John Legend and Chrissy Teigen Sell Beverly Hills Home

Musician John Legend and his wife, model and social-media celebrity Chrissy Teigen, have sold their Beverly Hills home for about $22.7 million, according to their listing agent Marshall Peck of Douglas Elliman.

The property was listed for $32 million last August, but the price had more recently been cut to $23.9 million. Mr. Peck said a previous deal for the property, signed roughly a week after it was first listed, had fallen apart and slowed down the marketing momentum. “Everyone thought we had sold it,” he said.

Mr. Peck declined to identify the buyer beyond saying he is a private-equity executive. The buyer was represented by Joyce Rey of Coldwell Banker Realty.

The roughly 8,500-square-foot, seven-bedroom house has a design inspired by Ms. Teigen’s Southeast Asian heritage, with a hand-carved wood ceiling in the great living room imported from Thailand and teak wood detailing, The Wall Street Journal reported. The primary bedroom has a brass-and-concrete fireplace, a balcony, a “glam room” and designer closets that the listing agent described as “evocative of a Chanel showroom.”

The property also includes a heated saltwater pool and Jacuzzi, a wood-burning oven and a pergola.

The couple bought the house for $14.1 million in January 2016, records show. It had been formerly owned by singer Rihanna. They completely redesigned it and redid the kitchen with professional-level equipment for Ms. Teigen, who is a cookbook author.

Mr. Legend is known for his hits such as “Ordinary People” and “All of Me.” Ms. Teigen recently apologized for her previous behaviour on social media after being accused of cyber bullying. “There is simply no excuse for my past horrible tweets,” she wrote in a statement on the website Medium. “I was a troll, full stop. And I am so sorry.”

Mr. Legend and Ms. Teigen couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the sale. The couple purchased another house, a 10,700-square-foot spread in the Benedict Canyon area of Beverly Hills, for $17.5 million last September, The Wall Street Journal reported.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

John Legend and Chrissy Teigen Sell Beverly Hills Home

The celebrity pair closed the deal at a cut price.

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents