After unloading his primary family home in 2019, Rob Lowe has been scooping up Montecito real estate at record speed — since the end of 2020, the 1980s heartthrob and his wife Sheryl Berkoff have snapped up three mansions in the uber-rich enclave for a combined $47 million.
In the summer of 2019, Lowe, 57, and Berkoff, 59, sold Oakview Estate, a 10,000-square-foot villa a stone’s throw away from the mansion now occupied by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, because their two sons had by then moved out and the property was too large for the two of them.
Lowe and Berkoff chose to downsize and invest not in one but three smaller properties all in Montecito — a $13 million property in the same neighborhood as their old home, a 4,274-square-feet home from the 1990s on the Montecito’s main shopping street for $5.2 million and a four-bedroom beach mansion for which they paid around $29 million, according to the New York Post.
Few details about the deals were made public, but Lowe and Berkoff have chosen to raze the 5,800-square-feet house on the first property and build something new on the 6.7-acre lot. Celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres and Katy Perry reportedly also made bids on the second property but ultimately lost out to the couple’s $5.2 million offer.
With a decades-long reputation as a refuge for Hollywood celebrities and California’s uber-rich, Montecito was once again thrust in the news when Harry and Meghan chose to make it their home after giving up their royal titles. The area is heavily guarded while any real estate transactions are kept under tight wraps by agents who are used to working with numerous non-disclosure agreements.
Lowe, who first rose to fame in the 1980s after playing Sodapop Curtis in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic coming-of-age film “The Outsiders,” had major roles in shows including “Parks and Recreation” and “The West Wing” as an adult. In more recent news, the second season of the Fox problem-solving reality show “Mental Samurai” is set to premiere on May 29. Lowe is both the host and the producer.