Celebrities are Selling their Mansions for Massive Losses

Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott remove $16 million Beverly Hills mansion listing after two year battle trying to sell this huge property. Rob Lowe slashes another $550,000 off of his Beverly Hills home. Ken Griffin sells Chicago penthouse at 44% loss. This is no joke, you guys. Celebrities and billionaires are not having the best of luck selling their mansions lately. Some of them are taking big losses. Whether you're trying to sell a $30 million house in Beverly Hills or a $30 million penthouse in Chicago, you're playing a high-stakes game at these big price points. And even real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank just issued a warning to these celebrities who are struggling to sell their homes, which we'll get into later in this video. Based on the comments section of a handful of my other videos, I know there's some of you guys out there who just love to see these rich people struggling, but I, for one, kind of feel bad for these guys. I mean, it's never fun to have a property sit on the market for months or even years on end. Trust me, I've been there. In today's episode, let's dive into some of the most recent stories highlighting celebrities either doing huge price drops or just flat out taking huge losses on their luxury properties. For our first story of the day, let's talk about Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott. These two originally listed their Beverly Hills home two years ago for $22 million. That's a lot of twos. And it still hasn't sold yet. This house seems to be everything that a couple like this would want. It's sitting on a private one-acre lot at the end of a cul-de-sac with a private double-gated driveway, but reports are saying that it's unclear if Kylie and Travis ever even moved in here. For specs on this one, we've got seven bedrooms, over 9,000 square feet of interior space, but look at this price history. So, they originally bought the house in 2018 for $13.5 million. Two years later, they listed for sale in October 2022 for $21.9 million. You can see they dropped the price a bunch of times over the course of the last two years, and after getting all the way down to $15.995 million, they finally just gave up and took this place off the market. It seems a little weird to me that they would take the house off the market because from what I understand, these two aren't even dating anymore, so you'd think they wanted to just keep dropping the price and dump this place and just wash their hands of it, but what do I know? It's a cool house, though. Honestly, it's probably my favorite on the list today. Here's one of the seating areas. You got this huge wall of glass that opens up into the very private backyard. I think one thing I really like about this house is there's a really good contrast between the wood floors, the white walls and ceilings, and then the dark accents. Very sleek kitchen. I will say something about these black cabinets, though. So, I actually put some black cabinets in one of my house flips a couple of years ago, and they turned out awesome. Like, everyone loved them, but one thing I learned is that these things take on fingerprints like crazy. It's very annoying. And another thing that's a little bit unusual about this kitchen is that you don't get that big wow factor great room here. The kitchen's kind of tucked back on its own. With seven bedrooms, though, they did a lot with the space, so one of the rooms is a movie theater. They got another setup as a game room with a fireplace. The master bedroom is huge. It doesn't really have a balcony, but it's got sliders that open up to this railing, and then it even has its own little seating area up this flight of stairs. So, yeah, overall, I mean, this is a great house. It's got really nice designer touches throughout. There's tons of natural light and sliders all over the place. There's a bunch of these balconies all over the property. To me, it just seems like a house that a lot of buyers would walk into and would just fall in love with. Like, it caters to a lot of different people because of the finishes that they chose in here. If you ask Realtor.com, they say it's unclear whether Jenner and Scott are taking it off the market to try to unload it in an off-market transaction, or if they've taken the house off the market to try to come up with some new tactic in selling it. Both of them have moved on, though. Kylie moved into a monster $37 million compound in Homely Hills, and Travis has got himself a $24 million futuristic mansion in Brentwood. So yeah, regardless of what happens with this Beverly Hills house of theirs, I think they'll be all right. Sticking with the Beverly Hills theme, let's talk about what's going on with Rob Lowe's house. He just slashed the price on this thing another $550,000. This one is located in Franklin Canyon. It's an older house built in 1950, and it's a small lot compared to most of what we talk about here on the channel. The lot size is only 6,700 square feet. It's not just the lot that's small, either, though. The house is small on this one, too. It's less than 3,000 square feet, plenty of space for most people, but small for Beverly Hills standards, that's for sure. If you look at the price history on this one, it doesn't look all that bad at first. Rob bought the house for $3.75 million in 2020, then in July of 2024, he relisted it for sale for $6.575 million. His issues here, though, are for one, he's dropped the price by over a million dollars at this point, and it still hasn't sold. And for two, apparently Rob did a pretty extensive renovation on this house after he bought it. Who knows exactly how much money he spent, but just knowing the cost of construction in LA, it's very possible he spent a million dollars on this rehab when you account for the inside, the landscaping, the pool, all that. One of my favorite rooms in the house is this sunroom out here in Arizona. We just call this an Arizona room, not sure what they call it in California. The kitchen's tiny, let's be honest, but it's also not a huge price point, so you kind of get what you pay for, you know? More black cabinets, though. That's the second time we've seen black cabinets today, that's funny. This is probably the master bedroom with its own balcony. I just love when people put a skylight in the master bathroom, especially if you can't get a window in there. You kind of have to have a skylight just to dump some natural light in the room during the day. We got a couple other random bathrooms that are probably attached to the other bedrooms. I'm gonna guess this one is the powder room. You gotta love the listing descriptions. The listing description on this thing says it has an open floor plan with soaring ceilings. I don't see anything about this floor plan that is open, and these ceilings are the opposite of soaring. It's a nice cozy house, though, and it's a nice setting to be nestled into Franklin Canyon like this. My guess on this one, just a guess, is that this house isn't selling because it's targeting the wrong buyer pool based on the location. This is the type of house, to me, that's gonna end up selling to maybe a family. This is almost more of a starter home for L.A. standards, but the issue is that I think this house is sitting more in one of those locations that caters more to those single celebrities or just those types of buyers who are looking for something a little bit more flashy. All right, next, let's talk about Ken Griffin, probably one of the most famous residential property owners in the world. Ken just sold a couple of his condos in Chicago for a $15 million loss. We've talked about Ken a bunch here on the channel before. The guy's worth around $50 billion, so he can certainly afford to lose a few bucks. Plus, the timing of this one is kind of convenient. The silver lining here might be that Ken's able to take some of this loss and treat it as a write-off on his tax returns. Anyways, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ken's units here were located at the top of the Chicago high-rise building, number nine Walton. He actually owned four units in this building, which means that after this most recent sale, he's still got two left. Ken paid almost $60 million for the four units back in 2017. The craziest part to me is that the units were delivered to Ken in this unfinished shell condition so he could customize them himself, which he never got around to doing. Ken says he's trying to leave Chicago due to the crime rate. He's been critical of the governor's work around the rising crime rate, and he thinks the decline of value in Chicago's real estate is directly correlated to the failed political leadership out there. His words, not mine. Oh, and just these two units alone that he sold off amounted to around 15,000 square feet of living space with four terraces, a rooftop deck, and a swimming pool. Now, I couldn't find any more photos of Ken's specific unit, but just in case you guys were curious, I did find a couple other units that are currently for sale in the building. We can look at the most expensive one together. It's pretty cool. This one is in that same shell state that Ken's was, so it is going to give us a decent feel for what his looks like. It's a six bedroom, eight bathroom, they say, which doesn't look like that to me, as you'll see in a second. The place has 7,500 square feet, and they're asking $8.5 million. You know, it's a nice looking building from the outside. Any of you guys out there from Chicago, let us know down in the comments what you think about the location of this building. To me, it seems like a pretty solid central location in the city, but yeah, here's what the unit looks like. So $8.5 million for this. The description says that these are 14-foot tall windows, which tells me it's probably 16-foot ceilings. That's actually really impressive for a condo. It's really weird seeing it in the shell state too, and just trying to think about how you're going to bring power and water lines and sewer lines all to the locations where you want the kitchen and the bathrooms and stuff to be. They do also mention in the description, though, that this place comes with an approved set of designer plans from the developer, so maybe you need to follow those plans. Awesome views, though. I mean, come on, this is what you see off your patio. It's really hard to imagine who's going to walk into that unit and be able to picture themselves actually living there. These shells have got to be a pretty hard sell. A big draw to this building, though, is all the amenities. The common areas of this building are really nice, and you've got your pools, you've got your valet, you've got your gym, all that stuff. So I don't know. Ken obviously sold his place, so he found that buyer, but the fact that he sold it for such a loss could have partially been due to the crime rate that he was talking about, but I think the fact that it's a shell is another massive factor here. Okay, so Gene Simmons' old house. We've talked about this one on the channel here in the past. Gene sold his house to a developer named Max Noble. Max spent years doing this really high-end renovation here. When he was done, he relisted the house for sale, though, and at this point, it's been sitting on the market a long time. They haven't had any bites. The original asking price on this house was a massive $48 million, which sounds like a lot, but you are getting a lot for that price. The developer Max here, he's kind of a celebrity himself in the real estate scene. He's got over 400,000 followers on his Instagram alone, and scrolling through his page, he's built some absolutely epic homes. If Max builds such cool houses, though, why is this one not selling? That's the question. If a house isn't selling, yes, it can be because of the location or because of the neighborhood or because of a bad floor plan or because of bad finishes, but most of the time, the real reason a house isn't selling is because it's priced too high. Here on Max's house, though, remember, we started at $48 million. Now we're down to $34 million. You guys let me know in the comments if you think that's still too high. For that price, you get 16,000 square feet of living space, though. We're priced at 2,000 bucks a foot. That's a little high, but remember, this is a high-design home here. We have looked at this one in the past because it's been on the market for so long. This time, I'm just going to call out maybe some of the things that I think are holding them back from selling this house, starting with all this wood on the outside. I know wood does a little bit better in California, but to me, when I see a bunch of wood on a house like this, the first thing I'm thinking is, is that going to be a bit of a maintenance nightmare? Maybe. Inside, as with a lot of Max Noble's houses, he has a lot of these funky statues, which I personally think are pretty cool, but they might deter a lot of buyers. Like this statue behind the glass and all these ones on the shelves. See, there's another one. The Kaz statue is so, so cool. I'd love to have that in my house, but I would venture to guess that at least half the buyers out there would not want a Kaz statue as the centerpiece of their home. Speaking of maintenance, yeah, you're going to have maintenance with the wood on the outside. You're going to have a lot of maintenance, too, with the wood all throughout the inside of this house, especially the stuff on the walls that's going to get some fingerprints on it over time. This is the type of picture right here that is going to get your house in an Enes video. It's going to get your house on the cover of Architectural Digest, but is a buyer going to be able to actually picture being cozy and living their life here? He just seriously goes all out, though. It's impressive. Like, look at the casing around this door. Look at this, like, metal fluted detail around the staircase. And how about the sink and the powder room? Like this is unbelievably cool. Another factor, too, with this very sleek design is that it comes across as pretty stiff. Imagine sitting here at this table entertaining your friends. It's kind of hard to imagine. This room, you don't even want to touch it. It's too nice. Then in the kitchen, it's kind of the same thing. This is a very photogenic kitchen, but you can't even pony up to the island in a bar stool because of how the island's built. I don't know. I'm really not trying to knock this house. I'm just trying to understand why there's been so many price drops. Master bedroom is probably one of my favorite rooms in the entire house. But remember, we're trying to stick to critiques and figuring out why this thing isn't selling. So my critique on the master bedroom is there is absolutely nothing cozy about having like 18 foot ceilings in your master bedroom. You want something a little more intimate and something that makes you feel like you want to go to bed. And the last thing I'll say, which I always thought was kind of weird about this house is the pool is about a mile away from the house. Most commonly with these high end homes, you see the pool just about right outside of your living space. So you can be hanging out in your living room or you can have someone hanging out in the swimming pool. And it's kind of this indoor outdoor experience. But you've got to hike down this huge flight of stairs even to get to your pool. And even when you're down there, where do you put your lounge chairs to get some sun? I don't know. The pool is a miss for me on this house for sure. But this is another one. I want to hear what you guys think down in the comments. Why is this house not selling? Like a year and a half on the market, 15 million in price drops. What's going on here? I mentioned earlier that Barbara Corcoran issued her warning to all these celebrities and A-listers who are trying and failing to sell their homes. And that is that they just need to get realistic with their pricing from the beginning. Corcoran said that one of the worst things that you can do is routinely lower the price of your mansion because it just suggests to buyers that you're struggling to sell and it encourages even more lowball offers. That's a wrap for today's episode, you guys. If you enjoyed the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button down below before you go. I've got some really awesome videos planned for the next couple of months and you don't want to miss out on those ones. I'll see you guys next week.