Luxury Real Estate

Houses Don’t Sell Themselves by Rick Goodwin, Publisher of Unique Homes

It is always entertaining when a real estate record is broken, especially when one of the agents responsible for raising the bar is an industry icon. In this case the icon is Joyce Rey with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Beverly Hills. She and Stacy Gottula, also with Coldwell Banker, were the listing agents for Le Belvédère, a chateau-size estate in Bel Air that, when it went on the market for $85 million about a year and a half ago, was the fifth-most-expensive home for sale in the U.S. I say “were” the listing agents, because the deal is closed, the sale is completed. Though not yet made public, the sale price is rumored to be about $50 million, and so now Joyce and Stacy have their names on not only the most expensive home sale in the U.S. so far this year, but also the most-expensive home sale ever by a broker in the L.A. metro area.

To continue reading, please click here

By Robert Lockard

Nick Antonicello, Director of Sales for Unique Homes, pointed out an interesting story to me last week in the Los Angeles Times Blog. You might have already heard about it, but I just want to put in my two cents about the whole affair.

Peter Viles, Senior Producer for Real Estate at LATimes.com, wrote in his blog entry that Donald Trump, possibly the best-known real-estate developer in the world, is seeking to buy Ed McMahon’s mansion to save him from foreclosure.

In an even more bizarre turn of events, Mr. Trump now might be having some competition for buying Mr. McMahon’s luxury home. That’s according to a new blog post today by Ann Brenoff, author of the Los Angeles Times’ weekly “Hot Property” feature.

As Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.”

To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of this story. I mean, Mr. McMahon certainly seems like a good man who simply let his finances get out of control until he went from delivering oversized million-dollar checks to being unable to pay for his multimillion-dollar luxury property. His story just seems remarkable and bitterly ironic.

Since he went public with his mortgage troubles, it appears that Mr. McMahon will now be able to make it through this difficult experience fairly well. Competing offers on a house that’s about to be short sold is pretty impressive, I think.

I guess, in the end, my point is: Is this justice? I mean, not everyone can be helped like this. Is Ed McMahon’s celebrity status the main reason why he is receiving this attention and assistance? I’m uncertain of the answer to these questions. I hate to see anyone suffer, but is some suffering just while other suffering should be alleviated, and how do we judge that?

I believe that life is generally good, although it is difficult and filled with perils. Mr. McMahon seems to have had a very good life, gaining much more success and fame than most people will ever know. I feel bad that he is facing failure near the end of his life, but perhaps that is a lesson he needed to learn. I am sure we all must face failure and seek to succeed afterwards. Hopefully we will learn to be better people in the process.


Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with LuxuryRealEstate.com. I am Robert. I create all of Luxury Real Estate’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more. I was really tempted to call this blog entry “Wake up with the King” Luckily, I refrained. You can share your blog entries on the Luxury Real Estate Blog by emailing them to me. By the way, ordinarily I would link to the two blog entries above via their TrackBack links, but they don’t appear to be working, so I just used their regular links. The photo of Mr. Spock is from www.flickr.com/photos/cultureculte/2306916969 and it is the copyright of culture.culte.