Rosie O’Donnell Loses a Bundle on Sale of Riverfront Property in Nyack

After 3.5 long and no-doubt dispiriting years on the market at declining prices that started at just under $2 million and plummeted to $1.435 million, Rosie O’Donnell has finally sold a waterfront home that was once part of her sprawling riverfront compound in Nyack, New York. Unfortunately for the occasionally polemical comedian, actor, chat show host, activist and LGBTQ+ entrepreneur, the $1,362,500 sale price is a stomach churning $837,500 less than the $2.2 million she paid for the property in April of 2003…and that’s not counting whatever she spent on improvements and real estate fees.

O’Donnell purchased the five contiguous properties that formed her multi-acre five-residence former compound in a series of transactions between May 2001 and January 2008 that totaled $8.605 million. She first put all five homes for sale in late 2017 for a combined $10.79 million, and has slowly shed them in a piecemeal manner. With this latest sale, four of the compound’s five residences have been sold for a total of $7.666 million, while the fifth is currently pending sale with an asking price of $1.575 million, an even more bone chilling $1.225 million below the $2.8 million she paid in early 2008.

Originally built in 1918, clad in denim-blue shingles and privately situated behind an intercom-operated safety gate, the comprehensively updated four-level transitional-contemporary residence spans about 2,200 square feet with three bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. A combination kitchen/dining/living space sports mahogany floorboards and a 12-foot-high mahogany coffered ceiling along with a wood-burning fireplace and a skylight-topped lounge lined with full-height picture windows that provide a dynamite view across the Hudson to the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge that connects Rockland and Westchster counties about 30 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

Listings held by David Sanders of Christies Int’l Real Estate, who also represented the buyer, show the kitchen is newly renovated with “state-of-the-art appliances” and the bathrooms feature marble and tile. In what was dubbed in marketing materials as the “Star’s master suite,” there’s a fireplace, dressing room and French doors to a riverfront deck. There’s another large deck just outside the main floor living room, while a family room on the lower level has a third fireplace and glass sliders to a waterside patio and a 100-foot-long private dock.

Once O’Donnell completes the sale of her former Nyack compound’s fifth and final property, her residential holdings will still include a sleek triplex penthouse in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan that she picked up in 2017 for exactly $8 million as well as a five-acre estate in Saddle River, N.J., that she acquired in 2013 for $6.375 million and has had on and off the market since late 2015, most recently earlier this year at a money-losing $5.995 million.

O’Donnell first appeared on TV in 1987 on the seminal sitcom “Gimme a Break!”, and she went on to become a 11-time Daytime Emmy winner for her eponymous daytime chat show that ran from 1996 to 2002. Along the way she started (and folded) a magazine, adopted five kids, wrote several memoirs and, nearly a decade ago, brought the musical flop “Taboo” to Broadway. Her more recent gigs include a main role the short-lived series “SMILF,” last year’s HBO miniseries “I Know This Much Is True” and the upcoming, long-in-development reboot of the 1980 noir film “American Gigolo.”