A Bel Air Beast In Contract

Strap on your safety belts, hitch up your britches and grab a big fat nerve pill children because there's a big deal going down in Bel Air that is sure to drop jaws and make every owner of a home listed at more than $25,000,000 grin with glee and breathe a deep sigh of relief that there really may be some life in the extreme upper end of the Los Angeles property market.

In February of 2009, amid much hoopla and tittering by real estate watchers and gossips, real estate developer Mohamed Hadid listed his newly completed, colossal 48,000 square foot beast in Los Angeles' uppity Bel Air neighborhood with an equally uppity and porcine asking price of $85,000,000.

The price of the ridiculously opulent 10 bedroom and 14 pooper pile that sits on 2.2 acres was dropped to $72,000,000 in August of 2009. After more than a year on the market the listing is now marked, "Backup Offers Accepted" indicating a deal is in the works for three floor monster mansion that includes 19 fireplaces, a 280 degree view, a 5,000 bottle wine cellar, an honest to goodness ballroom, a professional screening room, a Moroccan themed lounge and Turkish hammam (erroneously spelled "hummam" on the listing), a damn swan pond, and more tangled and tortured boiserie than the damn Palace of Versailles.

Suzanne Saperstein, Candy Spelling and Iris Cantor–a trio of wildly rich single ladees who all have booteek hotel sized houses in Los Angeles on the market–must be spitting jealous and seeing red that they've been trying to unload their high-priced white elephants for years and years and years with no luck and along comes Mister Mohammad Hadid who snatches up a buyer for his insanely expensive behemoth after just 420-some days.

Naturally, upon getting wind of the deal Your Mama put out feelers with a few of our better connected peeps in the Platinum Triangle. Of course, everything is secret, secret, secret regarding the potential deal but what we're hearing back from two separate sources is that the buyer is a big money foreigner and that the deal is going down in the fifty million dollar range. Have mercy. A third source with deep connections in the high end Bev Hills-Bel Air real estate world told Your Mama the "alleged" price being bandied about is closer to sixty million and suspects there may be some kind of business connection/relationship between the seller and buyer.

Other than that the property is marked "Looking for Backup" Your Mama can't confirm any of this information. At this point it's just rumor and gossip. Got that kids? Rumor and gossip. We won't know the real details until the deeds and records are recorded or, more likely, we read about it in one of the more respectable real estate gossip columns.

Mister Hadid, who claims he spent $59,000,000 building the massive manse, made much of his millions developing Ritz-Carlton hotels as well as lavish mansions like the Bel Air behemoth on Carolwood Drive where Michael Jackson expired under suspicious circumstances in June of 2009.

photo: Coldwell Banker Previews / Joyce Rey