About two years ago Your Mama heard from a trusted and reliable informant that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver were poking around every twenty million dollar estate in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles.
Flash-forward to this week in May 2011 when the action flick actor/former governor and the journalist/authoress announced they'd gone splitsville. This parting of marital ways might be a surprise to many but for those in certain west coast real estate circles it's old news.
Several months ago a rumor slipped down the real estate gossip grapevine and into Your Mama's inbox that soon to be ex-Missus Schwarzenegger purchased a condo in a posh apartment tower along the Wilshire Corridor near Century City. We subsequently peeped and poked around in the property records but did not then nor do we now find any records that reflect such a purchase.
Early yesterday morning, in the wake of the former couple's announcement, we sent a covert communique over to one of our better connected real estate insiders, let's call her Polly Platinumtriangle, to see what she knew about the matter. Miz Shriver reportedly moved from the family's Brentwood mansion several months ago and according to Polly P. the former first lady of California is currently camped out in a leased house in Malibu. Polly P. also whispered in Your Mama's big ear that soon to be ex-Missus Schwarzenegger is thisclose to acquiring a sizable bacherlorette pad on the same street in Brentwood as blogging entrepreneur Ariana Huffington and actress/chat show hostess Ricki Lake.
Since 2002 the Schwarzenegger-Shriver family homestead has been an approximately 14,500 square foot multi-winged Mediterranean-style mansion on 5.83 acres in a swank gated enclave above Mandeville Canyon (shown above) that property records reveal was purchased in April of 2002 for $4,863,000. As many of the children already know, the Schwarzenegger-Shriver estate is in the same small development where pigskinner Tom Brady and his supermodel wife Gisele Bündchen are in the end stages of building a 20,000 square foot "green" mansion, as if a 20,000 square foot house for a family of 3 or 4 can ever really be considered "green."
Whether the former governor will stay put in the family mansion or whether he'll seek an sexy bachelor pad is not (yet) known to Your Mama.