There were a couple of other housing transactions recently:
Matthew Perry and Kirk Kerkorian (http://guests.themls.com/profile_page.cfm?mls=05-052481)

And via the WSJ:

The Home Front:

"Key Changes

SINGERS Shakira and Wyclef Jean have both won Grammy awards, are both up for more Grammys next month -- and are both waiting for someone to buy their houses.

Shakira, who last year released best-selling albums in Spanish and English, this month put her waterfront Miami Beach property on the market for $5.9 million. The move comes four years after the Colombian-born entertainer paid $3.38 million for the house. It's on North Bay Road, where neighbors include actor Matt Damon. The Mediterranean house sits on less than an acre, with 101 feet of water frontage, 6,360 square feet of living space, five bedrooms, six baths and a fireplace. A pool, Jet Ski lift and Jacuzzi are also on the property.

Shakira's listing comes less than a year after she sold a 3,000-square-foot house she owned on La Gorce Island off Miami Beach for $1.8 million. She's searching for another property in the area, according to the North Bay Road house's listing agents, Carlos Justo and Jorge Uribe of Sol Sotheby's International.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jean this month listed his South Orange, N.J., house for about $1.5 million. In 2002, he paid $710,000, for the five-bedroom property, about 20 miles west of Manhattan. The house is near East Orange, where the entertainer grew up after immigrating to the U.S. from Haiti as a child, and has two master-bedroom suites, three full baths and views of Manhattan across the Hudson River. Lauryn Hill, a member of Mr. Jean's hip-hop band, the Fugees, also owns a house in South Orange. Mr. Jean's cousin, Renel Duplessis of Jordan Baris Realtors, has the listing.

Mr. Jean -- who's up for a Grammy for "Million Voices," a song he co-wrote for the 2004 film "Hotel Rwanda" -- owns an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Saddle River, N.J., as well, says Mr. Duplessis. Mr. Jean, 33, didn't return calls for comment.

Belafonte Cuts His Price

ENTERTAINER Harry Belafonte last month cut the price of his Manhattan apartment by $2 million, to $13 million. The Upper West Side co-operative, which he's owned for more than 40 years, went on the market last August. The 17-room home, facing Riverside Park on the western edge of Manhattan, has seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a library and four fireplaces.

Last September Mr. Belafonte, 78, sold his Mediterranean-style house in the Caribbean for $2.2 million. He bought that 3.3-acre property, in the French-administered part of St. Martin, in 1982. It has four bedrooms, gardener and caretaker cottages and a pool. Maria Pascal and Richard Mortimer of Prudential Douglas Elliman have the Manhattan listing.

The price cut comes as the Manhattan real-estate market is showing signs of cooling. The number of fourth-quarter sales of Manhattan co-ops and condominiums fell by 21% from the 2005 third quarter and by 27% from the 2004 fourth quarter, according to a report by Prudential Douglas Elliman. Though the holiday season is typically slow in New York, industry professionals also blamed rising mortgage rates and buyer uncertainty.

`Zorba's' Widow Sells

APRICE CUT helped Kathy Quinn, the widow of two-time Oscar-winning actor Anthony Quinn, sell her Bristol, R.I., house. The property, about 15 miles north of Newport, sold last week for $3.25 million. It first hit the market in 2004 with a $4.5 million price tag, but Ms. Quinn cut the asking price in December to $3.65 million. Attorney James Kearney, a partner at Latham & Watkins in Manhattan, bought the house.

Ms. Quinn subdivided the property after the actor's death in 2001 and lives on an eight-acre parcel next door to the 10-acre property that was sold. The couple paid $1.4 million for all 18 acres in 1995, public records show. The property -- on a peninsula bounded on the east by Narragansett Bay and on the west by Mount Hope Bay -- includes a 14-room main house that measures 7,300 square feet. The Quinns, who were married in 1997, relandscaped the grounds, which feature a three-acre apple orchard and water frontage on both bays. The property includes two guest houses, a greenhouse and a pool with a pool house. Melanie Delman, of Lila Delman Real Estate and Christie's Great Estates, had the listing.



WEEKEND JOURNAL
The Home Front: Private Properties
By Troy McMullen
759 words
20 January 2006
The Wall Street Journal
W8
English
(Copyright (c) 2006, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

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I was inside Bois Dore about two years ago...maybe three...it was on the market then...it is large and quite nice, but it needed a few things...like a new roof...(and it has acres of roof)it hadn't been updated and wasn't fully airconditioned etc. It had nice gardens at one time and the potential remained for making them nice again...Narraganset Ave is a good address...it isn't Bellevue Ave, but it's still in the top few streets...BD backs up to Salve Regina school...but it isn't as loud as you might expect it to be...
At the time there was a doctor renting it...he had some amazingly large number of children, like eight or ten of 'em, so it seemed to work for him in the space catagory. I never knew why he didn't buy it...maybe he knew too much about it. (lol)

There are/were a few nice outbuildings that were part of it that are available separately now...a good sized garage and a nice little house (not really that little) for staff...they are both in the million plus catagory now...so I guess in the last few years a lot of effort has been spent on legal subdividing...which seems to be very expensive above New Jersey...


Bottom line...Bois Dore is nice and not too, too pricey for Newport, but it'll need a heck of a lot of work to make it top notch...and why else live in Newport excpet to live in a top notch place??

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Wow... This is hilarious... You're talking about my house. I don't know if I am supposed to be offended or not. You probably didn't realize that that "doctor" you were talking about still has that house. I am one of his kids, and you kind of exaggerated the number of children. It is actually seven, and I am the second to youngest child. The ages in order from youngest to oldest are 22, 20, 18, 16, 14, 12 (me),
and 10. We just recently bought Bois Dore like a year ago, but are still having financial problems since we are trying to sell our other huge house, Wrentham, which is also in Newport. We still have the whole problems with the house, but you must have come at a bad time or something, because the "gardens" you talk about are probably part of the greenhouse area that used to be part of the property before we had moved their, but has been owned by Carolin Skelly's granddaughter the whole time, and is in great condition. There has been some work done on the place (except for the front wall which is falling apart)and there has been some improvement on it, but the house was really not that bad in the first place. The only roof that has ever leaked is the one over the ballroom, and my dad has never truly loved the place, but instead wanted more to finish renovating the other house we have, Wrentham, that had been abondoned for 50 years. The other house is almost done and is really beautiful. I wonder why this website didn't mention Wrentham instead, considering how it's on the market for 14 million.

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