Comedian Chelsea Handler has said that buying real estate is a great way to stash your savings: “Invest in property. I don’t have tons of investments, but I have a lot of real estate because that’s always going to mature and that’s always going to have value in the right places,” she told MarketWatch this past summer. But her own real-estate investments haven’t always panned out. On a recent episode of her podcast, Handler said that the Brentwood, Los Angeles, home she bought from Cheryl Hines and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for $5.9 million in 2021 was a “disaster” with so many issues that she still hasn’t been able to move in.
Handler, who bought the Mandeville Canyon home via a trust named after her older sister Simone, claims that she didn’t know who the sellers were until after the deal closed because they also used a trust. But after the sale, she says that Hines, who moved into another property down the street with RFK Jr., left her a note that read, “Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you, Chelsea.” That gesture rankled when Handler discovered the extent of the issues at the house. For one — and perhaps most alarmingly — the home, built in 1937, didn’t have a proper foundation, according to Handler. She also said that the property had a storage unit that she learned was illegal, and so would need to be torn down, only after the purchase. It’s unclear why the prepurchase home inspection she had done wouldn’t have caught such obvious red flags — especially an unpermitted structure on the property. But Handler claims that an inspector she hired after the sale told her it had the most “toxic environment,” and that there were so many issues with it that she still hasn’t moved into the home years later. It appears to be a lovely space in the listing photos, though: They show a five-bedroom home with an elegant-looking renovation, a spacious backyard, and a pool.
Buying a foundationless house is not the only real-estate mistake Handler has made. She converted her previous home, a five-bedroom in Bel Air, into a two-bedroom to discourage her family from visiting for too long. It definitely made “the house less valuable,” Handler admitted. After renovating the house to have fewer bedrooms, she then had to change it back to sell: “I had to turn the two bedrooms back into five bedrooms.”
