Grammy-winning R&B singer R. Kelly has placed his 22,000-square-foot mansion in Chicago’s south suburb of Olympia Fields on the market for $1.595 million.
Robert Kelly, 44, built the gated 16-room mansion in 1997. During the summer, the mansion made the news for being the subject of a $2.9 million foreclosure lawsuit, with Kelly having failed to make monthly mortgage payments for more than a year. According to reports at the time, R. Kelly claimed his reason for not making payments was to prompt his lender to renegotiate his loan.
Now, R. Kelly has listed the 6-bedroom mansion in a short sale, meaning that he owes more on the property than it is worth. Features include 8 full baths, 6 half baths, 4 fireplaces, an indoor pool and a theater room. Outside are private wooded land, a private lake and 12-foot wrought iron and concrete-encased fencing.
“It’s a fabulous house with a lot of great features,” listing agent James Mattz of Century 21 Pro-Team exclusively said. “Whoever buys it at the price we’re marketing it at is going to get an incredible value.”
Mattz said the mansion’s indoor pool room is one of its most distinctive features.
“You’d think you were in the jungles of the Amazon,” he said. “It’s not a pool room, it’s a tropical experience.” Mattz said he did not know the specific reason Kelly had listed the property.
During the news about the foreclosure lawsuit, several media outlets reported that R. Kelly had not lived in the mansion for a year. On Monday, James Mattz said Kelly’s property “is occupied, based on what we know.”
Records also show that R. Kelly has been renting a high-floor unit in the Trump Tower in downtown Chicago.
Another former property of Kelly’s also has made news in recent months, with the 11-room, 8,000-square-foot Lakeview mansion that Kelly once owned selling in August for $2.64 million. Kelly had owned that residence from 1994 until selling it in 2002 for $2.25 million.
It was in that house where R. Kelly had been accused of having made a sex tape with an underage girl. Kelly denied that he was the man in the tape, and he was acquitted of child pornography charges stemming from that tape in 2008.
