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Watch Episode 32
In This Episode
Hosts:
Bob Frady & John Siegman
Properties:
23500 Park Sorrento UNIT C34, Calabasas, CA 91302
Episode Summary
Welcome back to Property of the Week! This time, Bob Frady and John Siegman head to Calabasas, California, to review a luxury condo that allegedly belonged to none other than Kanye West. With its sleek modern design, six-figure architecture, and a price tag that’s been sitting on the market for over 100 days. This episode asks: is the “Kanye premium” really worth it?
Key Takeaways
In this episode:
• Why a property’s “celebrity connection” doesn’t always add real value
• The red flags behind property size discrepancies and unclosed permits
• What buyers should ask about HOA reserves, wildfire escape routes, and earthquake coverage
Whether you’re a California buyer, an investor eyeing luxury condos, or just curious about how fame affects price, this episode is packed with real estate lessons from the world of Calabasas.
key findings & Insights:
• PropertyLens report shows moderate risk but size discrepancy raises questions
• Recent HVAC permit pulled just 11 days ago
• Strong HOA and low crime rate, but wildfire and earthquake risks remain
• Tax spikes suggest a recent ownership change and price correction
• Market value is roughly $800K below listing price
• Mold, radon, and PFAS exposure concerns typical of Southern California
Resources
Realtor.com
Try it: Propertylens.com
Questions Contact us: support@propertylens.com
Transcript
Bob Frady (00:00:00) Ladies and gentlemen, boys and Girls, ships at Sea. It is time for another episode of Property of the Week from PropertyLens. For those of you who don't know. I'm Bob Frady, co-founder and CEO of PropertyLens, and with me as always.
John Siegman (00:00:21) John Siegman, co-founder and president of a PropertyLens. Almost forgot.
Bob Frady (00:00:25) So, Kanye West is selling off properties, some of his properties. We don't know how many he has, and we think that we've located his condo in Carlsbad, excuse me, Calabasas.
John Siegman (00:00:34) No, Calabasas.
Bob Frady (00:00:36) Calabasas is, eh, same thing.
John Siegman (00:00:37) Another place starts with a C. That's by the ocean.
Bob Frady (00:00:41) Calabasas, California and we thought we'd take a look at it and see what we think about the property. Now, this is allegedly the Kanye condo. But we think it is, but we'll just say it's allegedly right now so we don't.
John Siegman (00:00:56) Note, if we refer to it as the Kanye condo, it's always alleged count day, Kanye condo.
Bob Frady (00:01:02) It's alleged and here it is, 23500 Park Sorrento, Unit C34, in Calabasas. I ran this report today just to make sure that everything was still updated and proper. Three bedrooms, four bathrooms. 2,260 square feet. So let's take a look at our property. Here's all the identifying information, John, what's our snapshot telling us?
John Siegman (00:01:24) We've only got two owners in the last 15 years. The property's only nine years old. What this sort of shows you is that it doesn't turn over often. So it's good. It's not a problem. Property tax increase over the last six years. A little higher than anticipated in California thanks to Proposition 13. So we know that it's changed hands within the last six years. Insurance costs. Pretty much close to the 7.4% per year average across the country. So not outrageous. As far as increases go. Repairs, fairly moderate given the price of the condo itself. It's not a flip. Lots of building permits. Yay. So they're keeping it up or other people are keeping it up. You wanna look for the ones that are units. Pacific, two possible damaging events. Those happen to be two wind events that happened earlier this year, and it's not in a flood zone. So there you go.
Bob Frady (00:02:20) From a quick snapshot standpoint, Not bad. What do we got in the pros and cons standpoint? It's relatively new, modern construction. It's energy efficient. There's a low crime rate in the area. You've got good fire protection in that area and you got lots of amenities in the community. If you wanna see more, you can always hit the drop down button and it'll give you more information. Now, on the bad side, John, what do we got?
John Siegman (00:02:44) Not necessarily bad. Let's just say less than good.
Bob Frady (00:02:47) Less than ideal.
John Siegman (00:02:49) Well. Welcome to California, particularly Southern California. We shake and we bake. You got earthquake risk. You got wildfire risk. You're not in the flood zone, but you are relatively close to one mold. You got an ocean. If you're near an ocean, it's gonna be damp and it never gets cold enough here to freeze the stuff out. So do you always have a risk of mold? Then there's a property size discrepancy, which is probably the biggest concern on this list because there's a difference between what the county assessor has to say and what the realtor has to say. And so you wanna find out why this is. Sometimes it's just poor record keeping by the county. Sometimes it's an unpermitted extension. You gotta find that out because lots of bad things can happen. Isn't that right Mr. Frady?
Bob Frady (00:03:40) I actually had a house that, I didn't know this at the time when I bought it, 'cause we didn't have all this fancy property land stuff. There was a size discrepancy between what the county or the city thought and what the realtor told me. Well, when I went to relist that house, it turns out there was an unpermitted bedroom that extended into the garage and the city's like, that's not up to code. You're gonna have to rip that out. So to pay to rip it out before I could sell my own house, which was a colo of pain in the neck, not just from the fact that I had to do it, but it shrunk the square footage of my house, which was the total pain. So we've got some nice location benefits. We've got some property features. It's a contemporary design, as we shall see. Now to some people, they like contemporary designs. John Siegman may not be a fan. Bob Frady may be a fan, who knows, but it's very particular when you get into contemporary design with bespoke.. Architectural elements, you know, for those of you who don't speak the king English, that means, you know, custom. So recent updates, yeah, it's fancy, it's fancy schmancy. So, premium's gonna be about 3,600 and the repair cost is gonna be about 17 five. So John, what kind of questions would you wanna be asking if you're looking at this property?
John Siegman (00:04:58) Oh, you'd be wanting to ask a ton of questions. These are the top six. If you ever have a question about what you should ask, you can always ask Lens AI right down there in the bottom, 'cause it will tell you the top 10, 20, 15, hundred, whatever question number you wanna put in there. It will give you, in order the questions that you should ask. So when you look at this property, it's relatively new. It's made up to the current earthquake standards. You would want to know is it insured? Because the structure itself for earthquake should be insured through the homeowners. Same for the other structure risks. So those are two things that you would wanna ask about. It was very windy there earlier this year, and the two wind events in early January. So you'd wanna make sure that there was no damage to anything like shingles or any covering. The roof itself is a mixture of a couple of different things, so you'd wanna make sure that was taken care of. The permits themselves, are they closed or there's stuff that's still open that hasn't been resolved. Because if you walk in. And all of a sudden you wanna do something and you go, Hey, let's go do this. And then you find out you can't until you close other permits. That might be a problem. As one of us has experienced. Not me.
Bob Frady (00:06:23) Once again, I got a bill that was 10 years old from the county, like, this permit was never closed. You can't open a new one. I'm like, whatcha talking about? Because the contractor just never closed it properly. It's like, ugh. So you gotta check and now the seller should check and make sure, but as the buyer, remember, everything is buyer beware. So you gotta make sure that you are being as aware as you can be. So from an inspected expense report, we got some termites. You wanna just check for that? Everything else is just pretty maintenance oriented. We know everything is pretty new in this house. The HVAC system was upgraded, the water heater was upgraded a couple years ago. So all the big things that you're gonna worry about are pretty much taken care of. You still wanna have a little reserve funds just in case, 'cause you never know what's gonna go on. But the number one thing that you would wanna check on is termites. 'cause termites love Southern California. And as we talked about, you know, we've got some toxic exposure at this location, arsenic in the groundwater, mold issues, and PFA contamination in the drinking water. That should largely be mitigated by being on city sewer, you know, but if you're really paranoid, then you'll do a water check on this house. Not enough to necessarily not wanna buy the condo, but enough to make sure you're taking care of your family's health. And then, as we said before, we got wildfire and earthquake termites. It's a 9-year-old house. The roof condition's unknown because it's part of the condom association, and no significant damaging events have occurred. Now, if you want, you can print a list of questions for the seller, or you can print a list of items to give to your inspector and say, make sure you check this out. So we get down to insurance. You know, there's a range between $1,900 to $6,400. You gotta talk to your insurance company because different insurance companies will have filed rates that are different. So let's say you're with company X, Y, Z. We'll call them and you move from one house in California to this house in California, and you say, oh, I like these people. Let's do the same thing. Are they giving me a fair deal on the condo? So that's one of the things that you want to check out, but otherwise it's pretty, pretty straightforward. Now we get into something interesting. John, why don't we talk about the listing details. What do you see here?
John Siegman (00:08:37) I see that the market value is about $800,000 less than the listing price. You know, when you live in Bob Frady's neighborhood, having a little cache saying that you live in Kanye's condo, allegedly carries weight when you're, you know, like me, that carries no weight. So do you really wanna pay for that weight? That's up to you. This is a condo as we'll see in the descriptor. They hired a really expensive architect to come in and do the interior treatment and the interior features. He's got a good name in LA. If you're into modern, this is the person you should call. if you're not, then you're probably paying for a lot of stuff that, quite frankly, your. It's probably never gonna get your money back on.
Bob Frady (00:09:28) That's one big key thing. The second is that this was listing is from July. It's now 108 days on the market. What does it mean when it's been on the market for a long time? John Siegman.
John Siegman (00:09:38) First thing is it's overpriced. The second thing is deals are falling apart. What we don't know is how many times people got to the table and couldn't get this over the line. But we can tell you that 15 to 20%. Of all contracted real estate deals right now, in November of 2025 are falling out. Falling out. Not this is, you've gone through, you've made offers, you've agreed, you've done all sorts of stuff, and they're not getting done. And a lot of that is just because people aren't comfortable, because there's a lot of unknowns, a lot of unknowns that you can eliminate with this report.
Bob Frady (00:10:24) To me, that's an opportunity to negotiate. And usually people don't move on price for one of two reasons. Number one is because they're just insistent that eventually the market's gonna come back and the pendulum will swing the other way and they'll get the price that they want. They have a number in their head and they're married to it. And the second is that. They can't sell it for less for one reason or another. You know, there may be obligations behind that would turn them upside down so they hang on as long as they can. If you are on the market for 108 days, chances are you're overpriced. And to me, knowing this going in, like that's an opportunity to negotiate. Now, maybe you get a box of Yeezys for some, for, you know, autograph Yeezy's. Come with the place. Assuming that this is Kanye's content,
John Siegman (00:11:03) I'd hope you'd at least get one of the Grammy awards hanging on the wall.
Bob Frady (00:11:07) There's all sorts of things that you can negotiate that are not necessarily reflected in the list price. It's negotiation time. It's 108 days too long. Here's the description. Vincent Van Duysen. Very fancy architecture, so, and all sorts of nice things, you know, good appliances, all that stuff. It's in Los Angeles County. It's about eight miles from the coast, which is nice. And the USDA plant, Hardy, the zone is 10 a, so stuff's gonna grow there. You can plant whatever you want. So when we look through the prior ownership, we see some interesting things. this was initially sold in 2017, in a trust, for $1.6 million, then listed in 2022 for $3.5 million, moved over into a different trust, which probably caused the reset on the taxation and. Now listed for $2.95 million. So that's a pretty steep discount. So one of the things you have to deal with from a psychology of the seller is either A, they're desperate to move it, or B, they're mad because the price just went down half a million dollars and I ain't giving you another dime. You know, that's who knows what you're gonna run into. But those are both possible outcomes from having such a large price reduction in a property, even though it was three years ago. So if we look at the property taxes, you know, there was a, there's an aberration in here in 2022 for some reason, but it's,
John Siegman (00:12:41) it could've been the sale of the property.
Bob Frady (00:12:43) Yep. And then we've got. Internal part of the property. Modern, modern, modern. I'd be afraid to put like some toast in this house. 'cause I'd be thinking it's gonna mess everything up. It's very modern and that limits your appeal and that's great. You know, for if you love it, as my dad would say, if you like that kind of thing, then you'll like that kind of thing. Not everybody does. And that's okay if you're going in here, chances are you like that kind of thing. So if we look at damaging events, what do we see?
John Siegman (00:13:15) Two wind events. for those of you paying attention to the news,
Bob Frady (00:13:19) yes, that's exactly when the LA fires were, and luckily the winds were blowing in the other direction away from the property had they been blowing on shore. But a 65 mile an hour wind on shore is pretty unusual for this area. Then it would've gone the other way. Hence the wildfire risk for this location.