SELLER: Alex "A-Rod" Rodriguez
LOCATION: Miami Beach, FL
PRICE: $38,000,000
SIZE: 19,861 square feet, 9 bedrooms, 11 full and 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In case any of y'all celebrity real estate-o-philes have managed not to hear yet, currently injured New York Yankee Alex "A-Rod" Rodriguez—He of the 10-year, $275,000,000 contract—(not so quietly) slid his brand-spanking new mansion in Miami Beach, FL on the market with a four-bagger asking price of $38,000,000.

In addition to his considerable (and considerably lucrative) baseball abilities Mister Rodriguez is a well-known serial celebrity dater who's famously frolicked with man-magnets like Madonna, Kate Hudson, and Cameron Diaz. So the celebrity gossips allege, the hunky short stop currently gets busy with a professional lady-wrestler named Torrie Wilson. Your Mama had never heard of this Miss Wilson person before but a few minutes on the internets and we learned the bodaciously buxom faux-blond has appeared in her birthday suited glory in Playboy twice and, bless her heart, cultivates and incorporates mutual and forced tongue kissing with both men and woman as part of her professional persona. As, uhm, inneresting as Miss Wilson's tawdry-for-pay-ways may be, it's not her real estate story we're telling today.

Property records Your Mama peeped are frustratingly opaque but The Daily News reported Mister A-Rod paid $24,000,000 in [June] 2010 for the pair of side-by-side Miami Beach parcels that combined total just over 1.1 acres and together stretch 275 prime feet along Biscayne Bay frontage.

Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the deed's dotted line, Mister A-Rod rolled up his renovation sleeves and removed whatever structure(s) did (or did not) stand on the two parcels to make way for an all new, colossal and very contemporary mansion with, according to current listing information, 9 bedrooms and 11 full and 2 half bathrooms in 19,861 square feet of interior space.

The straight lines and flat planes that make up the exteriors volumes is mimicked on the inside with boxy, voluminous and semi-transparent living spaces stripped bare of any extraneous or purely decorative architectural detailing such as baseboards and moldings. There are matte-finished wide-plank white oak wood flooring; long expanses of crisp white walls ideal for displaying Mister A-Rod's growing art contemporary art collection; lofty and sometimes soaring, double-height ceilings; complete walls of metal-framed, floor-to-ceiling windows and doors that reach as high as 12 feet and peel back to connect to the waterside recreation and entertainment areas.

The main floor living/entertaining spaces, all sparely furnished with mostly low-profile and largely white- or putty-colored upholstered pieces, include a boo-teek hotel lobby-like foyer and a spacious but still comfortably scaled living/dining room with two full walls of glass that slide open to the backyard area(s) and third glass wall that glides open to a glass- and foliage-walled atrium. Although no part of the house appears to be particularly formal in listing photographs, the less-formal, family areas include an open-plan kitchen/breakfast/family room; a compact, window-lined television viewing room for two plus a moody, a sexed-up home theater and a cavernous, double-height game room with long, built-in wet bar and entertainment center fitted with (at least) three tee-vees.

Other customized amenities available only to the very rich include a 3,000 square foot sports room/fitness center and a separate gym with steam shower; a commercial-grade elevator for moving large pieces of furniture and artwork from floor to floor; a roof top terrace with glittering views of the bay and Miami's downtown skyline; two gated motor courts and garage space for four cars; and a two-story guest house/poolside lounging pavilion with at least two flat-screen tee-vees mounted on either side of the built-in barbecue.

The 2,200 square foot second floor master suite—all by itself almost the size of the average American home—wraps around the aforementioned glass and foliage-walled atrium and encompasses a bedroom, sitting room, dual bathrooms and the sort of closet space and dressing areas that Your Mama better find  in a twenty thousand square foot pile in Miami Beach with a hefty-hefty-hefty price tag of nearly for forty million smackers. Glass walls around the atrium provide multiple layers of transparency the make it possible to stand in the entirely glass-walled shower in one of the two master bathrooms and see across the atrium and clear through the master sitting room to the sparking Biscayne Bay. It's not a set up for the bashful or corporeally ashamed—there are wonderfully heavy-looking curtains for those folks—but it's an undeniably spectacular (if showy) design conceit.

Naturally, the nearly new mansion comes complete with all the high-tech bells and whistles a rich person can pay for such as automated lighting and climate systems, surround sound throughout the property, and a very serious security system with 16 cameras. Listing information helpfully notes the residence is equipped with high-impact glass and a self-powered generator to withstand the devastating hurricanes that periodically ravage South Florida (and the surrounding states).

Besides the two-story guest house and attached poolside pavilion, the waterside back yard features a deep, shaded outdoor living lounge with fireplace; poolside sunbathing terrace and wide strips of well-watered and -groomed lawns; an au courant vanishing edge swimming pool (and spa); and an second almost all glass pavilion of undetermined purpose (that may or may not be the above-mentioned work out room with steam shower).

Mister Rodriguez seems to be in the mood to shrink his real estate portfolio lately. In early 2011 he paid $5,500,000 on a 3,585 square foot, 35th-floor condo crib at the Rushmore building in New York City that he flipped back on the market 10 (or so) months later with a substantially higher eight million dollar price tag. In April of this year (2012) he sold the 5 bedroom and 5.5 bathroom apartment for $6,600,000 to a former airline executive turned financier.

Two years ago he (and his now ex-wife Cynthia) sold a 9,010 square foot water front residence in Coral Gables, FL for $8,500,000. It was originally listed in fall 2008 with a much higher asking price of $14,876,000. At about the same time in 2008 Mister and ex-Missus A-Rod listed their Coral Gables crib they also hoisted their New York City spread on the the market with a $14,00,000 asking price. The erstwhile couple finally unloaded the 4,600 square foot Park Avenue apartment in March 2009 for $9,900,000.

listing photos: ONE Sotheby's International Realty

Celebrity real estate rumor has it that 22-year old country music superstar Taylor Swift has gone and spent more than four million bucks on an oceanfront mini-estate in Hyannis Port, MA just a few doors away from the childhood home of Conor Kennedy, the grandson of Ethel Kennedy who she's (allegedly) been dating less than three months.

The property in question—first listed at $13,500,000 a couple years ago and last on the open market for $4,900,000—was recently taken off the market and a someone who claims to work for a company "directly involved in the sale" snitched it was true. However, as of today, it should be noted, property records do not reflect a transfer of ownership of the 7 bedroom and 5.5 bathroom Cape Cod Colonial.

Listing information Your Mama teased up out of the interweb state the low-key and East Coast dignified but pretty-dang outdated residence is "located in the historic Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port" while early reports on the scuttlebutt report it neighbors the famous Kennedy family compound. Either way is right up next to the long-time residence of young Mister Conor Kennedy's grandmother's house.

Listen chickens, we really have no inside intel as to whether this is true but we certainly hope not because a purchase like this would be just so stupid. We know that young Miss Swift has a tendency to throw herself willy-nilly into relationships with high-profile men like Taylor Lautner, Joe Jonas, John Mayer an Jake Gyllenhaal, but buy a multi-million dollar vacation house a few doors down from the grandparents of the guy she's been hooking up with for a couple short months? Well, that would be downright foolish and straight up creepy, wouldn't it?

Maybe she only leased the house? Or maybe this is all just a lot of rumor and gossip?

Whatever the case, Miss Swift is known by property gossips to maintain residences in both Nashville, TN where she shacks up in a duplex penthouse and Beverly Hills, CA where she hides out in a semi-secluded canyon compound.

listing photos: Curbed via Robert Paul Properties via Zillow

Several weeks ago Your Mama discussed a sleek, completely contemporized 8,000-plus square foot townhouse on the Upper (and Far) East Side of New York City formerly owned by famed photographer Richard Avedon and later by French-American banker named Olivier "Oliver" Sarkozy who sold it in January 2012 to Showbiz/media mogul Kevin Wendle for $8,400,000. (Mister Wendle, co-founder of the Fox network, E! Online, CNET and iFilm, quickly flipped the townhouse on the market just over a month ago with a $12,500,000 price tag.)

Now comes word slips down the celebrity real estate gossip grapevine via Page Six of the New York Post that Mister Sarkozy—otherwise known as the recently (and contentiously) divorced, 42-year old half-brother of former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy and the current man-beau of pint-sized child star turned mogulette Mary-Kate Olsen—has dropped $6,250,000 to purchase an historic, nearly 150-year old fixer-upper townhouse in the still funky but fully-strollerized East Village neighborhood where Mister Sarkozy, so the scuttlebutt goes, plans to live in May-December sin with 26-year old Miss Olsen.

Listing information shows the 5-story red-brick residence retains many original architectural details, and includes five bedrooms, four bathrooms, more than a dozen closets, eight fireplaces with ornate mantelpieces, a cast-iron Juliet balcony that stretches across the front of the piano nobile, and an English basement that lets out to a terraced garden.

Lucky for Miss Olsen's equally tiny and prodigiously wealthy twin sister Ashley, the townhouse immediately next door is—or, until recently, was—also on the market so, should they choose, the not-quite-identical twins could live in nearly identical side-by-side townhouses. Don't laugh, children, stranger things have happened in the sometimes mystifying world of celebrity real estate.

listing photos and floor plan: Rubicon Property (via StreetEasy)

Professional skateboarder turned reality tee-vee star Rob Dyrdek seems to have developed a dinero-draining real estate habit of buying multi-million dollar houses in Los Angeles, CA and listing them several years later for considerably less than he paid.

listing photos: Prudential California / Beverly Hills 

In June 2005 Mister Dyrdek dropped $1,400,000 on a 2,792 square foot multi-story contemporary crib set into a steep hillside in a low-key neck the Hollywood Hills known as The Hollywood Knolls. The long-legged gal at Trulia Luxe Living reported the boxy, glassy and airy three bedroom and 3.5 bathroom residence (above) served as a backdrop for the first of Mister Dyrdek's several reality tee-vee programs (Rob & Big, Roby Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory and Ridiculousness), but we can't vouch for that since neither Your Mama nor The Dr. Cooter have neither heard of nor seen any of Mister Dyrdek's programs.

The prolific setter of Guinness world records—he has more than 20 to date—first and unsuccessfully attempted to unload his nest in The Knolls back in 2008 and early 2009 (at an unknown asking price). He recently re-listed the canyon view house with a $1,249,000 price tag.

A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that even with a (not entirely unlikely) full-price sale Mister D. will lose $151,000, not counting renovations and/or improvements, maintenance, upkeep and carrying costs, and, let's not forget, the real estate fees.

listing photos: Prudential California / Beverly Hills

In May 2008, just before his first failed attempt to sell his house in The Knolls, Mister Dyrdek splashed out $2,459,000 for a 4,706 square foot residence in the affluent Mount Olympus neighborhood, a upscale mountaintop enclave above Hollywood known in L.A. real estate circles to be popular with wealthy foreigners, specifically, for some reason, Russians.

Mister Dyrdek first put the five bedroom and five bathroom Mount Olympus concrete-faced contemporary abode that looks more than little like modern-minded prison on the market in May 2012 with an asking price of $2,599,000. By mid-July the price had dipped to $2,399,000. The property was briefly in escrow in early August (2012) but the house is officially back on the market, again with the $2,399,000 asking price. A mathematics degree isn't required to see that's $200,000 less than he paid four years ago, not counting renovations and/or improvements, maintenance, upkeep and carrying costs, and real estate fees.

It's clear Mister Dyrdek wants to sell. He's willing, after all, to endure a combined, pocketbook punishing $351,000 loss on the two houses. However, lest any of the children feel the need to jump to any ugly conclusions about Mister Dyrdek's bank accounts, keep in mind his financial situation would appear to be healthy enough that he did not need to shed either of the above houses from his property portfolio in order to acquire his next.

listing photos: Dream Home Photos for Coldwell Banker / Sunset Boulevard

In June of this year, as first reported more than a month ago by the long-legged gal at Trulia Luxe Living, Mister Dyrdek dumped another $2,500,000 to acquire a third residence in Los Angeles, this one located just below Mulholland Drive not so far from the tippy-top of Lauren Canyon.

Listing information shows the fully renovated and modernized two story residence has four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in 3,733 square feet of interior space that also includes high pitched ceilings, a stacked stone fireplace, and clerestory windows. High quality finishes includes Brazilian walnut and Flannel Limestone floors, energy efficient windows, walnut cabinetry and marble counter tops in the kitchen, and swankety-swank Ann Sacks and Walker Zanger tile work.

In addition to a trellis-shaded outdoor kitchen and lounge, outdoor entertainment spaces include multi-level concrete and tile terraces, a dramatically under-lit built-in bar and a seating area grouped around a portable fire pit with glimmery, over-the-hedge views of the lights of the sprawling San Fernando Valley.

Only time will tell how long before Mister Dyrdek will start to feel itchy footed. Your Mama isn't making a prediction but if his real estate history repeats itself Mister Dyrdek may (or may not) very well have his new house back on the market in a few years with an asking price well below the two-point-five he paid. We shall see, butter beans, we shall see.

Oscar winning English actress Kate Winslet and Oscar-winning American filmmaker Sam Mendes parted marital ways in 2010. So the story goes, ex-Missus Mendes retained ownership of the family's New York City duplex penthouse pad atop the Eagle Condominium, a 12-unit, no-door-man building in the heart of the art gallery-choked Chelsea neighborhood.

We're not sure if Miz Winslet and the kids (and/or Mister Mendes) made much use of the house-sized penthouse pied-a-terre since the split and divorce but we are sure, as first revealed by the celebrity gossip hummingbirds at the New York Daily News, the light-flooded duplex digs have come up for lease with a monthly asking price of $30,000. The price includes all the oppressively neutral, ho-hum Shabby Sheek day-core.

Property records show Mister Mendes and Miz Winslet paid $4,995,000 for the approximately 3,300 square foot penthouse during happier wedded days in July 2004. Floor plans included with current lease listing information (above) show the two-floored configuration allows for three or four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms.

A long entrance hall extends deep into the apartment and explodes open to a capacious, 23-foot wide main living space that stretches nearly 47 feet long with 13-foot ceilings; a dozen over-sized windows on three sides; a central wood-burning fireplace; and a long wall of built-in book cases. The open, center-island kitchen has birch-colored, flat-fronted cabinetry; long snack bar and super-sized, top-grade, commercial-style stainless steel appliances.

Two guest family bedrooms share a vestibule off of which spoke a laundry closet suitable only for stacked machines, and a guest powder pooper plus a shared (if smallish) full bathroom for the bedroom occupants convenience(s). Across the entry all from the guest/family quarters, the south-facing master suite's complete with decent-sized walk-in closet and private, all-white attached bathroom with two sinks, two windows and separate shower and free-standing, claw-footed soaking tub.

The u-shaped stair case bends up to the second floor where a large, double exposure room is suitable for use as a family/media room/den or, because of its walk-in closet and attached bathroom, as a fourth bedroom suite. The upper landing and bedroom/den both open through French doors to an approximately 1,700 square foot wrap around terrace with fab (if not exactly birds-eye) city and river views.

Although one presumes Miz Winslet has long (and perhaps always) maintained a residence in London, we have no specifics about such a thing and our research does not readily turn up any other properties owned by either or the both of them.

listing photos and floor plan: Town Residential