Monday, March 11, 2013

Showbiz Bigwig Mike Medavoy Flipping Out Again

SELLER: Mike and Irena Medavoy
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $7,998,000
SIZE: 5,437 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In 2007 Tinseltown super producer Mike Medavoy and his wife Irena slapped a ludicrously optimistic $23,500,000 price tag on their nearly 11,000 square foot house in the guard-gated Beverly Park community that sold July 2009 for $12,500,000.

A few months later, in September 2009, the Hollywood power player and is charity-minded lady downsized to an approximately 6,200 square foot house in the ever-so-trendy Trousdale Estates neighborhood in Beverly Hills for which they paid $5,850,000. However, Mister and Missus Medavoy soon caught a classic case of The Real Estate Fickle and, in June 2010, flipped the low-slung four bedroom and seven bathroom house back on the market with an asking price of $7,495,000. Property records show the house sold very quickly to a Canadian corporate concern for $7,500,000.

The following April (2011) Mister and Missus Medavoy plunked down $6,000,000 dollars for a 5,437 square foot architectural pastiche of a house in prime East Gate Bel Air that Your Mama will call it a faux-Tuscan Renaissance Revival style villa due to a lack of more discernible or specific vernacular.

The—ahem—villa overlooks the impossibly exclusive Bel-Air Country Club where, as per the country club's website, gentlemen members and their male guests are not allowed to wear "Bermuda or walking shorts, jeans or denims of any color, tank tops, cutoffs, swimwear, football jerseys, or any type of shirt with printed phrases and warm-up suits are not permitted."

Anyhoo, less than two years later, in late February 2013, the itchy-footed Medavoys heaved their Bel Air house back on the market with a $7,998,000 price tag. It might seem ludicrous to some of the children that Mister and Missus Medavoy would slap an asking price on the house 33% higher than they paid for the place less than two years before but they did undertake an extensive and costly renovation of the property and—bully for them—within two weeks the property was put into escrow with an unknown buyer at an unknown price.

Incidentally, the property had been owned since at least the mid-1990s by Jon Peters—another Tinseltown super producer—who sold the house to arts and culture patroness Brindell Roberts Gottlieb in March 2008 for $8,200,000. Miz Gottlieb, bless her real estate heart, lost a $2.2 million bundle when she sold the house to Mister and Missus Medavoy for just six million bucks.*

Listing detials show the two story house was originally built in 1950, sits on .85 gated acres, measures 5,437 square feet and has a total of four bedrooms and five bathrooms including a "romantic" master suite with high ceiling and dual bathrooms.

The formal living room is roomy enough to comfortably accommodate a grand piano and has wood floors, a vaulted exposed beam wood ceiling, hulking stone fireplace and at least four sets of French doors that open to a long and wide, slate-tiled city view terrace. The vaulted ceiling continues over the formal dining room with a quartet of sky-lights that flood the room with light all day long. There aren't any listing photos of the kitchen but listing details call it a "Fabulous country open kitchen with eat-in breakfast room."

Other less formal spaces include a gallery lined with windows and built-in bookshelves, a fully carpeted den/office and an also fully carpeted over-sized family room filled with roll-armed upholstered sofas and chairs and a truckload of books, photographs, accolades and other movie industry memorabilia form Mister Medavoy's nearly 50 years in Da Movie Bizness.

The lower level—where some if not all of the bedrooms are located as far as Your Mama can tell—opens to a basket weave pattern red brick terrace and wedge-shaped deck that surrounds the bullet-shaped swimming pool. The terraced and fully landscaped grounds include tended gardens and walkways, narrow strips of flat lawns and a lighted sport court that overlooks the once exquisite UCLA-owned Hannah Carter Japanese Garden.***

The immediate area where this house is located is chock full of large estates owned by all sorts of wicked-rich people who include apparel mogul Serge Azria—who paid $21 million for his 12 bathroom house in April 2011, billionaire investor Tom Gores, financier Michael Doumani, wealthy widow Bren Simon who once put her 20,000-ish square foot mansion on the market for $50,000,000 but has since reduced it several times the price to its current $29,900,000.

*Mister Medavoy's has had a hand in producing, literally, hundreds of feature films including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky and Annie Hall, all of which earned best picture Oscars in the mid-1970s. Since then he produced through a variety of companies (Orion, TriStar and Phoenix) a slew of money maker and award winners including The Terminator (and Terminator II), Dances with Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs, Sleepless in Seattle, Hook, The People vs. Larry Flint, The Thin Red Line, Shutter Island and the 2010 mega hit Black Swan. According to his extensive and impressive resume on the Internet Movie Data Base, Mister Medavoy has more than half a dozen projects from several different genres (Sci-Fi, Horror, Drama etc.) in various stages of filming and development. 

**As far as we can tell from a look-see at the property records, Miz Roberts Gottlieb still also owns the nearly 11,000 square foot house on 2.34 acres immediately next door that she and her deceased husband Milton—a former economics professor turned real estate developer—have owned since the late 1990s.


***The 1.5 acre Kyoto-style hillside garden, designed in the late 50s and early 60s by Nagao Sakurai, was donated to UCLA in the mid-60s. Although they had agreed to maintain the garden in perpetuity, in early 2012 the university removed all the valuable art objects and planned to sell the garden citing prohibitively high maintenance costs, deferred maintenance issues and a lack of attendance/revenue related to the strictly limited parking. Controversy ensued and garden preservationists were relieved when the L.A. Superior Court granted a temporary injunction that prohibits the sale of the garden. A trial is set for May (2013) to determine the long-term fate of the stored garden. The university also listed the adjacent house—the so-called Carter House—in February 2012 for $9 million but it was de-listed five months later and has not returned to the (open) market.


listing photos: Coldwell Banker / Beverly Hills South

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

mama dear, you're forgetting the Medavoy's house in M.E. they sold to Charlie Sheen!

Anonymous said...

I think perhaps his high-maintenance missus Irena fancies a triumphant return to Beverly Park! Yes i can see it now

Anonymous said...

What's with these people? It would seem that the process of buying and renovating and moving in and then moving out is central to their lives. From the looks of what they did inside (walls covered with personal memorabilia), it's not as though they were setting up a flip. Although in LA, who knows, the indicators of a successful life in the movie business may be a major selling device.

As far as the previous sale of the same property by the wealthy widow, I'm assuming that taking a 2m loss on that sale could be of consequence to her because she was off setting huge gains on something else, and not just a matter of being so rich that it makes no difference. But then again for all we know she needed the cash to pay her taxes or pay off someone named in her husband's will or some such thing.

The story of the fate of the garden is a sad one, but not a simple one.

Anonymous said...

BUY SELL BUY SELL BUY SELL BUY SELL SELL SELLLLLL

Anonymous said...

@4:32
You don't think they've got a team of illegals to hang shit?

Jim in Tampa said...

The pool looks like it needs a remarciting and new decking.

Anonymous said...

It's not about having enough money to have other people do everything for you. Yeah, we all know they don't have to lift a finger in this whole business of packing up the china and changing the marble in the bathroom and hanging the precious Matisse.. it's about feeling content with yourself, with your lot in life. I'm not making a moral judgement or suggesting they should be doing something better with their money or their time. It just seems like they don't know what they want and that seems like it would be frustrating and not much fun.

Anonymous said...

Now THIS is an ugly house. Top-to-bottom. The living room looks like it was furnished with a bunch of high end thrift shop finds, if there were such a store.

Books crammed everywhere. Pictures and awards over windows--too much!

The exterior is curvy, kooky, and whimsical. It doesn't know what it wants to me. Solid, square, hedges jammed up against the house. Paving, paving, and more paving. The whole thing is a mess. Maybe when Phil Spector gets out he can buy it. It looks like it should be warm but it's too schitzotype.

Mama's black sheep in Weho,

Still here.

Anonymous said...

P.S.

I just don't think Mama wanted to "go there" today with this one!

Laters,

Mama's Black Sheep in Weho,

Still here for a moment longer.

Anonymous said...

8:45 why not make a moral judgment? These silly people who jump in and out of houses on a whim are a prime reason the US needs a stiff real estate sales tax, like 20% of the value of each house bought or sold and a mansion tax as well. The people are so running off with money, a good deal needs to be taken away from them. PS If you sell a painting at auction you will probably be charged a 20% commission. Same should apply to houses.

Anonymous said...

I've always thought that hanging awards, gold records, etc on the wall speaks of insecurity. One or two special ones, yes, but row after row seems just downright tacky to me. It loses its impact and just looks...odd.

My Property Stores said...
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Anonymous said...

@845
Do you know them? Why the f would you suggest that they're miserable rich people who are bored and just like to move houses? You're stupid.
@313
What's on your wall? Besides spider webs and lead paint...

Anonymous said...

@5:46
I suggested it because it's a distinct possibility.

And you think I'm stupid. I'm devastated. Hope it makes you feel good that you've destroyed my day.

Anonymous said...

Aw, these poor, sad people. Having to redecorate and move houses after making millions and accepting offers in near record time. You are so insightful @725! These people are crazy. I mean, who flips real estate?!

Petra's said...

Goodness gracious. Maybe they just enjoy renovating houses? Maybe they find it fun to have a new house every year or two? I'm sure the profits they make doesn't hurt either. Just because they move constantly doesn't mean they aren't happy! Children these days.

lil' gay boy said...

I would suppose they must enjoy renovating houses -- their taste in real estate is neither mainstream nor, apparently, lucrative.

This is one of the fugliest homes I've seen in a long time -- with the narrow lot, long, ill-proportioned rooms, it resembles nothing so much as an upscale branch of the Professional Bowlers Association College campus...

Anonymous said...

Not lucrative? You don't need to be a mathematician to see that buying for $6mil and selling for almost $8mil is quite a profit in under two years. And that's not including what they pulled off in Trousdale in 2010. Remember 2010? Most everyone in the country had lost all their equity and any hope of making a profit, let alone actually selling their house.
Medavoys did it in a few weeks.
Except for Beverly Park, which im sure they still made a huge profit on, it's been nothing but roses for these two childless bitches.

Anonymous said...

Ummmm the medavoys have a son named nick who plays basketball at harvardwestlake. Rude comment

lil' gay boy said...

Ahhh, the numbers may look good, but when you add the money spent remodeling/refurbishing, moving all that crap here & there, plus taxes, closings, etc. -- it just doesn't seem rewarding to me...

...especially considering they got little more than half the asking for Beverly Park (but admittedly may have made a profit), a surprising amount for that awful Trousdale property (but little more than $1.6M after unspecified costs/"improvements"), and the current property is going for less than it did in '08.

But hey, that's me; not what I'd consider lucrative enough to be called a successful flipper.

Anonymous said...

The fact that they bought this place on Siena for 6m and sold it for around 8m doesn't mean that they made much of a profit. We're told that the house went through a full scale renovation. Then we have the broker commissions, the property and other taxes. The list of expenses goes on and on. If they ended up with any gains, it's got to be a drop in the bucket for them. So it's not about the money.

Anonymous said...

"and the current property is going for less than it did in '08"
$202,000 less. Do you remember what happened just seven months after that 08 sale? That would be October of 08. Think think think.

Anonymous said...

They've had four houses in four years and have made big bucks on all of them. The 'extensive renovations' they did weren't really that extensive or costly at all. More equivalent to a new shade of lipstick.

Sandpiper said...

Whew. Felt like I was running the gauntlet just to reach a comment box. Staying away from the numbers. Instead playing I SPY, if only for my own amusement – and safety. Q: Where are the reading lamps in the room festooned with books? A: Dunno. Q: Where is the mammoth turtle? A: Sleeping on the motor court. Q: Where isn’t there a book or memento to be seen? A: In the (private?) office.
What if they had a billiards room PLUS a real library, once again, without reading lamps? A: It could look like this. And it's for sale.

http://realestalker.blogspot.com/2011/08/will-bank-book-burt-reynolds-from-his.html

Unknown said...
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Anonymous said...

LGB let it go. As a member on a gay bowling league, I take offense to your reference! My teams club house would be much nicer!

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...
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Donna Hoffman said...

Living room looks classy and the dining area is beautiful and spacious…

how to flip houses said...
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KMK Real Estates said...
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