Celebrity Real Estate: Vanilla Ice on flipping houses and home life

Posted by Annalisa Burgos | June 24, 2011

Vanilla Ice offers real estate investing tips on DIY Network's The Vanilla Ice Project.

Bet you didn’t know that rapper Vanilla Ice is also a real estate investor and home improvement enthusiast.

The artist best known for his ’90s hit “Ice Ice Baby” and his crew renovate foreclosures and discounted properties in Florida and sell them for profit. Catch all the action on DIY Network’s The Vanilla Ice Project!

Vanilla Ice, aka Rob Van Winkle, sat down with HGTV’s FrontDoor.com to talk about the first home he bought, how he got into real estate investing and what home life means to him. Watch Vanilla Ice’s video interview.

Want Vanilla Ice to “ice” your house? Enter DIYNetwork.com’s “Ice My House” sweepstakes and you can win a room makeover from the rapper-turned-flipper. But hurry! Contest ends Monday, June 27.

Tour Vanilla Ice’s former pad on Star Island in Miami Beach, which is for sale for just under $15 million >>

Tour more celebrity homes for sale at FrontDoor.com/celebrity >>

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UnReal Estate: Rapper 50 Cent’s money pit cut to $10.9 million

Posted by Annalisa Burgos | August 13, 2009

50-cent-rapper-home-for-sale-2This from our Cool Houses Daily files:

Rapper 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, slashed the asking price on his massive Farmington, Connecticut mansion again, hoping to unload the former money pit he rarely used.

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It was originally listed at $18.5 million in 2007 and reduced late last year to $14.5 mil. Now, he’s asking $10.9 million — surely to cover the $4.1 million he shelled out for it in 2003 and the additional $6 mil he spent on repairs and upgrades.

The 17-acre estate has been the subject of an ongoing court battle between “Fitty” and an engineering firm he hired to repair and improve the home. Fitty sued BVH Integrated Services, claiming the firm owed him $3 million for maintenance repairs that were not included in its original repair estimate of about $500,000. Terms of the settlement in June were not disclosed.

The mansion has a whopping 21 bedrooms and 25 baths, a private lake with gazebo, an indoor/outdoor pool, gym and grand media room, all spread nicely over 48,000 square feet of living space.

If you love Fitty’s house like, er, a fat kid loves cake, view the listing to find out more about his crib.

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