Rapper 50 Cent's massive mansion just sold for a fraction of its price after being on the market for over a decade.
Born as Curtis James Jackson III, 50 Cent bought the mansion for $4.1 million from former boxer Mike Tyson in 2003. That was the same year the rapper's hit debut album was released, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," according to WSJ.
Built in 1985, the mansion is set on 17 acres. The estate spans approximately 50,000 square feet, has 21 bedrooms, 25 bathrooms, swimming pools, a home theater, a recording studio, a full gym, and a conference room, according to the real estate listing. The listing also includes aerial shots of the sprawling mansion as well as photos of a night club decorated with murals of the rapper.
Why Was the Mansion So Hard to Sell?
Rob Giuffria, a broker at Tea Leaf Realty in West Harford, Connecticut, predicted back in 2007 when the mansion first went up for sale, that it would never sell for more than $5 million, according to the Hartford Courant."The hardest part of getting the house sold is 'How do [you] utilize a house that large?'" he told the Courant. "It's a showy house. Someone who buys it wants to impress with its size."
He said that the mansion would have been better suited for a place such as Los Angeles, Miami, or New York City, where celebrities might want to impress friends with the sheer size and opulence of their homes.
Another reason it was so hard to sell could be because of the history of the place. Built in the 1980s by real-estate fraudster Benjamin Sisti, the mansion was a monument to the wealth of his company, Colonial Realty Co. That was until the operation went bankrupt in the 1990s, reported the Courant. Even then, the mansion was known as "the most notorious house in Connecticut"—and was almost five times as large as the houses surrounding it.
Who Bought the Mansion?
The Farmington mansion is now owned by Casey Askar and the Askar Group of Naples, Fla.The proceeds of the sale will be donated to the G-Unity Foundation Inc., 50 Cent's nonprofit.