Yours for £63m, Jacko’s Neverland ranch
IT boasts 22 buildings, including a train station, a six-bedroom mansion and a 50-seat cinema.
Then there’s the four-bedroom guest house, two lakes, a swimming pool, a basketball and a tennis court.
But the real selling point of this 2,700acre ranch in Los Olivos, California, is not what’s still there – but rather who used to inhabit it. This is Michael Jack- son’s Neverland ranch, and it has gone up for sale for £62.5million – complete with restored giant floral clock.
The fairground rides, not to mention the orangutans, giraffes and elephants – and Bubbles the chimpanzee – are all gone. The only animal that remains at the property is a llama. But those who just want to nose around the property that was home for the King of Pop for 15 years may find their way blocked. Estate agent, Jeffrey Hyland, of Hilton & Hyland, told the Wall Street Journal there will be ‘extensive prequalification’ safeguards for anyone showing an interest.
‘We’re not going to be giving tours,’ Suzanne Perkins of Sotheby’s International Realty, who shares the listing, told the Journal.
Jackson paid £12.7million for the property in 1988 and renamed it after the fictional island in Peter Pan.
It was in the extensive grounds that he staged his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley in 1995. Elizabeth Taylor also wed Larry Fortensky there in 1991.
Jackson defaulted on the £15.9million he owed on the property in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the real estate company Colony Capital.
After he was acquitted in 2005 of charges that he molested children at Neverland, Jackson moved out. He was living in a rented home in Los Angeles at the time of his death in June 2009.
The property has now been renamed the Sycamore Valley Ranch, its title before Jackson moved in.