SELLER: Scottie and Larsa PippenLOCATION: Fort Lauderdale, FL
PRICE: $16,000,000
SIZE: 9,782 square feet 6 full and 7.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Buckle up your safety belts butter beans and let the high-priced real estate games begin for The Real Housewives of Miami. Like so many of the other women who appear on the many other versions of the campy, oddly mesmerizing and extremely popular reality tee-vee franchise, at least one of the glitzy women on the Miami program is currently looking to change up her real estate circumstances. The eagle-eyed children will note, however, that the housewife and the house in question aren't actually in Miami but rather 30-some miles up the coast in Fort Lauderdale, a city otherwise known at the "Venice of America" because of the numerous canals that wind their way through the coastal neighborhoods.
Thanks to a slew of real estate birdies down in Fort Lauderdale Your Mama was recently made aware that retired NBA superstar Scottie Pippen and his Real Housewives of Miami cast member wife Larsa have put their sizable waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale's high-toned Harbor Beach neighborhood on the market with a fat asking price of $16,000,000.
As all the children surely know by now Your Mama don't know shit from shinola about professional basketball so we spent the better part of the morning tracking down our ball-crazy b.f.f. Fiona Trambeau who told us that during the 1990s Mister Pippen played side-by-side with basketball legend Michael Jordan on the Chicago Bulls team. During his tenure in the Windy City he helped earn the team six NBA championships. In the late 1990s he was traded to the Houston Rockets who quickly handed him off to the Portland Trailblazers. He 2003 he went back to the Chicago Bulls for a not particularly successful single season before retiring. Missus Larsa Pippen, a former model described on at least one website as a "snarky, Lebanese beauty," pushed out three baby Pippens (or maybe it's four) and Mister Pippen has two additional children from previous relationships with two other women.
There are scads of reports available online that speculate that Mister Pippen–who reportedly earned around $120,000,000 during his long career–might be broke or next to. Now listen kitty cats, Your Mama don't know a catalog from a catacomb so we can not and do not claim any knowledge of the inner workings of the Pippens' financial matters. What is a part of the public record is that Mister Pippen lost tens of millions on bad investments and shoddy financial planning. These rumors and reports of reduced financial circumstances may or may not be true and they may or may not have something to do with the desire of Mister and Missus Pippen to sell their super-sized mansion in Fort Lauderdale.
Property records show that Mister and Missus Pippen paid $1,340,000 for their double-wide parcel in October of 2000 and proceeded to have an Addison Mizner-inspired Mediterranean Revival-style mansion custom designed that, we like to imagine has extra tall doorways to accommodate Mister Pippen's 6-foot and 8-inch frame. The house, like so many in coastal communities is built tight to the lot's perimeter making it appear a bit squeezed.
Some online listings we exhumed from the internets show the Pippen's pad measures 9,782 square feet and other online listings show it weighs in at a significantly larger 13,500 square feet. For what it's worth the Broward County Tax man shows it's 9,782 but the Broward County Tax Man also shows the mansion has just 4 bedrooms and 3 poopers while all the online listings we peeped at indicate there are 6 bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms.
A cursory poke around didn't turn up any photos of the interiors of the Pippen residence so we're just going to assume without any credible evidence that the house is did up of done over in a big baller manner with an impress the guest style entry, a home theater with state-of-the-art audio/visual systems, a double height room or two, lots of heavy swagged drapery, lots of custom cabinetry with elaborate carved corbels and a master suite larger than the average American home. Listing information does show that the interior spaces include a mix of marble and carpeted floors, a central vacuum system, an automatic garage door opener and an elevator for all those to damn lazy to walk up or down a flight of stairs. Presumably all us real estate looky-loos and reality tee-vee junkies will all get a good look at the inside of the house when The Real Housewives of Miami begins its first season and then we'll all know just what sort of day-core Mister and Missus Pippen prefer.
Exterior luxuries according to listing information and property photographs include a double-gated driveway and motor court, 215-feet of canal frontage with private dock and boat lift, built-in barbecue center, numerous balconies and shaded terraces, a kind of puny putting green, raised spa and a lagoon-style swimming pool where a frightening and dangerous looking curly-cue slide contraption has been installed.
This huge house in Fort Lauderdale is hardly Mister and Missus Pippen's only visit to the real estate rodeo. The Pippens' previous residences include a Fort Lauderdale mansion they sold in early 2004 for around $2,700,000 and a 21st-floor condo crib in Chicago Mister Pippen snatched up in the mid-1990s for $850,000 and sold in the summer of 2006 for $1,430,000.
After his star turn with the Bulls in Chicago and a hot minute with the Houston Rockets, Mister Pippen went west to play for the Oregon Trailblazers. According to previous reports, Mister and Missus Pippen settled into a 16,000-plus square foot brick mansion on 2.28 acres that they reportedly purchased in 2000 for around $4,000,000. They sold the 6 bedroom and 7.5 pooper brick-built residence in 2007 for a reported $2,950,000. A little fussin' and fightin' with the over-worked beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that those rough numbers represent a million dollar plus loss on the property.
Although the property records we accessed seem a tiny bit confusing–or maybe it's just the massive amounts of cold medicine and gin coursing through our cold-compromised body that's got us all befuddled and betwixt–but it appears that Mister and Missus Pippen still own a 10,500-ish square foot mansion in the upscale community of Highland Park outside Chicago, IL that records and reports indicate they purchased in January of 2004 for $2,225,000.
We have no idea what the future real estate plans are for Mister and Missus Pippen but perhaps when they unload their white elephant in Fort Lauderdale they'll hightail it back to Highland Park where Missus Pippen can then star in the currently non-existent The Real Housewives of Chicago. Don't laugh or mock, children, stranger things have happened, particularly with Bravo's growing army of Louboutin-shod "real housewives," few of whom are actually housewives.
listing photos: Panton & Company Realty via EWM International
