"Ellen DeGeneres sells Beverly Hills penthouse for $843,000", "Oscar Pistorius finally finds buyer for his Pretoria home where he killed Reeva Steenkamp", "Dolly Parton lists" while "Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis buy in Beverly Hills."
It cannot be denied that celebrities buying, selling and discounting their listed homes adds to the glamour quotient of the real estate business. However, the stars hog most of the limelight in these deals, when the real people driving the transactions are the realtors.
Representing a celebrity address sure has its perks and looks pretty neat on a resume, but it comes with certain challenges. When buying or selling a celebrity home, there is added attention and too much speculation. Therefore, the realtors need to strike the right balance between exposure and privacy.
"All attention in real estate is not-wanted attention," said Deborah Barry, who listed Alan M. Dershowitz's West Cambridge home for $3.95 million in October 2012, to The Boston Globe.
"It's harder and rarer than you think to hide your name from public record on a real estate transaction. Either you have to be extremely wealthy or doing a very non-traditional transaction for real estate," said Eddie Weinhaus, Chief Operating Officer at Blockshopper, to Forbes in an earlier interview.
Celebrity homes are tough to sell too, because people find it hard to imagine a high-style star's home to be theirs. In fact, star-owned homes sit for a longer time on the market than the normal ones.
It gets harder if the celebrity is controversial or the home itself is a controversy.
For instance, Oscar Pistorius, the "blade runner's" Pretoria home where he shot girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp to death, faced difficulties even finding a realtor. One realtor told ENCA.com:
"I wouldn't want to market that house. It just has bad karma attached to it now and it will be an incredibly difficult sell."
However, Ansie Louw took up the challenge. Talking to Daily Mail about the difficulties of selling the home, she said:
"We were not allowed to take photos or put it onto our website. If they do open it they attract lots of people just interested in the case and it will be chaos." The home managed to fall under escrow earlier this month.
Celebrities, who want to keep it private, opt for hiding their identities on property transactions via Trusts and Limited Liability Companies that oversee their real estate portfolio.
For example, Leonardo DiCaprio, the "Wolf of Wall Street" star, recently purchased Dinah Shore's Palm Springs estate via the Malibu Colony PCH Property LLC, of which Robert Hrtica, Dicaprio's cousin, is a representative.
Then, there is the matter of preference. While some celebrities like keeping it super private, some prefer public exposure and would also talk to the media about their homes and its history.
"The first step is to understand the goal of the seller. My objective is to convey the property to serious buyers who find value in the property itself and find the celebrity ownership to be of minor significance," said Allison Mazer of Gibson Sotheby's International Realty, who represented Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady's Boston penthouse, to The Globe.
