These stars are experts at scratching that real estate itch.

In the 10 years since Zillow rose from a twinkle in co-founders Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink’s eyes to an online real estate powerhouse, home-loving celebrities have been powering through some real estate of their own.

Oprah was far and away the top home buyer during that decade-long stretch. But Ellen DeGeneres, Cher and Nicolas Cage (hello, “Moonstruck”!) were no slouches in the home buying and selling arena during that time.

Oprah Winfrey

America’s favorite billionaire owns homes all over the country, from Chicago to Nashville to Hawaii. She’s even bought a 2-bedroom in a small Indiana town where she once owned a whole farm.

Recently, the television mogul paid $14 million for a high-tech mansion in the box-canyon ski town of Telluride — complete with a seven-person hot tub and a “wine mine” — and $28.85 million at a recent auction for this sprawling horse farm in Montecito.

RearPatio_resized

Ellen DeGeneres

Beloved comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres has been buying copious numbers of homes since before she married Portia de Rossi. “I’ve never bought to sell. I always say: ‘This is it. I’m never moving.’ People laugh at me now,” she told The New York Times.

DeGeneres bought this Malibu home from fellow house-flipper Brad Pitt.

Brad-Pitt_kitchen-574x430

She also spent $26.5 million on an acreage in Montecito with ocean views.

Capture

A couple of years ago, she went on a streak of owning homes for just 6 months each, including the famed Brody House in Los Angeles.

Nicolas Cage

“Other people own beachfront property; I have ghost-front property,” actor Nicolas Cage said of owning the most haunted mansion in New Orleans, the Lalaurie House.

Not that he limits himself to ghosts. Among the dozen-plus places he’s called home over the past decade are a castle in Bath, England, and a castle-looking home in Rhode Island, which he sold at a 60 percent loss.

Nicolas Cage RI home exterior

Cher

The multi-talented entertainer with seemingly endless energy found time over the past decade to trade real estate, including buying this home in the coveted 90210 ZIP code.

Cher's home

She also bought a home in Malibu where family reportedly live. It’s near her villa there, where she told Architectural Digest “every room has two views of the ocean.” The remodel of her villa wasn’t cheap, she acknowledged. “My mother once said to me, ‘What you need is a very rich man.’ And I said, ‘Mother, I am a very rich man.’”

Cher has also sold a slew of homes in recent years, from Palm Springs to West Hollywood to Los Angeles, where her son Elijah Blue reported lived in this home near Venice Beach:

Living Room 2

And she auctioned off her Hawaiian estate for a hefty $8.72 million:

chers-hawaii-home

Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt

Here’s a power couple with a powerful appetite for real estate. They’ve bought at least six homes in the past decade and sold one to Ellen DeGeneres. That doesn’t even count the $22.5 million sale of the Beverly Hills home Pitt and ex-wife Jennifer Aniston sold after their split.

Jolie and Pitt recently cut the listing price on the New Orleans mansion they bought in 2006 for Pitt’s Big Easy filming of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by $850,000.

Brad and Angelina's New Orleans home4

Julia Roberts

Here’s a superstar with a super-long list of homes. Roberts bought her main residence, at Malibu’s Point Dume, in the early 2000s, but has done a fair bit of transacting in the meantime.

She’s asking $26 million for a lush Hawaiian estate that’s near two other Hanalie properties she owns:

Julia Roberts' home4

While she dropped the price on that tropical oasis, Roberts raked in more than she was asking — for a total of $5.35 million — on a Greenwich Village penthouse for which she paid $3.9 million in 2010:

Julia Roberts' living room3

Roberts still has a pad in Manhattan, which she’s reportedly renting out. But she’s unloaded a lot, including homes in her hometown of Smyrna, GA, and in Pacific Palisades, Beverly Hills and Venice, the latter to actor Tim Robbins. Across the country, she’s sold homes in Tennessee, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

For a guy his size, Dwayne Johnson is surprising nimble — at home trading.

The Rock has leaned mostly toward home selling over the past decade — most of those homes in Florida. He’s unloaded at least 10 homes there over the past decade, including this mega-mansion outside Miami with two 3-car garages and a deluxe master bath:

exterior

master bathroom

Rosie O’Donnell

Here’s another talk-show host with a voracious appetite for real estate. O’Donnell’s most recent score is this mansion in West Palm Beach with 180 feet of waterfront:

3100NFlaglerDr_print_58

She paid $5.3 million for it, fully furnished, which shouldn’t be a stretch given the $9 million sale a couple of years ago of her Greenwich Village penthouse:

Rosie O'Donnell's living room

She tried unsuccessfully to sell four riverfront homes she collected in Nyack, NY:1 wash ave from the water

But the comedian had better luck selling multi-million-dollar homes in Chicago, Manhattan and Miami Beach.

Kelsey Grammer

While Sideshow Bob was busy being a, well, sideshow on “The Simpsons,” the actor who voices him was center stage in the first season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” in which his marriage fell apart — precipitating all sorts of real estate swaps.

The property-loving Grammer unloaded many of his and ex-wife Camille’s holdings in recent years, including their main home in Malibu:

Kelsey Grammer main home

The Grammers also let go of homes in Beverly Hills, Hawaii, The Hamptons and this ski retreat in Colorado:

Grammer_bdrm

Before his marital woes began, Grammer sold a Bel-Air estate to actress Salma Hayek for $13.5 million.

Reese Witherspoon

For a while, this Oscar winner was a Brentwood fanatic. She bought three homes in the posh Los Angeles enclave, including an “enchanted cottage,” that collectively went for $13.6 million in 2014.

Witherspoon sold her Ojai getaway at a loss:

Reese Witherspoon Ojai home

She picked up a $12.7 million Pacific Palisades mansion, along with two homes in Nashville suited to a Southern belle. One of them is a historic home she plans to restore:

front door

*Fuente: http://www.zillow.com/blog/top-celebrity-buyers-sellers-191397/

Leave a comment