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Celebrities' real estate languishes
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This time, the joke is on Marty Ingels.
The comedian-actor-businessman is living in a former Federal City Bank branch in Los Angeles while he and wife Shirley Jones sell their home in Beverly Hills.
Ingels began renting the bank in March as a $250-a-month stash for the huge assortment of papers and memorabilia that he has collected over the years. "I'm an obsessive pack rat," Ingels says. "I moved 60 or 70 boxes of stuff out of the house so it'd be easier to sell."
But Ingels found himself spending so much time with his collection that he moved in a refrigerator, microwave and second-hand leather couch to sleep on. Occasionally, customers come knocking, thinking the bank was still open. "I'm thinking of putting a sign out in front," Ingels quips. "Deposits only."
Those may be the only residence-related payoffs Ingels receives, at least for now. Like many luxury homeowners, celebrities from country singer Tanya Tucker to socialite Lee Radziwill are finding that the softening economy and the fallout on Wall Street are pinching the market for big-ticket luxury homes.
Tucker, in fact, is selling her $13 million farm in Tennessee by herself so she can avoid a real estate agent's commission. Meanwhile, prices on languishing celebrity-owned homes -- many bought at premium prices or lavishly upgraded -- are softening.
* Actor Val Kilmer's New Mexican vacation pad north of Santa Fe has been on the market for two years. Kilmer has cut the original $2.5 million asking price twice - first to $2.15 million, now to $1.9 million. He's even offered to split the 27-acre property to make it more marketable.
* Actress Linda Evans recently dropped the price of her baronial estate in Tacoma, Wash., Villa Madera, to $2.3 million from $2.5 million. Evans put the property on the market last June. It's not unusual for high-end property to be on the market for a year, but in the tech-dominated Pacific Northwest, the implosion of New Economy companies clipped high-end property sales. "The luxury market in the Seattle area has dried up," says listing agent Heidi Bright of Coldwell Banker Bain Associates.
* Tennis great Martina Navratilova's $8.5 million home in Aspen, Colo., has been on the market since 1996. Given the area's predominate mix of vacation homes, whose prices typically sink when the economy sours, Navratilova's pad can probably be picked up for a lot less.
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