Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton has already dropped the price on her meticulously-restored Beverly Hills Spanish Colonial Revival mansion. It was first listed at $12.95 million in March and is now on the market for $11.995 million.. Built in 1927 by architect Ralph Flewelling, the 7,145-sq.-ft. seven-bed, nine-bath spread features an inner courtyard with a fountain (above, surrounded by sleepy Mexican gnomes) separating the kitchen and family room on one side from the media room, den and staircase leading to the upstairs, the L.A. Times reports. It has thruway arches in the living and dining rooms, a movie star-worthy pool, and a garden with olive tree-lined walkways. Keaton's acting career has been interspersed with her home- and building-preservation efforts, the paper notes, and she is a member of America's National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The home was featured in Architectural Digest in November 2008 and the slideshow is here.

The world of real estate reporting lost one of the greats this week. Braden Keil who wrote the Gimme Shelter column for the NY Post succumbed to cancer. He was a sharp writer and a true gentleman and will be much missed.

From the Wall Street Journal's Private Properties:
--Golfer Jim Furyk has listed his Hawaii mansion, shown above, for $7.5 million. The listing for the five-bedroom home with ocean views is here.
--A duplex in a small 19th-century New York building where painter Mark Rothko once lived is for sale for $2.75 million.


From the Real Estalker:
--Patrick Dempsey has put his Bel Air home on the market for $3.595 million. The listing is here.
--Singer Jesse McCartney has listed his Hollywood Hills home for lease for $4,900 a month. The listing is here.
--Diane Keaton has listed her Beverly Hills, California home for $12.995 million. The listing is here. You can see interior pictures from when the home was covered in Architectural Digest here.
--Max Weinberg, drummer for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and the leader of Conan O'Brien's house band has bought the home on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles being sold by Naomi Foner and Stephen Gyllenhaal. The couple, who are the parents of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal first listed the home at $4.2 million but had dropped the price to $3.495 million. It is rumored to have sold for around $3.1 million.
--Producer Mike Medavoy and his wife Irina have listed their home in the Beverly Park community of Beverly Hills again. The home was listed at $23.5 million when we checked it out as an estate of the day in April 2008 but is now on the market for $19.95 million.

From the LA Times Hot Property:
--Sally Field has put her Malibu home on the market for $6.95 million. It is our estate of the day later today.
--Keith Gonzales, the editor of the Players Directory the film and television industry's oldest and best-known casting guide, has put his Los Angeles home up for sale for $4.399 million. The property website is here.
--Chef Mark Peel has sold his home in the Windsor Square area of Los Angeles for $3.25 million

From Berg Properties Big Time Listings:
--Actress Golden Brooks of TV's "Girlfriends" has placed her four-bedroom, home in the Hollywood Hills on the market for $1,799,900. The listing is here.
--Baby Phat fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons has dropped the asking price of her home in the Beverly Hills post office area to $6.9 million. It was listed at $7.75 million when we checked it out as an estate of the day last June.
--Actor Robert Loggia has listed his four-bedroom home in the Bel-Air area of Los Angeles for $3.65 million. The listing is here.

From Move Trends:
--Last summer, Sylvester Stallone purchased a property along with the lot next door in the Lake Sherwood area of Thousand Oaks, California for a total of $6.35 million. Now the home is up for sale for $5.2 million and the adjacent lot is also for sale for $1.65 million.
--Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis' former six-bedroom home in Los Angeles is listed for $3.195 million.

From AOL Real Estate:
--Check out the amazing homes of some of America's billionaires.
--The best suburbs to live well for less.

From the NY Post's Gimme Shelter:
--The double-wide, 22,000-square-foot Upper East Side mansion at 14-16 E. 67th St. which belonged to Bob Guccione has been on and off the market for the past six years for prices over $50 million finally has an accepted offer. The reported buyers are edge-fund manager Philip Falcone and his wife, Lisa. The final price is unknown but the home's $59 million listing figure is well above the current record of $53 million for a 25,000-square-foot townhouse on East 75th Street purchased by investment banker J. Christopher Flowers nearly two years ago. Guccione was forced out of the townhouse in early 2006 after he failed to pay off a high-interest loan in a last-ditch effort to avoid foreclosure a few years earlier. Even with the high price the home is said to need work.
--European soccer star Robbie Elliott's two-bedroom, two-bath condo at 205 E. 59th St. is now listed for $1.9 million. The listing is here.

From the NY Observer's Manhattan Transfers:
--The independent news program Democracy Now! has paid $6 million for a raw loft at 217 West 25th Street. Records show the group took out a $6 million mortgage paid for by the literary Lannan Foundation, run by J. Patrick Lannan Jr.
--More news on the homes billionaire Ira Rennert bought for his daughters. He bought two apartments, each over $30 million, for his two daughters, Tamara and Yonina. The first daughter's duplex at 740 Park Avenue closed for $32 million and the latter daughter and her husband closed on designer Vera Wang's old 14-room apartment at 778 Park. The closing price was $33.6 million. There are no mortgage records filed for either deal, which suggests that Mr. Rennert not only spent $65,600,000 on his daughters' apartments last month, but he paid $65,600,000 in cash.
--Actor Frank Langella closed on a $2.1 million, fourth-floor condo at 336 Central Park West this week.
--The old Stanhope hotel which was turned into multimillion dollar apartments was stalled for sales for a couple of years but now all but five of the 26 units have gone to contract since April. Cristina Carlino, the founder of Philosophy cosmetics, paid $11.97 million for the first unit and so far wo other buyers spent about $13 million each with the the second spending part of that amount on an $848,000 one-room, first-floor maid's studio. The biggest listing at 995 Fifth, the custom-built, five-bedroom penthouse, still sits on the market for $47.5 million.
--Steven Feder, the man once known as the Psychic Hotline King and his partner, Lou Thomas Trosclair, sold off for a massive profit the Time Warner Center apartment that they bought from Ricky Martin. They paid $9.75 million in September 2006 for the 3,050-square-foot space and sold it for $15.85 million to a neighbor. They bought a combined-unit apartment exactly 10 floors up, paying $24.48 million. Their seller at the $24.48 million apartment paid just $12.5 million in 2006.
--Trump SoHo, the 46-story glass tower at Spring and Varick streets, has already sold a slight majority of its units-53 percent, even though sales began just in September, and the building isn't scheduled to open until 2009.
--Robert Toll, the CEO of Toll Brothers Inc. the largest luxury home builder in the U.S. reportedly had his compensation cut from $19.2 million in 2006 to $8.4 million for the last fiscal year, as his company's net income fell 95 percent. Toll was planning to move into the three-unit penthouse at One Ten 3RD, Toll's rectangle-paneled new condo on Third Avenue, but his wife vetoed that idea. Instead, the Robert & Jane Toll 2002 Children's Trust, "for benefit of" their 27-year-old son, Jacob, paid $2,235,672 for just one of those three penthouse units.

From the Wall Street Journal's Private Properties:
--Kanye West sold his Beverly Hills teardown for around $8 million, less than a year after he bought it for $7.15 million. As I've mentioned in previous columns there is a house on the property but the home was sold for land value and includes plans for a two-story contemporary home.
--The former home of Joseph Hirshhorn, who gave his name to a renowned Washington art museum, has sold for $30 million in Greenwich, Connecticut.
--Jet-charter company owner Todd Rome has agreed to sell his Southampton, N.Y., home, fully furnished, for $11.5 million which is lose to double what he paid for the 1.8-acre property in 2005.


From the Real Estalker:
--Rumor has it that Nancy Daly, the estranged wife of Los Angeles' really rich ex-mayor Richard Riordan, has very quietly sold her Carbon Beach Malibu compound to a young hedge fund honcho and his wife for somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-$55 million.
--Actress Michelle Johnson has put her Buddha-themed modern home on Blue Jay Way in West Hollywood on the market for $6.35 million. Check out the gorgeous view at the property website here.
--In 2007, actress Diane Keaton spent $9,100,000 for the Lloyd Wright (the son of Frank Lloyd Wright) designed Alfred Newman Estate on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. The six-bedroom home sits on a 2.625 acre property. Keaton, who is a famous property flipper in Los Angeles, has put the property back on the market for an undisclosed amount.
--I think I saw a billboard in Los Angeles advertising this one, 138 acres of Hollywood hilltop including Cahuenga Peak, shown above, for $22 million.The listing says that the land can be developed into one massive estate with 360 degree views or that five large estates can be constructed.
--Screenwriter Naomi Foner and television director Stephen Gyllenhaal (yes, parents of Jake and Maggie) have put their modern Runyon Canyon adjacent house on the market for $4.2 million. The listing for the five-bedroom home is here.
--DJ Paul Oakenfold has put his Los Angeles home on the market, it's our estate of the day later today.
--Actress Beverly D'Angelo has purchased the allegedly haunted home in the Hollywood Hills that belonged to Donna Dixon and Dan Aykroyd for $3.8 million (it was listed at $4.2 million).
--Singer Dido may have already found a buyer for her charming home which is listed at $4.6 million.
The Beverly Park mansion belonging to property developer Robert Bisno and his wife Jeanette appears to be headed into foreclosure. The scuttlebutt is that they are in default on a $4,000,000 mortgage and February 29th auction date has been set.
--CSI: Miami star Khandi Alexander has but her home in the Hollywood Hills on the market for $4,495,000. The listing is here (no pictures yet).

From Lexis-Nexis:
----Russian star tennis player Maria Sharapova has purchased a luxury penthouse apartment worth $ 2.1 million in the beach city of Netanya in Israel. (Thanks, Lana)

From the LA Times Hot Property:
--Former baseball star Mike Piazza and his wife, the former Alicia Rickter, a 1995 Playboy Playmate, have bought their second property in the Miami Beach area for $10 million. It had been listed at$12.5 million.The seller is Sophia Marcovitz, ex-wife of Marshall Marcovitz, the founder of the Chefs Catalog.
--Jaime Pressly has re-listed her Tarzana home at $1.299 million. Check out the pictures at the virtual tour here.
--Rick Caruso, developer of open-air shopping malls including the Grove in Los Angeles, has purchased a Malibu home for just under $12 million.
--Lisa Hollingshead, a producer who worked on Madonna's "Truth or Dare" movie has listed a Malibu house she owns near the Getty Villa for close to $3 million.
--Before his death in 1982 at age 84, car designer Howard "Dutch" Darrin had planned to develop eight acres he owned in Beverly Hills, the undeveloped residential land was sold and is now available again. The asking price is $5.75 million.




From AOL Real Estate:
--Best American cities for bargain hunters.
--Top improvement projects by cities.