Now that the end of her long-running talk show is officially in sight, Ellen DeGeneres is apparently feeling a bit nostalgic. More specifically, she’d like to rewind back to the simpler days of 2017, when she owned Rancho San Leandro, a magnificent Montecito hacienda right next door to Oprah Winfrey’s ever-expanding, 70+ acre “Promised Land” estate. And now that the Louisiana native and Portia de Rossi have snipped their last residential tie to Los Angeles — their Tudor-style Beverly Hills home sold last month for exactly $45 million to a still-unidentified buyer, a few ticks above the $42.5 million they paid for the place in 2019 — the couple are refocusing their energy on gobbling up more Montecito real estate, including at least one property they’ve already previously owned and sold.
Astute property watchers will recall that back in September 2017, DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi paid $7.2 million for Rancho San Leandro. They gave the place a quick renovation and flipped it at a huge profit less than a year later, in May 2018, in an $11 million deal. The buyer was Tinder cofounder Sean Rad, who subsequently married his longtime partner Lizzie Grover in a low-key wedding ceremony on the property.
Rad first put the estate up for sale in spring 2019, asking about $12.7 million, but with no takers it was delisted in early 2020, shortly before the global COVID-19 pandemic caused the first wave of U.S. shutdowns. Since then, Montecito real estate has skyrocketed to eye-popping heights; records reveal Rad has now resold the place back to DeGeneres and de Rossi — and the couple paid an astronomical $14.3 million, way more than Rad’s last asking price and almost exactly double what they spent for the very same property less than four years ago.