Tyra Banks Pays Over Asking For Pacific Palisades Fixer Upper

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 The pint-sized kitchen is lined with outdated and downright dizzying floral print wallpaper and, anchored by a huge, raised hearth stone fireplace, a wall-to-wall-carpeted den is wrapped in dark brown wood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.

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