Flipping Mansions!

COURTESY TopTenRealEstateDeals.com

PHOTOS Ryan Corey

Kenny Rogers, who died on 20 March, did almost everything well. He sang (selling over 100 million records), wrote songs and acted; he was a restaurateur (Kenny Rogers Roasters), businessman and author; and he was charitable (Kenny Rogers Children’s Center), a photographer and an athlete (famous for faking out and then scoring on Michael Jordan in a 1988 charity basketball game).
He found early success in the music business as a Houston teen star singing his song titled That Crazy Feeling on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Later, Rogers joined The New Christy Minstrels and then The First Edition before going solo with giant hits such as The Gambler, Lady and Islands in the Stream with Dolly Parton.
And then Kenny’s career took off as one of the world’s favourite country pop singers.
In addition to his music, acting and entrepreneurship, he was especially good at real estate. Before celebrity ‘home flippers’ Ellen DeGeneres, Meg Ryan and Diane Keaton, Kenny Rogers enter-tained us and flipped homes on the side.
Always teeming with energy while performing, Kenny segued into buying, renovating and selling big homes with good bones in upscale neighbourhoods at a healthy profit in the early 1980s.
His first flip was in 1984 in Beverly Hills for US$ 20 million – a record price in Los Angeles at the time. Since then, most of his homes have been in Atlanta where he also launched an interior design business that catered to the city’s richest homeowners.


After his Beverly Hills flip, Rogers bought a bank owned 27,000 square foot Atlanta home in 2002, which had been on the market at US$ 12 million, for only 2.75 million dollars – and he sold it in 2006 for US$ 8.5 million.
Outside Athens in Georgia, Rogers built the almost 1,000 acre Beaver Dam Farm, which he later sold in 2011 for 10.5 million dollars.


In 2009, Rogers paid US$ 2.8 million for a home in Atlanta’s ritzy Tuxedo Park, which was listed at almost US$ 8 million, and sold it in 2011 for 3.725 million dollars.


Most recently, Rogers bought and then spent over US$ 3 million to redesign and decorate a 7,000 square foot suburban Atlanta family home when his twin sons were only four years old and needed plenty of space to play.
Rogers died in his family home surrounded by his wife Wanda and their children.