Tyra Banks Pays Over Asking For Pacific Palisades Fixer Upper
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Veteran Supermodel, reality television tycoon and increasingly prolific high-end property flipper Tyra Banks used her deep pockets to beat out multiple other buyers and plunk down not quite $3.1 million, more than $200,000 over the almost $2.85 million asking price, for a modest fixer upper in a prime neighborhood of Los Angeles’ low-key but high-cost Pacific Palisades community.
Owned by the same family for nearly three-quarters of a century and desirably situated just several homes from a high bluff, from which there are panoramic ocean and coastline views, the otherwise unremarkable, late-1940s traditional bungalow is arranged around an entry courtyard with four bedrooms and two bathrooms in a bit more than 1,600 square feet. Clean and well-maintained but woefully dated, the living and dining rooms both have elegant if old-fashioned parquet flooring. The pint-sized kitchen is lined with outdated and downright dizzying floral print wallpaper and, anchored by a huge, raised hearth stone fireplace, a wall-to-wall-carpeted den is wrapped in dark brown wood paneling straight out of the 1970s. A skylight topped sunroom opens to the shady central courtyard and a somewhat small, separate backyard squeezes in a wee patch of lawn surrounded by a hodgepodge of trees and shrubbery along with a good-sized antique brick terracing that runs under a pergola that shields a defunct-looking sunken spa tub.
According to the property gossips at the L.A. Times , the first to catch wind of the transaction, Banks plans to transform the humble California ranch into a “farmhouse inspired beach cottage.” The property was listed with Steven Moritz and Natasha Lahera , both from Sotheby’s Int’l Realty , while Banks was represented in the transaction by Heidi Lake , also at Sotheby’s Int’l Realty .
Over the last year or two, the property-obsessed smizing expert, who came out of modeling retirement last year to appear in a tiny yellow bikini on the cover of the “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue” for a third time, almost 25 years after the first time she graced the cover, has bought and/or sold a handful of multi-million dollar homes, all in Pacific Palisades. Early in 2018, several months before she shed a 4,800 square foot bluff-top contemporary with spectacular ocean and sunset views for $8.9 million , she upsized to a nearly 6,200 square foot multi-story contemporary near the affluent village’s downtown shopping and dining district that cost her almost $7 million . The entrepreneurial former catwalker, who created the till churning “Top Model” international reality TV juggernaut more than 15 years ago, also hauled in $1.475 million on the springtime sale of a two-bedroom townhouse she picked up almost exactly year earlier for $1.355 and in the fall she sold a 3,700-square foot ultra-contemporary for $4 million after buying it about four years earlier for almost $3.3 million.
Banks has long maintained a real estate foothold in New York City where she presides over a roughly, 7,000 square foot condo on a high floor of a luxury tower in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City she scooped up in 2009 for a mite more than $10.1 million. The suburban mansion sized duplex came up for sale in 2017 at $17.5 million and has come available on several occasions, most recently in the fall of 2017, as a short-term rental at $50,000 per month.
