Here comes the repo man. While Ed McMahon is better known for his curtain call on “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson’s former late-night sidekick is among the latest celebs to get bit by the foreclosure bug. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that McMahon was $644,000 behind on a $4.8 million loan for a home in Beverly Hills, CA.
According to the newspaper report, Recon Trust, a division of Countrywide Financial,
filed a notice of default related to the loan of the home on Feb. 28. Earlier in the year, Forbes.com reported that McMahon’s 7,000-square-foot Beverly Hills home was put on the market in July 2006 for $7.7 million. He has since dropped the price not once, but three times, and the property was last listed at $5.7 million.
Foreclosures up
Some 243,353 households, nearly one in 519, received a foreclosure filing during April, according to the U.S. Foreclosure Market Report from RealtyTrac, an online marketplace that tracks foreclosed properties. That figure was up 4 percent from March and surpassed the record of 239,851 set in August 2007.
Last month, the “King of Pop himself,” Michael Jackson, was able to avert the auction block of his Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbra County. The 2,700-acre ranch was slated to be auctioned off on May 14 after Jackson defaulted on loan payments. But Jacko eventually worked out a deal to sell the loan on the property — estimated at $23.5 million — to Colony Capital, a large real estate investment firm.
Meanwhile, Jose Canseco, the former Major League Baseball slugger turned book author and steroid expert, is also trying to tag out the repo man. Foreclosure documents show Canseco owed a bank more than $2.5 million on his 7,300-square-foot home located in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino.
I guess fame and fortune can’t buy you everything, and these days, it can’t always buy you a lovely house.
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