to afford a $75 million mansion? She does, duh! But does she really wanna live in a house where a nasty divorce went down, where the son of a (alleged!) cannibal spent his blood money, in a tomb to forgotten wealth that has sat abandoned for years? Pardon us, but isn’t that really awful feng shui?

Let’s wait and see.

Anyone who has followed Yolanda’s silly little blog for even a short period of time should know that there’s really nothing we crave more than an excuse to briefly dissect the history of a major celebrity-style estate located in a posh pocket of LA. And this next house, originally built in 1934 (though majorly renovated over the years) and sublimely located in an ultra-swank area of northern Beverly Hills is just the proverbial bee’s knees, if y’all will pardon the cliché. We love it.

Listed way back in March 2016 for a heavyset $34 million, the high maintenance compound lingered on the market for a full year before finally transferring last month (February 2017) for a still-impressive $25,000,000. And though the buyers’ identities are carefully screened behind a blind trust, Yolanda just happens to know that they are a low-profile Ohio-based businessman named Richard “Rich” Reilly and his wife, Christie Reilly. But forget about that for the moment while we strap into our rocketship and blast away, way back in time.

As we say, the Tudor-ish-style pile was originally constructed in 1934 for an unknown (to Yolanda) individual, but judging by the size and location it must’ve been someone pretty big and important. The house sits on high-nosed Tower Road on the northernmost edge of the city of Beverly Hills. Directly across the street is the city of LA (Beverly Hills Post Office).

Sometime in the 1940s the house became owned by the George Sidney family. Our Mr. Sidney was a bigshot film producer/director at MGM, and he had connections/friendships with most of the big stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age, so Yolanda can only imagine that this house was the site of some excellent — though long-forgotten — Tinseltown parties.

Mr. Sidney held onto the residence until sometime around 1978, when he married a rich Beverly Hills lady and moved to her (arguably less impressive) house in the flats.

To be honest, Yolanda is not quite sure who Mr. Sidney sold the house to, but we think it might’ve been Freddy DeMann, who served long and exceedingly lucrative stints as the music manager of both Madonna and Michael Jackson. In any case, it was definitely Mr. DeMann who — in 1993 — sold this house for $3,750,000 to well-respected film producer Gale Anne Hurd. It appears Ms. Hurd’s second husband Brian DePalma was also involved in the purchase, though the couple were already dunzo by this time.

After Ms. Hurd married her third (and current) hubby, fellow film producer Jonathan Hensleigh, and the couple sold the house in 1997 for $4,450,000 to billionaire heiress Janet Crown of Chicago’s Crown family.

Sadly for Ms. Crown, we doubt she misses the memories that were made in this house. Sometime in 2006, while her marriage to her celebrity personal trainer hubby Gunnar Peterson was swirling town the toilet of love, her young ex-boytoy (and alleged drug addict) Peter Marino broke into the Tower Road house and was non-fatally stabbed by Ms. Crown’s security guard.

My oh my, what a tangled web some folks weave. But we digress.

In March 2010, Ms. Crown unloaded the property for a rock-bottom $9,600,000 to Marcus Everard, formerly a Hong Kong-based financier who now resides full-time in Los Angeles, so we’ve been told.

Mr. Everard spent years and dumped untold millions into transforming what had been just another big Beverly Hills mansion into the opulent, nobility-worthy compound you see below. Seriously, kiddies, the landscaping costs alone on a property of this caliber probably exceed the amount that most folks earn in a single year. For starters, the entire house is surrounded by some of the tallest hedges we’ve ever laid eyes on, and they cover all the 1,000+ feet of frontage this property sports on tony Tower Road.

The house is situated on a sloped 1.38-acre lot, which by estate standards might not seem all that big, but the place is masterfully terraced and landscaped to create the illusion of a much larger property. Neighbors are essentially invisible from the viewpoint of the home and grounds.

Many large estates have two or occasionally even three driveways, but this one has no fewer than — wait for it — FIVE gated driveways surrounding the property, which variously access the main house, the guest house, the gardens, or a service entrance. After winding around the long main driveway (above left), the main house presents as a large and grey but not humongous two-story pile. Out back, however, the structure reveals its true enormity as it drops down mullet-style to three full floors.

According to listing information, the extensively renovated and expanded main residence clocks in at 11,311-square-feet, which isn’t exactly mega-mansion-magnanimous but is quite large.

The house’s public rooms are large without being overbearing and luxurious without seeming too pretentious. Overall, we like the decorating, even that unconventionally square and all-glass dining room table. The kitchen has a massive and somewhat rustic-looking center island topped with walnut or some other lustrous-looking wood. Naturally, high-end appliances abound. And nearly every public room has French doors that open to views of the gorgeously-landscaped backyard (more on that in a minute).

We’re not sure what it is about teal paint, y’all, but that drawing room (or whatever it is) pushes Yolanda’s buttons in all the right ways. We also like that balcony equipped with couches and a glass coffee table, although we wonder what the homeowners will do with that when the rains come? Guess that’s the hired help’s problem, eh?

The master suite has a vaulted ceiling with a lovely balcony off the bedroom. The master baths (two, actually) both verge on the enormous in size. Also upstairs are four additional family bedrooms.

The most impressive feature of the estate, however — at least from Yolanda’s point of view — are the exquisitely manicured grounds, with their raked pea-gravel, sculpted hedges, and hundreds of other assorted plants and flowers (most planted by Mr. Everard during his recent renovation of the property). Props!

There is a classy rectangular pool with some of those weird water fountains. Those seem kinda cool at first but always make Yolanda think of a rich people pissing on themselves for some reason. But whatever.

In addition to the main house, there’s also a two-story guest house (which at 3,980-square-feet is larger than the majority of Americans’ main residences!) In here there are three more bedrooms and baths for a total of 8 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms in 15,291-square-feet of living space.

Now, about the buyers who felt comfortable throwing down $25 million for the house. Rich and Christie Reilly may not be household names, even in the tonier parts of Los Angeles where they reside, but they most assuredly afford a $25 million compound and much more. You see, Mr. Reilly is the President (and was the owner) of a Cincinnati-based company called Rough Brothers, Inc., which manufactures and restores greenhouses across the United States, of all things.

The company had been owned by Mr. Reilly’s father, Al Reilly. After his death, as far as Yolanda can tell, the younger Mr. Reilly inherited most of the company and is the fellow responsible for orchestrating its July 2015 sale to Gibraltar Industries for $130 million in cash.

Mr. & Mrs. Reilly have two teenage daughters — Montana Reilly and Mia Reilly. And although the family hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, they’ve actually resided in Los Angeles for at least the past 5 years or so, where the girls attend school. As a matter of fact, the Reillys own a fancy pad over in the super-posh Holmby Hills neighborhood.

The unique-looking modernist house is about as far — stylistically speaking — from their new Beverly Hills mega-compound as Yolanda can imagine, but it’s also got quite the interestesting pedigree. Behind that imposing red wall, kiddies, is one of the United States’ only pool/fountains designed by the world-famous Mexican architect Luis Barragán.

For what it’s worth, y’all, Yolanda has mad respect for Mr. Barragán. He’s rightfully a legend in the world of architectural design. However, we don’t love the look of his pool/fountain combo here. At all. Perhaps because the 4,905-square-foot house is shoehorned onto a paltry .16-acre lot, there ain’t no outdoor space and therefore the pool is pushed up uncomfortably close to the home. Looks like it’s hungry. Might swallow up everyone inside. We’re just sayin’.

But if you like the look and have millions to burn, you’re in luck. With their massive upgrade in Beverly Hills, we doubt Mr. & Mrs. Reilly will want this house hogging space on their portfolio for much longer. Give ’em a call, we say.

Listing agent: Kurt Rappaport, Westside Estate Agency
Mr. & Mrs. Reilly’s agent: Steve Frankel, Coldwell Banker

For as jaded as Yolanda has become when it comes to those divorced-from-reality Platinum Triangle real estate sale prices, we gotta say that even we were shocked — nay, flabbergasted — when we caught wind of this latest big ticket sale. Lately these rich folks just seem to have gone from plum crazy to real blasted bloomin’ nutcases.

When this big new spec mansion clunked its way onto the market, we took a glance at the photos and thought to ourselves “well, there’s another flavor-of-the-minute beast that’s overpriced by 100% or more.” Indeed, kiddies, we (foolishly) never imagined for a millisecond that some blasted dolt would come along and pay more than $20 million for this thing, which in our (useless) opinion looks real crappy and isn’t even in the best area, really.

Boy, were we wrong! Yeah, as usual.

Along came Variety‘s Our Mama, who last week whispered to us that the ridiculously-overpriced monstrosity had gone and sold for an utterly ludicrous sum. Yolanda checked property records, and much to our shock and awe, the wart did indeed quietly transfer for a stupendous $38,500,000 on the last day of March (2017). And then the final piece of the koo-koo puzzle fell into place when our other bestie Little BoPeep bleated out that the new owner was a billionaire foreigner named Sir Tom Hunter.

Our Sir Hunter hails from the faraway Scotland land, and some years ago he achieved considerable fame as (purportedly) being his homeland’s first self-made billionaire. A brief perusal of Sir Hunter’s biography (thanks, Wikipedia!) reveals that the 55-year-old made his first fortune through his athletic retail chain Sports Division, which was sold in 1998 for several hundred million pounds.

These days Sir Hunter seems to toil as a major philanthropist and and an investment guru via his West Coast Capital corporation. Through this private equity vehicle, Sir Hunter holds or held major stakes in a variety of major retail chains, most of them based in Europe.

Now, y’all, at the risk of sounding xenophobic (we really ain’t) Yolanda was not at all shocked that the big bucks buyer was a foreigner. Not that there aren’t plenty of super-rich Americans who can afford a $38.5 million house. Trust us, there are. But only a foreigner would pay such a ridiculous sum for a spec house that ain’t really even in a good area of Beverly Hills or Beverly Hills Post Office or whatever.

You see, pumpkins, this house is located in a nice but hardly A-list neighborhood of the B.H.P.O. called the Crest Streets. (Because all the streets have names that end in -crest, duh. Gilcrest, Paulcrest, etc). The neighborhood is pricey and has its fair share of well-known folks — Microsoft’s Paul Allen among them — but in Yolanda’s opinion the area is a bit too difficult to access and the lots are a bit too cramped to ever be truly ne plus ultra.

Needless to say, this $38,500,000 sale price is far and away the most ever paid for a property in the neighborhood.

As is typical of many homes in this tightly-packed community, the residence sits rather hard-up on the street. Still, it’s on an unusually large lot — a full acre, not all of which is usable — so the 15,000-square-foot house is quite long and rambling. It was built, so the story goes, by a developer named John Saca and it’s got the requisite gated driveway and compact motorcourt plus a rather nifty (teak wood?) front door. And an Aston Martin Vanquish out front (probably not included in the purchase price).

Indoors the house tries to wow with the typical floor to ceiling windows and double-height ceilings. The materials are certainly high-end, with marble and exotic woods from the Burmese rainforests or something like that, but overall the presentation leaves us feeling rather cold. What’s with that ugly beam bisecting the window. That bar on the kitchen island looks tacked-on and just plain weird. And Yolanda certainly does not want to sit on a stump.

The theater is certainly impressive — one of the largest we’ve ever seen in a private home, honestly. And the views from the master bath are lovely if not exactly thrilling (despite the eastward vistas, the home does not have a great angle on the Downtown LA skyline).

Here are some more cathedral-like living spaces.

The exterior of the home resembles a rambling boutique hotel, with a 210-foot infinity pool connecting the two major “wings” of the property. Looks vaguely like some sort of supersonic jet when it’s all lit up at night, no?

Also connecting the two wings of the property is an 850-foot “art gallery” with paintings by Picasso and Warhol — all of which were for sale. But not included in the $48 million purchase price. Why? Because folks are crazy!

The master suite is decidedly opulent. The wine cellar is fabulous and the we can guarantee the pizza delivery man will be wowed by this house. But if you ask a persnickety old hag like Yolanda, this place is a dump. Yeah, we said it. It already looks dated and there’s no way Sir Hunter will ever make a profit on this. So there — it’s in writing. Care to prove Yolanda wrong, Sir?

One more thing. What the heck is with that outdoor bathtub with its chrome (?) fixtures. Good golly, it must be a pain to keep that thing clean! We suppose that’s the servants’ problem, of course, but are we really gonna pretend that it’s okay for some rich old fart to make the hired help toil away scrubbin’ just because he has a fancy for some outdoor bathtub nudity? Hell no! Listen, Sir Hunter, you seem like a cool dude and Yolanda really means no offense, but kick that thing to the curb straightaway. Pretty please?

You ungrateful bastard!

Listing agents: Jesse Lally, Branden Williams, Rayni Romito; Hilton & Hyland

Yolanda heard whispers about it before, of course, but — even so — we were still shocked that the whole thing went down so quickly and for such an awe-inspiring amount of money.

Property records now reveal that Hong Kong native Ms. Karen Lo did, in fact, acquire Malibu’s gigantic and highly-visible “Lady Malibu” or “Sweetwater Estate” (or whatever you’d like to call it) in an off-market $70 million deal in late March (2017).

Well, actually, her name (or her husband Eugene Chuang’s, for that matter) does not appear in property records. Technically speaking, the estate was acquired for $69,900,000 by an enigmatic offshore corporation. But everyone who’s anyone says the person behind the corporate veil is Ms. Lo (and Mr. Chuang) and that’s not really something folks would make up. So there.

To give you an idea of how quickly this deal was put together, signed, sealed, delivered, recorded, etc — it was only nine short months ago that the then-bedraggled and long-abandoned property was acquired for $33,500,000 by a Mexico-born Beverly Hills guy named Mauricio Oberfeld. So we were told, the deal was brokered by uber-agent Mauricio Umansky, who is either a familial relative or close associate of Mr. Oberfeld.

Lickety-split came the renovations and in early March (2017), a scant eight months later, we heard rumors the estate was in escrow with the Lo-Chuangs at $75 million. The actual sale price was a mite lower, of course, but it’s certainly no less impressive or unprecedented. Not only is this (easily) the biggest sale ever for a non-oceanfront property in Malibu, it’s a close second place in the list of biggest Malibu residential transactions ever, topped only by Jim Jannard’s $74.5 million splurge in early 2013.

What Ms. Lo got for that price is Malibu’s most epic estate. By far.

Yes, kiddies, we know the above is a strong statement and some folks might take umbrage with that. Bill Bell’s certainly got a nice place above Paradise Cove. Laurene Powell Jobs’ unfinished compound will certainly be something to behold upon completion. Mr. Jannard’s place at nothin’ to sniff at, either. But in terms of the location, the property size, the unsurpassed views, the house, Yolanda thinks this place simply cannot be beat. About the only quibble we have is that the 15-acre property has no direct beach access.

In fact, if she really gets a hankerin’ for an evening stroll on the sand, Ms. Lo must pop into her chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, Bentley, or Mercedes-Maybach and have the driver peel down the driveway, zoom out the massive front gates, haul ass around a few tight corners, exit the gated community, navigate always-busy Pacific Coast Highway, and then drop her off to hang out with the hoi polloi on Malibu Road or at Nobu or some other such commoner silliness. The indignity of it all!

But you know what? Yolanda doesn’t care. We’ve lived in LA all our long lives, kiddies, and as much as we love California — our ocean is damn cold. And the beaches ain’t really world-class. We’re just keeping it real.

For those of you who want a more thorough backstory or more exterior photos of this property, go here, here, or here. We’ve written about this place so many times that Yolanda just can’t be bothered to rehash it all again. Sorry! And unfortunately, we really don’t have any decent interior photos to share with y’all. Despite the property having changed hands multiple times since its 1992 completion date, it has never once been listed on the open market.

Despite this, however, it seems that Kyle Richards hosted some sort of boozy soirée at this house in a recent episode of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Did y’all get to see the interiors then? Please let us know. We don’t watch that botox-laden trainwreck any longer.

Anyway, back to the buyer. If you read Yolanda’s previous story you should already know that this is not the only luxury property in California owned by Ms. Lo. Back in April 2013, she paid a still-very-A-list $8,125,000 for two adjacent yet uncombined apartments in what is arguably LA’s best condo high-rise — Sierra Towers. The seller of both units, y’all may be interested to know, was fellow Malibu homeowner Cher.

Back then, rumors ran amok that Ms. Lo planned to combine both units into one supersized mansion in the sky, but apparently the lady done changed her mind. In 2014, she sold the smaller unit to real estate super-agent Kurt Rappaport, who flipped it just two months later to a local jewelry designer. Property records indicate Ms. Lo continues to own the larger apartment,  at one time reported to be the only duplex in the entire building. (Although we aren’t sure that’s the case anymore).

So y’all might be wondering where Ms. Lo gets $70 million for a big ass, high-maintenance estate in Malibu. We wondered that too! But after some research, we discovered she comes from a very, very wealthy clan. Our Ms. Lo’s grandfather, you see, was a billionaire guy named Dr. Lo Kwee-Seong. This Dr. Lo happens to be the founder of Vitasoy, which apparently is a highly-popular soymilk drink in Hong Kong. This venture made Dr. Lo rich enough to the point where he became one of the city’s major philanthropists. And the rest is, well, history.

In addition to whatever money she got from good ol’ billionaire granddad, Ms. Lo’s sister just happens to be married to another billionaire fellow named Lawrence Ho, who himself is the son (and presumptive heir) of yet another billionaire — Stanley Ho — aka the “King of Gambling”. For more than 40 years, Mr. Ho held a monopoly-mafia-style stranglehold on the international gambling mecca of Macau. Also at one point, we believe, Mr. Ho was one of the top 10 richest men in Hong Kong.

Although we really have no knowledge of their financial arrangements, Yolanda assumes that Ms. Lo and her hubby (Mr. Chuang) have forged their business empire and luxury property portfolio with some assistance from Ms. Lo’s multi-billionaire extended family. Maybe? Maybe.

And yes, kiddies, this is (so far) 2017’s biggest residential real estate transaction in Los Angeles County, beating out Evan Metropoulos and his $65 million Trousdale Estates throwdown. Congrats, Ms. Lo (& Mr. Chuang). Now burn some sage or feng shui this place up. With a sordid history of divorce, death, and money laundering — it’s damn well gonna need it. You hear?

Yolanda can’t apologize effusively enough for being so AWOL these past few weeks. What can we say? We’re a busy beotch. But we’re back now and ready to catch up on the million+ stories we missed out on over the past month or so. Let’s kick things off with a quick tale about a relatively low-profile but unfathomably rich heir to a candy fortune who recently threw down the big bucks on a highly-private and sublimely-located compound that straddles the border between Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills.

The property in question was for sale for a very long time — at least a year or so. Yolanda seems to recall it was once priced at more than $20 million, but don’t quote us on that because we’re not totally certain the booze hasn’t addled what little brains we have remaining. Capiche?

Anyway, the “property” is actually two separate (but adjacent) parcels with two different addresses and two separate homes.

The sellers of both parcels, property records reveal, were a couple named John & Lacey Williams. Our Mrs. Williams, y’all may be interested to know, happens to be a daughter of the late Eileen Ford, the formidable “grande dame of the modeling world” who with her husband Jerry founded the elite Ford Models agency in New York City.

In 1996, the Williamses purchased a home on the edge of Beverly Hills, right next door to the super-hot Trousdale Estates ‘hood. The structure is Mediterranean-style and clocks in at 4,592-square-feet with just 2 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms, according to property records.

Sometime around late 2015, Yolanda thinks, Mr. and Mrs. Williams decided to sell their house, which is located in a tiny gated community that encompasses just one street: historic La Collina Drive.

Now this may seem strange to us mere financial mortals, but upon deciding to sell, Mr. & Mrs. Williams immediately plunked down $7,250,000 to buy their next door neighbor’s house. As for why they would do such a bizarre thing, their neighbor’s property is situated directly behind their own home — meaning that any potential development of their lot by prospective buyers would be restricted by the neighbor’s driveway access and such. Mr. and Mrs. Williams, it seems, realized that the two homes were worth more to potential buyers as one large compound than as two separate residences.

But we digress. Both homes appear to have their own pools and separate guest cottages. And though the current structures appear to be in decent condition, the property was marketed as a teardown — an “amazing opportunity to build an over 30,000 sq. ft. home on a rare 2.68 acre lot”. This month (April 2017) a big-bucks buyer finally bit the bullet, paying $14,980,000 for the entire kit and caboodle.

Though the new owner’s identity is (of course!) shielded behind the usual corporate veil, Yolanda happens to know it is a fellow named Stephen Badger. Our Mr. Badger is a 48-year-old guy with money. Serious money. Our Mr. Badger, you see, happens to be a great-grandson of Frank C. Mars, who founded the candy company Mars, Incorporated way back in 1911. More than a century later, the massive conglomerate ($33 billion in sales reported in 2015) remains entirely owned by the Mars family. Thus, y’all can see how Mr. Badger is very, very rich. His mother Jacqueline Mars is currently ranked as the world’s 26th richest person (and third-richest woman) and makes do with a net worth of $27 billion, according to Forbes.

Despite their vast wealth, the Mars clan remains deliberately low-profile. By all accounts, Mr. Badger has — until recently — led a relatively unassuming and quiet life in his current digs over in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is also a part-time documentary/film producer.

Yolanda is — naturally — not privy to Mr. Badger’s plans for the estate, but based on his real estate history we’re gonna toss out an educated guess that says he’ll raze the whole big beotch and construct something idiosyncratic and hideously costly. You see, this is not the first multi-million dollar property in LA owned by Mr. Badger. Back in June 2014, he plunked down $4,675,000 to purchase a very unique house at the tippy-top of a very steep and notoriously celebrified street that’s located in the Hollywood Hills and directly behind the legendary Chateau Marmont.

This house, y’all may be interested to know, was custom-built in 2009 to the specifications of another obscenely-rich heir: Johnson & Johnson scion John Lansing Johnson-Teal, son of major real estate baller Libet Johnson. The 3,000-square-foot abode was designed by LA-based architecture firm Space International and includes lots of wood and glass and cool features like a koi pond and an outdoor shower.

Some of the celebrity homeowners on the same street include Jimmy Kimmel, Sandra Bullock, and the Pepsi-swiggin’ socialite Kendall Jenner. But even they weren’t enough to keep Mr. Badger around. In August 2016, barely two years after acquiring it, Mr. Badger dumped the oddball property for $5,150,000 to young-ish music executive Aaron Bay Schuck.

Back to his new property. We don’t know if Mr. Badger is interested in this — he has the money to build just about anything he wants, after all — but as part of the nearly $15 million purchase price, his new compound came with renderings and plans for a big glassy modern palace.

There’s something undeniably cool and quintessentially LA about living in a enormous glass house overlooking the twinkling skyline of the city below, although Yolanda can’t help feeling that this sort of design is all a bit cliché and humdrum at this point. But who are we to judge? And regardless, Yolanda has a feeling that Mr. Badger will put some sort of eccentric — and sweet, get it? — spin on whatever he ultimately builds way up here.

Let’s wait and see.

Listing agent: Joyce Rey, Coldwell Banker
Mr. Badger’s agent: H. Blair Chang, The Agency

Despite its low-key and family-friendly atmosphere, kiddies, the leafy “Brentwood Park” enclave of Los Angeles requires a seriously obese wallet for anyone to even think about living there. It’s just really expensive. The prices are on par with some of the best areas in Beverly Hills, actually. Witness this 5,756-square-foot residence that is situated on a .6-acre lot located just a couple houses south of Sunset.

The big-bucks buyer’s identity is strategically shielded behind a bank trust, but Yolanda just happens to know the new owner is a 32-year-old lass by the name of Tyler Alexandra Gallagher Ellis. We’ll call her Tyler Ellis or Ms. Ellis for the benefit of our delicate typing fingers.

Of course, we’re oversimplifying things a smidgen. This isn’t an ordinary 5,700-square-foot house, and Ms. Ellis ain’t just some random fashion designer, either. We’ll deal with the home in a hot minute, but for now let’s (figuratively) dissect our Ms. Ellis.

Ms. Ellis is the daughter (and only child), you see, of the legendary fashion designer Perry Ellis. Known for his quality work and innovative designs, Mr. Ellis almost singlehandedly upended the somewhat-staid men’s fashion design back in the 1970s with his eponymous brand.

Now, our Mr. Ellis was openly homosexual. Near the end of his too-short life, however, he realized he wanted a child of his own. So he and his longtime best friend Barbara Gallagher conceived young Ms. Ellis (via artificial insemination). And when Ms. Ellis was only a young 18-month-old tot, sadly, her daddy lost his battle with AIDS.

Three decades have passed since Mr. Ellis’s passing and his daughter is now — as you can see — all grown up and has followed in her famous father’s fashionable footsteps. She’s got her own Tyler Ellis handbag line, where the cheapest item retails for about 1,400 bucks a pop and the bags are made from exotic materials like python, fish, and even ostrich leg (!!). She also rather recently married a guy named Benjamin Shriner in a remarkably lavish New York ceremony.

Because she is the only heir to her father’s fortune, Miss Ellis is also rich. Enormously rich. Yolanda does not know her exact net worth, of course, but we’d be shocked if it was anything under $100 million. Do not underestimate Mr. Ellis’s impact on his industry, y’all.

But whatever her net worth, Miss Ellis did recently plunk down the aforementioned $12,375,000 on her new Brentwood Park estate in what appears to have an all-cash sale. The house in question even has a name, according to the listing — it’s “The Chateau“. So y’all know it’s real, real fancy-like. Right?

The French-style abode was custom-built for the sellers by architect William Hefner back in 2005. And while the 4-bed and 5-bathroom home won’t win any awards from our size queens, it is indeed a remarkably stately property with high-class detailing and notably luxe interiors.

The walled and gated property features a pea-gravel motorcourt (tell Yolanda, kiddies, is there anything more satisfying than the crunch-crunch of a late model Rolls Royce rolling slowly over pea gravel?). The stately two-story property features a front-facing two-car garage and a north/south tennis court out back.

Inside, the rooms are grandly-scaled with double-height ceiling and lovely oak hardwood floors. the living room features a fireplace with an antique 17th-century fireplace mantle, and the dining room has blue velvet chairs below a shimmering chandelier that Yolanda thinks looks like a flying saucer made of diamonds.

Naturally, the kitchen has top-notch appliances and plenty of storage space.

The family room proudly flaunts its wall of glass that overlooks the grassy backyard.

The house may not be huge, but it’s unmistakably luxe. And as y’all would expect, the master bedroom features a boutique-style walk-in closet and a bedroom that wouldn’t look outta place in a 5-star resort. The extensively-manicured and high-hedged landscaping lends an unmistakable feel of Europe to the property. Or is that just Yolanda’s mimosa talkin’?

She may be a youngish lass of 32 years, but this is hardly Ms. Ellis’s first time on the high-end real estate rodeo. Way back in 2007, when she was just a 22-year-old whippersnapper, Ms. Ellis sold a huge oceanfront house on coveted Malibu Road for a whopping $16,000,000. The buyer in this case was an insurance entrepreneur named David Gundlach, who died in the house in 2011 at the relatively young age of 56.

Not that we intend to digress, but Yolanda can’t help mentioning that though Mr. Gundlach’s cause of death was reported to have been a “sudden heart attack”, we have heard from someone who is definitely in a position to know that the death is still listed as an “unsolved homicide” with the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Department.

In any case, the murder house was sold by Mr. Gundlach’s estate in late 2012 for a fat $17,483,000 to wealthy real estate developer Steve Gozini, who happens to be the very same fellow who forked out another $26,000,000 for Steven Spielberg’s Broad Beach mansion in June 2015. Our Mr. Gozini currently has the old murder house — or the former Ms. Ellis house, if you prefer — available for lease at the paltry sum of $150,000 per month.

Just a year after selling her baller-style Malibu crib, young Ms. Ellis ponied up $11,000,000 for a 3,105-square-foot unit on the 33rd floor of 15 Central Park West, one of the most coveted residential buildings in all of New York City.

Don’t believe the “most coveted” part? Check the receipts. In mid-2014, only six years after buying her apartment, Ms. Ellis sold her pied-a-terre for an extremely A-list $30,000,000 to Brazilian billionaire beer boss Marcel Telles. That’s right — in six years, Ms. Ellis’s apartment nearly tripled in value. And how many 29-year-olds do you know that got $30 million for their apartment? Not many, we’d wager.

Anyway, for at least the last few years, Yolanda happens to know that Ms. Ellis has been renting a fancy house in a very good pocket of the Beverly Hills flats.

The 7,000-square-foot contemporary casa was constructed in 1986. And, as luck would have it, the property — which Ms. Ellis just vacated sometime within the past few weeks — is already available for lease at the rate of $39,950 per month. If you’ve got the cash and “Striking curb-appeal”, “a bright dramatic interior w/stunning scale and volume”, and a “wonderful art collection” are your things, well, look no further.

Listing agent: Robert Radcliffe, Sotheby’s International Realty
Tyler Ellis’s agent: Steven Schaefer, Newmark Residential

Yolanda is certainly not a gamer — we leave that sinful silliness to you young’uns — but even an ignorant ol’ coot like us knows that LA-based Riot Games represents no passing fad. Since 2006, when it was founded by two USC kids (Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill) the company has grown to employ more than 1,000 people and rakes in over $1.6 billion in annual revenue. And ever since 2011, when Chinese media conglomerate Tencent forked out approximately $231 million for a majority interest in Riot, Mr. Beck and Mr. Merrill have been exceptionally wealthy.

The most amazing part about all this, at least to Yolanda, is not the incredible growth or net worth of the company. It’s the fact that much of this success seems to have been built on the (figurative) back of a rather bizarre multi-player game called League of Legends. Y’all can keep your corny ass games to yourself, we’re here to talk about the real estate. Just know that if we ever caught our non-existent man playing that mess, we’d slap him so hard that we guarantee he wouldn’t even feel it.

Anyway, back to Brandon “Ryze” Beck and Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill, the dudes who unleashed this terror on God’s green earth. Although we’d spied on some of their prior real estate moves, it was early 2015 when the pair made their first really big splash on Yolanda’s high-end real estate radar. Y’all may or may not recall that it was Mr. Brandon Beck, after all, who (in January 2015) forked out a stunning $21,500,000 for the humongous 15,600-square-foot Brentwood mansion of NFL star turned media mogul Michael Strahan. Not bad for a 32-year-old fella. But we digress!

Mr. Beck’s crib is pretty sweet and all, but it’s our Mr. Merrill who we shall discuss today. His real estate moves are somewhat quieter but certainly no less spendy and impressive than those of his co-founder.

To start things off, let’s rewind back to 2011. That year, Mr. Merrill plunked down $4,445,000 for a large (6,522-square-foot, 6-bed, 7-bath) Mediterranean-style house in a nice, leafy part of Santa Monica. The property sports a small guesthouse but unfortunately does not offer a pool or spa.

As far as Yolanda knows, this house continues to serve as the main residence of Mr. Merrill, his wife Ashley Merrill, and his young family.

However, this is not the only Santa Monica property owned by the Merrills. In March 2014, they threw down an even-steven $8,000,000 (through something called Ashmere Property LLC) for a large but somewhat strange-looking house on a prime and private 3.26-acre lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in the hippy-dippy and lefty-liberal Rustic Canyon neighborhood on the border of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. Whew!

The 10,000+ square foot single-story structure has (or had, actually) 10 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. And for the life of us, Yolanda can’t tell y’all what the proper architectural vernacular is for this thing. Is it Japanese-influenced? A woodsy midcentury modern? A unique take on a ranch-style traditional? Whatever the case, it don’t matter much anymore.

What did Mr. Merrill do with this 1969 oddball? Well, give him a giant foam finger and call him Miley ’cause he broke out the damn wrecking ball. Within a few months the whole house was gone. Destroyed to make way for Mr. Merrill’s grand plans!

Now, you might think that a vacant 3.26-acre lot would be enough space for Mr. and Mrs. Merrill to build their dream compound. But nope. Apparently not! Much to Yolanda’s surprise, the couple threw down another $9,300,000 just last month for the 1.91-acre property immediately next door.

What’s odd about this is that this particular house sold only last September (2016) for just $6,500,000 to music industry mogul Cameron Strang. All Mr. Strang had to do was hold the property for six months and — voila! — he made himself a fat ass $2.7 million profit. How y’all like them apples — what’s that old saying about the rich gettin’ richer and all that?

Unlike the weirdo house next door, this 1956 structure actually has a real fancy pedigree. The post-and-beam was constructed by vaunted architecture firm Buff, Straub & Hensmen and is located on a bucolic Pacific Palisades lane. Though the home borders busy-busy Sunset Boulevard, y’all would never know it. Many mature oaks and sycamores dot the premises.

It would seem that Mr. and Mrs. Merrill wanted this property very, very badly. And who could blame them? With this acquisition, their future compound now has access from both Rustic Canyon and Sunset Boulevard. Convenient and totally baller-style. Yolanda does approve!

Except we don’t approve of demolishing this beauty, as we suspect the Merrills will want to do. This place is beautiful and would function as a perfect guest house! We’ll even move in just to prove that point, Mr. & Mrs. Merrill.

But we digress yet again. According to our calculations, Mr. & Mrs. Merrill have spent $17,300,000 for their 5.17-acre compound. And while that may seem like a crazy amount of money to toss away on a teardown — and it is — rest assured that Mr. and Mrs. Merrill still have lots more cash to spend on real estate, as they aptly demonstrated back in June 2016.

Back in June, y’all see, Mr. & Mrs. Merrill ponied up a very A-list $13,085,000 for a rather gorgeous oceanfront house on Malibu’s coveted Malibu Road. The 4-bedroom, 4-bath property was designed by prolific Malibu developer Scott Gillen of UNVARNISHED and features exposed beam 12’+ ceilings, hand scraped oak floors, Fleetwood sliding glass doors, and a custom gourmet kitchen with European Caesarstone counters and high-end Wolf appliances, all per the listing.

By Yolanda’s tabulations, Mr. Merrill now owns approximately $35 million in luxury Los Angeles real estate. And that’s not counting, of course, the many millions he will spend to construct a big-ass compound on his prime, 5+ acre lot in the Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades wilderness. And he will spend those millions and millions more, trust. We’d bet all our jewels on that.

See? Yolanda is a bit of a gamer herself, after all.

Yolanda took a look over our most recent stories and realized we’ve yet again fallen into that trap of too much Westside stuff. But don’t get it twisted! We love Santa Monica, Brentwood, Malibu, all those places. But we’ve had our behind parked in one spot for much too long. So our next couple stories will be all about us showing love to the Eastside — specifically the hipster-approved and spectacularly scenic yet dangerously-expensive Los Feliz neighborhood.

That gosh-darn Angelina Jolie may have captured all the area’s real estate headlines with her record-smashing not-yet-finalized $20+ million purchase of the Cecille B. DeMille estate, but there are a whole bunch of other celebs on the stylish move out here, too. For starters, witness the lovely A.L. Schoenborn residence, constructed in 1924 by legendary California architect Wallace Neff.

In 2013, the Spanish-style casa was sold for the first time in more than 40 years for $2,545,000 to a lady named Patricia (Patty) McHugh. Our Ms. McHugh is a very, very rich lady — in case y’all didn’t already know. The onetime fashion model is now the Chairwoman/head honcho at McHugh Construction, which is one of the largest commercial construction outfits in the whole damn United States. The Chicago-based firm has annual revenues of more than $500 million, employs more than 1,000 people, and has built some of the city’s most recognizable landmarks: Water Tower Place, Marina City, and Trump Tower.

Anywho, Ms. McHugh made a whole bunch of renovations and upgrades to the then-somewhat-bedraggled ol’ Neff, endeavoring to preserve original details while equipping it with modern conveniences. For the most part, with a few exceptions, Yolanda thinks Ms. McHugh succeeded in her quest

In February 2016, Ms. McHugh first attempted to flip the newly-refreshed property for somewhere around $5 million. Sadly — although we doubt her deep pockets were hurting much — it took nearly a year and a handful of pricechops before the property finally found a new owner for the less-impressive (but still substantial) sum of $3,875,000.

Now kiddies, that right there was almost the end of the story. Y’all know that Yolanda strives to keep up with the entire LA real estate scene, but even we occasionally miss juicy tidbits. We admit it — we completely (and egregiously!) forgot to check on who the new owner was here. But thanks to our buddy Vlad the Revealer at the Celebrity Address Aerial website for noticing that the house sold to a mysterious blind trust and hittin’ your gurl up. Who, Vlad wondered, could the secretive new owner be?

It took us a hot minute or two, but we finally sorted out that the buyer is a young (31-year-old) lady named Troian Bellisario. And although the ignorant Yolanda swears on our silk sunshade that we’d never previously heard of her, turns out Ms. Bellisario is quite a big deal in the wacky world of entertainment.

Ms. Bellisario was born and raised in Los Angeles (who knew non-transplants existed!). She also grew up rich. Really rich. Serious moolah. Her daddy is Donald P. Bellisario, who has a whole boatload of money because he created a whole bunch of super-successful TV shows like Magnum P.I., JAG, Quantum Leap, NCIS, and many more. Ms. Bellisario is the sixth of her daddy’s seven children and the first of two with his third ex-wife, former actress Deborah Pratt.

Despite the advantages that her father’s wealth and fame afforded her, Ms. Bellisario did not necessarily have an entirely charmed childhood. Although she graduated as high school valedictorian from a prestigious private school and went on to attend/graduate from USC, our gurl also revealed that she once suffered from an eating disorder and engaged in cutting. Yolanda hopes she’s all better now, we do!

While Ms. Bellisario has been acting since she was a tot and guest-starred on many of her daddy’s TV programs, it wasn’t until 2009 when Miz B really got her big showbiz break. It was that year, after all, when she won the plum role of Spencer Hastings on Pretty Little Liars. The very popular tween drama series — it just wrapped after its seventh season — has surely earned Ms. Bellisario many millions of dollars.

But we digress — Yolanda’s here for the real estate. And it’s really not such a surprice that Ms. Bellisario would be in the market for a big new house right about now. After all, it was only about six months ago when she celebrated her nuptials to actor Patrick J. Adams of Suits fame. Congrats, lovebirds! Now let’s check out their fancy new nest.

The steeply-sloped .38-acre property features a two-car garage out by the street that abuts a gated staircase and winding driveway. Both lead up to the house, which is almost entirely hidden from prying street-level eyes behind thick foliage. And though the aforementioned steep slope is certainly not ideal for a dog run, it does allow the main house to rest on a high knoll and provide occupants with stunning vistas of Downtown LA and beyond (on a clear day, natch).

Inside there’s a surprisingly-gigantic double-height living room with an original fireplace/ironwork and what appear to be newish hardwood floors. The staging stays neutral and somewhat generic, but we like it nonetheless. Elsewhere there’s a petite dining nook and an office/library of some sort that features an oddball glass table with horse-hoof legs.

The kitchen has been completely renovated and is guaranteed to wow all guests with its tip-top-of-the-line fixtures that include a super-chic La Cornue range and a SubZero glass-doored fridge. Yolanda can almost guarantee that those two items together cost more than yo mama’s new Porsche Panamera. Clearly Ms. McHugh spared no pennied in the kitchen.

We’re less enthusiastic about the white-painted brick. The German in us gloves the glossy sheen, but at the same time we can’t feel there’s something a bit… hmmm… antiseptic about it? Sue us.

At 3,900-square-feet, the house isn’t quite a mansion, but it’s still plenty commodious. We guarantee Ms. Bellisario and Mr. Adams will have plenty of room to rattle around up in here. The staircase (pictured here) features lovely original tilework.

The master bedroom is mostly — save for the four-poster bed and tiny chandelier — devoid of frippery but it does carry a big WOW in the form of its balcony, which is accessed through French doors and takes in views of a huge swathe of the LA basin. The master bath has the requisite glass-enclosed chandelier with rainfall showerhead, plus a boxy soaking tub.

In addition to the master, there are a total of 3 more bedrooms and 4.25 baths scattered throughout the upstairs and the rest of the mini-estate. Those tiles you see in the bathroom are 1920’s originals, kids.

Yes, the lot is steep, but it’s been reasonably well-terraced. The backyard is perhaps too small for any event (save a small tea party) but it does come equipped with a pool and spa.

As far as Yolanda knows — and we know so very little — this is the very first home purchase for both Ms. Bellisario and Mr. Adams. Yikes! There’s always anxiety that comes with being a first-time homeowner, y’all know. But if it makes these two feel any better, Yolanda approves of your splurge.

Listing agent: Konstantine Valissarakos, Sotheby’s International Realty
Ms. Bellisario’s agent: Anne Underwood, Keller Williams Beverly Hills

A few weeks ago, while Yolanda was out to dinner at one of our favorite Sunset Strip restaurants — perhaps not the classiest joint but filled with delicious eats, mind you — we received an urgent text from our buddy Vlad the Revealer, owner of the Celebrity Address Aerial website.

Good ol’ Vlad pointed us to a house in the scenic and spendy hills of Los Feliz (and on a particularly celeb-laden street!) that had just sold for $2,275,000 to a mysterious blind trust. Who, Vlad wondered, could the secretive new owner be?

Silly Yolanda was already three (or four or five) sheets to the wind at that point and we plum forgot about the text until much later. But once we finally got on the case, it didn’t take five minutes of investigatin’ before we discovered that the buyers are a comedian/actor named Jordan Peele and his new wife, comedian/actress Chelsea Peretti.

Now, usually Yolanda goes off on her tired spiel about how we “ain’t never heard” of such-and-such-celebrity-before, but today we can’t do that. You see, Yolanda actually knows who Mr. Peele is! Fancy that. You see, Yolanda was a big fan of the sketch-comedy series MadTV back in the day. That show was comedy genius in its younger days (back in the 90s and early 2000s). Towards its later years, however, it started getting whack and was finally (and blessedly) cancelled in 2009 before being unnecessarily revived in 2016 and quickly killed off again. Jeez, Hollywood! Get some original ideas for once, we say.

But we digress, and we’ll step off the soapbox. Point is, Mr. Peele got his big break on MadTV, so we definitely know who he is and we find him a funny fellow. And it seems he’s kept himself quite busy, too — after leaving Mad, Mr. Peele starred for several years with Keegan-Michael Key on the Emmy-winning show Key & Peele. This year (2017), Mr. Peele released his first feature film, the horror-comedy Get Out. Written and directed solely by our boy, the film has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has grossed more than $200 million worldwide (and counting) against a $4.5 million budget, which means Mr. Peele is now quite wealthy and likely has a long, bright showbiz future to look forward to. Mazel tov!

We’re less familiar with Ms. Peretti, but a quick consultation with our pal Mr. Wiki Pedia reveals she is quite the successful lass in her own right. She’s written (or co-written) several episodes of the very funny TV show Parks and Recreation, and she currently stars on the Golden Globe-winning police sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

This February (2017), Peretti-Peeles announced they are expecting their first bundle of joy. (Mazel tov, again!) So it’s really not such a surprise that they’d buy a new house to bring up baby, is it? Of course not. Now without further adieu, let’s take a gander at their somewhat unusual new property.

We say the house is “somewhat unusual” because the architectural style is atypical for the neighborhood, which is jam-packed with Spanish Colonials and Mediterraneans. The listing says this place is a Mid-Century Modern, and indeed it was build in 1953 and has some modern elements (mostly inside). Yolanda suspects, however, that the structure underwent at least one major overhaul sometime in its 64-year lifespan. If you ask us, we think it looks a bit more ranch-style or Hawaiian-influenced than what we typically picture when we imagine a MCM.

Also unlike most celebrity residences, which are either walled, gated, or high-hedged (sometimes all three) for maximum privacy, this house has major curb appeal. It sits on a corner lot and sports a big lawn, a wide driveway, and a generous three-car garage. A short stone pathway leads to a candy apple red front door, which in turn opens to the home’s living room/kitchen/dining room combo.

Some of the decor is a bit too 80’s for Yolanda’s taste, starting with all that orange-ish wood cabinetry. The kitchen is also much smaller and the appliances less fancy than we’ve come to expect in a $2+ million home, but Los Feliz is pricy and we suppose this is what you get at this price point. Blessedly, the residence has an open floor plan so things aren’t particularly cramped.

The master bedroom features more hardwood floors and has a lovely garden-view outdoor deck. The master bath needs a new color palette — at least — but does have nice features like a built-in soaking tub (is that still in?) and a dual-vanity sink with plenty of storage space. The 2,690-square-foot house packs in 3 bedrooms and 3.5 baths, perfect for a young family.

Whoever originally oriented this house on the quarter-acre lot did a bang-up job of planning, because there’s somehow enough space for the house plus decent-sized front and backyards. There’s a covered loggia, an outdoor deck, a dog-run sized grass space, and a pool. And the hillside location affords a view of the downtown LA skyline! Now we understand why the house sold in just one month and for $26,000 over the asking price.

As we’ve already mentioned, the Los Feliz area is chock-full of celebrities — many of whom tend to be stand-up comics or just famous folks with jokes. And this particular street — Catalina, it is called — happens to be full of funny peeps. Some of Mr. Peele and Ms. Peretti’s nearest new neighbors include George Lopez and John Mulaney. Also within walking distance are the homes of other big-name folks like Kirstie Alley, Mark Ronson, Tony Kanal, and Princess Tatiana von Furstenberg. And many more!

Before they hitched their wagons and bought their marital home in Los Feliz, it is Yolanda’s understanding that both Mr. Peele and Ms. Peretti were renters — he lived in a multi-family situation in Hollywood, and she bunked in a small Los Feliz house that’s just a few quick skips from their new (owned) property.

Listing agents: Boni Bryant & Joe Reichling, Sotheby’s International Realty
Mr. Peele & Ms. Peretti’s agent: Laura Stupsker, The Agency

LA has seen a healthy spattering of ultra-high-end sales recently — banner sales like private equity heir Evan Metropoulos’s $65 million Trousdale Estates splurge, Hong Kong billionaire Karen Lo’s $70 million Malibu splash, and the $85 million sale of David Geffen’s Carbon Beach compound to an as-yet-unidentified billionaire businessman. (Side note: Yolanda originally heard that the Carbon Beach buyer hails from Texas but now we are hearing that he actually comes from Latin America. Hmm. We shall see!)

So anyway, it was sorta unfortunate that a massive (and record-breaking!) sale down in Venice, a sale that would normally would be headlining real estate news, kinda quickly got lost in the shuffle of all those megabucks transactions. At $14.6 million, this one pales in monetary comparison to those aforementioned exchanges, of course. But make no mistake, kiddies, it’s totally unprecedented and no less shocking. Y’all young’uns may not remember, but 15 or 20 years ago Venice was just a grungy gutterbutt ghetto. No lie. But with the advent of super-trendy Abbott Kinney and all the tech giants opening up offices in the area, prices have skyrocketed so fast that they’ve nearly blown Yolanda’s bloomers off. Multiple times!

Another interesting tidbit is that the Venice house was never advertised on the open market. Built by noted sustainable architect David Randall Hertz, the 5,000-square-foot, four-structure compound found a new owner very quietly and without the aid of marketing. So the story goes, the buyer and seller knew each other beforehand and hashed out a price between themselves — a price that happens to be about $3.5 million more than any other sale ever recorded in the area.

Now, y’all know Yolanda, so y’all also already know we had only one question: who the heck was the outrageously rich buyer? Well, kiddies, Mr. Hertz himself told the LA Times that the new owner was an “investment group headed by Nick Valencia”.

But if y’all had never before heard of Mr. Valencia, you’re certainly not alone. Our Mr. Hertz’s admission absolutely confounded Yolanda. For one, we like to think we keep good tabs on all the richie-rich LA developers, yet we had never heard of this enigmatic Mr. Valencia. Just who is he, and where on earth did he get nearly 15 million bucks for a house in what appears to have been an all-cash sale?! That’s what we couldn’t figure out, not for the life of us.

But lo! Property records have now cleared, and we think all those silly questions have been answered. It seems, y’all, our Mr. Hertz — that crafty coot — was only giving us a portion of this tantalizing tale. Documents show the house was actually acquired by a corporate entity (Venice Sunshine LLC) that is linked not to Mr. Valencia but rather to a fellow named Brendan Iribe Trexler, better known just as Brendan Iribe.

This makes much more sense to Yolanda. Our Mr. Iribe, you see, most definitely has the cash to afford a $14.6 million house in Venice. While we aren’t sure of his exact net worth, it was only three years ago that the 37-year-old Mr. Iribe and his business partner Palmer Luckey sold their Oculus VR company to Facebook for a mind-boggling $2 billion.

A thorough investigation reveals that Mr. Iribe and Mr. Valencia are longtime best friends who appear to both be interested in real estate. And it seems they are collaborating on a spat of real estate investment. We really have no proof of their arrangement, of course, but Yolanda imagines that Mr. Iribe provides the cash and Mr. Valencia puts in the work to renovate all these properties they’ve been buying. And there’s a lot. Over on Mr. Valencia’s website, he lists no fewer than 9 in-progress projects. And wouldn’t y’all know — a quick check of property records reveals that all 9 homes/lots are actually owned by Mr. Iribe.

If you’ve been following this silly blog for a while now, you may recall that Yolanda has already thoroughly dissected the very rich Mr. Iribe’s property portfolio. At the time we wrote that tale, we had no idea that our boy was fixin’ to break the Venice record with his Facebook moolah, but now we know. Don’t we?

If this compound looks a wee bit familiar, you might have seen it featured on the Showtime series Californication. The double-lot compound is completely walled and gated and encompasses the four previously mentioned standalone structures, which are linked by three enclosed bridges overlooking a courtyard with a long black-bottomed pool. Yolanda would call the house style contemporary with a Balinese or Hawaiian flair. Maybe?

Interior materials are exotic yet “sustainable”: Ipe, Mahogany, and Fir woods and a special kind of recycled concrete called Syndecrete.

For lots more photos and further information about the property, mosey on over here.

And for those of you who didn’t read Yolanda’s last article on him, we’ll be generous today and give y’all a quick but thorough rundown through Mr. Iribe’s property portfolio. The crown jewel in his collection, we believe, is his spectacular blufftop house in Laguna Beach (California).

Property records show that Mr. Iribe plunked down a baller-tastic $30,896,545 for his hilltop mansion back in September 2014. The house is located in what is often considered to be the best pocket of Laguna Beach — that would be guard-gated Irvine Cove — and features approximately 10,000-square-feet of contemporary interior space. It also happens to be almost directly across the street from billionaire money manager Bill Gross’s three-house compound.

The high-flying Mr. Iribe also lays claim to a 3,367-square-foot modern Spanish-style mini-compound in the pricey “Crescent Park” neighborhood of Palo Alto, CA, where one of his neighbors is Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr. Iribe is also not new to Venice — back in 2014 he paid $1,496,500 for a tiny house on a corner lot that Mr. Valencia has since completely gutted, as seen on his website.

In addition to these homes, there are also three new build projects in the works — one in Santa Monica, one in Venice, and one in Culver City — all of which appear to be collaborations with none other than our Mr. David Randall Hertz! Fancy that. There’s also a condo in Miami and a multi-family situation in Santa Monica thrown into the mix (just for fun)!

Since all of Mr. Iribe’s homes appear to be under construction, Yolanda wonders where the fellow actually lays his head at night? But then we suppose those are little people concerns — when you’re really rich you can afford to bunk up at the Montage or Ritz for months on end, right?

Listing agents: Tami Pardee & Justin Alexander, Halton Pardee + Partners; Tim Mullin, Partners Trust
Mr. Iribe’s agents: Tami Pardee & Katie Pardee, Halton Pardee + Partners; Tim Mullin, Partners Trust