Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Your Mama Hears...

...from trusted tipster Babbling Babette that supermodel turned Emmy-winning reality t.v. power player and budding apparel tycoon Heidi Klum is fixin' to hoist her mock-Med mansion in L.A.'s Brentwood area on the market with a price tag somewhere around $24,250,000.

The German-born Miz Klum and her estranged hubby, four-time Grammy-winning musician Seal, purchased the estate out of foreclosure in late 2010. They paid, as per property records, $14.2 million so if Miz Klum gets anywhere near their (rumored) asking price she'll have earned a substantial profit, less carrying costs, upkeep and improvement expenses, and real estate fees.

We're not sure what, if any, improvement and/or alterations Miz Klum made to the roomy residence or property but at the time of their acquisition the spacious mock-Med mansion had 8 bedrooms and 9.5 bathrooms in, as per listing details from the time, about 12,300 square feet of decadent interior space that included a wine cellar with tasting room, a cigar room with separate filtration system, a colossal kitchen with an early 17th-century Scottish mantelpiece, a domed library with a fireplace said to have been extracted from Napoleon's farmhouse, and a dining room that was originally installed in the Pierre Hotel in Paris and was dismantled and re-mantled in Brentwood.

The property spreads across 8.52 acres—or just over 12 acres, depending on where one looks on the internets—in the guard-gated Brentwood County Estates community where some of the other residents include (in)famously philandering former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and real estate size queens Tom Brady and Giselle Bündchen who recently had their custom-designed and—ahem—eco-conscious 22,000 square foot mega-mansion featured in Architectural Digest.

The children will recall that it was Your Mama who first let the celebrity real estate cat out of the bag a couple weeks ago about Miz Klum (and her new bodyguard-boyfriend) dropping close to ten million clams on a brick-built neo-Georgian-style pile in a little-known gated enclave high in the mountains above hoity-toity Bel Air.

aerial photo: Pacific Coast News

7 comments:

lil' gay boy said...

Her taste seems to be regressing; I loved the ridge top contemporary they had before the MockMed (which wasn't bad, either), but her recently acquired digs makes me wonder if turning 40 was the start of early onset astigmatism?

Desert Donna said...

I agree with LGB (as usual)..I commented when Mama brought up the Georgian pile, that it did not seem to fit Heidi's taste (or I thought) and her check book. It doesnt add up to leave this for that, especially if not court ordered per the divorce.

Sandpiper said...

You had me going there for a second, Mama. How'd you keep a straight face while doing this one up?

Napoleon's fireplace? Napoleon Dynamite? Elaborately paneled (sans patina) room, "re-mantled" here from a no-record Paris hotel?

Who needs silly old proof of authenticity when "listing information" is this good?!

Anonymous said...

Mama, you also forgot that any substantial profit is also going to be subject to a very significant capital gains tax.

Federally the capital gains is now 20%, and at least in 2012 the California state capital gains was 9.6% or thereabouts. Single people selling a primary residence can shield 250k, and a married couple can shield 500k. That's it. You can no longer reinvest in a more expensive property and shield everything.

So on a 7m profit, for example, there would be approximately 2.1m combined federal and state capital gains tax due.

It's a big factor that a lot of folks don't take into consideration, and is almost never mentioned in the retail real estate press. At least, I rarely see it mentioned.

Anonymous said...

Anon@ 9:20
Good piece of info, and I rarely begrudge a person for boo. However, I do find it hard to feel any sympathy for a person only making 4.9M, after paying taxes on 7M profit, from a house sale.

Anonymous said...

Does the dumbasses in California not have Realtors with access to the MLS or the Internet? Who sees someone pay $14 million for something and then gives them millions of dollars more for it a few years later? I guess this is what happens when you have new money people that did not work hard for their money, because I was raised to get the best deal for anything and to beat someone down in price.

Anonymous said...

wow, this house looks way better than that crappy new house Heidi bought in Bel Air. I think she should have kept the Brentwood house and just bought out Seal's interest in it if he even put any money into it. I know Heidi is the richer of the two. The Bel Air house looks ok but it is in an area with small homes and it is on a weird lot with a weird gated entry that takes you behind some other smaller homes to get to the house. It's a weird set up and anyone that looks it up on google maps or bing maps will see what I mean. If she got the Brentwood house for only $14 million then she should have just kept it and used that money that she purchased the bel air house with to buy out Seal. I guess maybe Seal did put some money into the house and he pushed her to sell it so he can make a huge profit and use it for his nest egg once he leaves his sugar momma lol. I know Seal is rich in his own right but he's supposedly worth like $15 million compared to her $75 million plus.