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The Playboy Mansion Will Reportedly Be Up For Sale Soon
The Playboy Mansion. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
The Playboy Mansion is reportedly up for sale, and the buyer will have to learn to live with a new roommate: Hugh Hefner himself.
TMZ reports that the 6-acre estate in Holmby Hills will be listed within a month, and that the owner of the mansion, Playboy Enterprises, will be asking around $200 million. One of the conditions of the purchase is that the buyer will be required to give Hef a "life estate," which means he and his wife can keep living in the mansion until death do him part.
While "The Mansion" has been seeped in lore over the decades, those who've visited, or lived there, say it's actually pretty bleak. 25-year-old Playboy Bunny Carla Howe described living in the house as "like being in prison," and that the bedrooms were dingy, and felt "cold and unused." And another Bunny, Izabella St. James wrote in her autobiography Bunny Tales:
Each bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture. It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room...Although we all did our best to decorate our rooms and make them homely, the mattresses on our beds were disgusting — old, worn and stained. The sheets were past their best, too.
And:
[Bunny Holly Madison's dogs] weren’t house-trained and would just do their business on the bedroom carpet. Late at night, or in the early hours of the morning — if any of us visited Hef’s bedroom — we’d almost always end up standing in dog mess...Everything in the Mansion felt old and stale, and Archie the house dog would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains, adding a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay
Oh, how MTV Cribs lied!
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As Forbes writes, the mansion is a corporate asset of Playboy Enterprises, and was reportedly undervalued when Hefner took the company private in 2011. At the time, the shareholders appraised the mansion's property as a paltry $54 million. Forbes also cited the Zillow appraisal for the house as $33 million.
Because of the crummy condition the house is allegedly in, the reported $200 million price tag is ludicrous; TMZ reports the house is a "tear-down" and that the value is in the acreage, and tony location. A comparable lot nearby recently sold for $60 million, but real estate experts told TMZ that the Mansion's history could help it sell in the $90 million-range.
Wonder what will happen to the exotic animals?
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