Pamela Anderson Wants $19.4 Million For Malibu Beach House

Pamela Anderson, the actress who rose to fame playing a California beach lifeguard on “Baywatch,” is putting her own California beach house on the market for around $19.4 million.

Before buying this property, Ms Anderson said she had lived right on the sand, but found that fans would come up to the property looking for her. “A girl actually ended up in our guest bedroom and had my ‘Baywatch’ swimsuit on,” she said, referring to the bright-red one-piece she was frequently photographed in. “That was it for me.”

In 2000, Ms Anderson bought a site, which backs onto a lagoon, for about US$1.8 million, records show; she said she later replaced a “shabby chic” cottage with a new home for herself and her two young sons.

“It took me 10 years to build—I put another $8 million cash into it,” Ms Anderson said in written comments.

Located in a gated community in Malibu, Calif., the three-bedroom house is about 5,500 square feet and includes a large open-plan living, dining room and kitchen area with a fireplace, a rooftop deck and an expansive pool deck with spaces for outdoor dining and sunbathing. The kitchen has slab stone counters and glass pocket doors that open to the pool. A wood-and-glass staircase leads to the main bedroom suite, which has a private balcony. There is also a one-bedroom guesthouse on the property.

Ms Anderson, who in recent years has appeared on reality television shows like “Dancing with the Stars,” noted that the property was inspired by some of California’s best known Modernist architecture, such as the Case Study Houses, experimental, modern homes designed by architects like Richard Neutra.

“I love a vintage edge/pop art sensibility and I’m an activist so it is 100% sustainable Teak that is also ‘nonconflict’ flown in from Burma,” Ms Anderson said in her comments. “I must have paid $1 million just in materials for siding. I don’t like orange—so we bleached and waxed—the finish is more blonde.”

Some of her favourite features of the property include the guesthouse, which she said has “the most beautiful view,” and the reflective mosaic tiles in the pool. Her bedroom, she said, is “just the most sensual and clean space” with a bathtub in the room and a sauna attached. Ms Anderson also installed solar panels on the property and planted an irrigated vegetable garden.

Ms Anderson, 53, said she left Canada in her early 20s to work with Playboy and is now selling to go back to her roots. She recently married her onetime bodyguard Dan Hayhurst, and the two plan to live on her ranch on the water on Vancouver Island, she said. That property was owned by her late grandmother.

“When she passed, I just let it go for 20 years while I worked and travelled,” Ms Anderson said. “I have spent the last year here renovating, landscaping, creating gardens so that we can live sustainably. Greenhouse, potter’s wheel, canning pickles and beets. I’m creating my life here now again where it all started.”

“I made it home in one piece, a miracle. I’m a lucky girl,” she said.

Tomer Fridman of the Tomer Fridman Group has the Malibu listing.

On a recent summer Sunday afternoon, Brooks Hiller was hunkered over his laptop at his apartment in Chicago, dialing in to hour three of a marathon series of conference calls on real-estate deals.

The 21-year-old isn’t a professional, and he doesn’t make a dime from this work. He is a rising senior at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where he leads a team of 20 undergraduates who manage about $12 million in equity.

Those students operate their own real-estate investment business, called Sample Gates Management, named for the Gothic-style limestone arches that are the gateway to the Bloomington campus.

Unlike the many student investment clubs that deploy university money or rely on donations, the Indiana group raises funds from third parties and invests in properties across the country, such as apartment developments and industrial parks.

As a high schooler, Hiller was so enamored with the program—by most accounts, the undergraduate-run real-estate investment group that manages the most capital—that he chose to attend Indiana with hopes of being a part of it.

Brooks Hiller with his parents Jeff and Heather Hiller at the Sample Gates on Indiana University Bloomington's campus. — Brooks Hiller, with his parents Jeff and Heather Hiller, at Indiana University’s Sample Gates in Bloomington in 2023.

“Students get the experience, the school gets a better education for their students, and the investors are making their money back and get to be a part of the program again,” Hiller said. “I really wanted to be part of that.”

The group’s success is emblematic of changes transforming both higher education and the real-estate industry.

An industry that once revolved around information shared at private clubs or events has become a highly digitized landscape. It’s now flooded with standardized public-market data, so much so that undergraduates can readily peer inside and participate on nearly equal footing.

Meanwhile, colleges in recent decades have championed what is called “experiential learning,” encouraging students to do the hands-on work that will teach them the practical job skills they can’t learn in traditional classroom settings. Plus, dozens of universities now offer real-estate degrees, minors or concentrations for undergraduates.

“At its core, this program wouldn’t have existed 30 years ago,” said Harvard University real-estate professor Avis Devine.

This summer, Sample Gates Management sold its first investment, an industrial warehouse development in Indianapolis. In about 16 months, the fund earned a 65% gross profit on that property.

“That’s a really fantastic return in this environment,” one that would be “good for sort of any professional firm, not just students,” said Tim Morris, a member of the board responsible for approving the students’ investments, who is a founder and co-managing partner of the real-estate firm Proprium Capital Partners.

That property was an “easy yes” investment, Tom Peck, the students’ faculty adviser, recalled. It would diversify the group’s investment portfolio, and a reliable tenant was committed to leasing the building once it was finished, Peck said.

Most of the fund remains tied up in investments, making it difficult to gauge exactly how well it is performing overall.

Aerial view of a large industrial warehouse building under construction with dirt lots and a few trucks. — Sample Gates Management sold its first investment property, an Indianapolis warehouse development, this summer. Gershman Partners/Citimark

A decade ago, there were only a few student-managed real-estate funds in the country. Today, there are at least 18, and two more are set to launch this school year, according to Mariya Letdin, a real-estate professor at Florida State University who has researched student-managed investment funds and advises one herself.

And yet, although a program like Sample Gates is an attractive resume line that provides unique experience among undergraduates, it isn’t necessarily a launching pad to help students secure jobs. Because of Wall Street’s summer-internship pipelines and early recruiting timelines, many of the 20 seniors in the group have already secured full-time jobs at global giants before they even touch Sample Gates funds.

In fact, the students’ professional experience—some of them participate in internships all three summers of college—is often a boon for Sample Gates. Students’ stints at institutional shops have left them with a “networking mindset” that “snowballs very quickly into a really, really good Rolodex,” Morris said.

At the Kelley School, where currently 278 students are majoring in real estate, faculty picked only 20 to manage the private-equity fund. The rising seniors were selected from Kelley’s already competitive roughly 60-student commercial real-estate workshop, in which students analyze deals and pitch them to mock committees.

In 2022, for the group’s first round of fundraising, Sample Gates raised $4.2 million from 46 investors, 40% more than their goal of $3 million. Last year’s cohort raised $7.8 million from 74 investors in the second round of fundraising, with one investor forking over $700,000. Some investors put money into both funds.

Construction site with two workers walking past new buildings. — The construction site of another project that Sample Gates Management invested in. Thanasi Georgiadis

Many of the investors are Indiana alumni now working in the real-estate industry themselves. They expect the students to return a profit, but they are also enthusiastic about fostering the young program and meeting standout students.

The student managers screen between three and eight deals each week, which could mean they evaluate up to 400 potential investments a year. However, between 2023 and 2025, they selected only 12 investments, ranging in location from Indiana to Arizona.

Once a potential investment passes an initial screening, a team builds financial models and meets with prospective partners to pressure-test the viability of a deal.

For students to move forward with an investment, they must present it to their investment committee, a board of 10 seasoned real-estate executives. The committee has to sign off on all deals, and they reject roughly a third of the ones the undergraduates bring to the table.

And if the students think they can pitch an investment without getting their eyes on the physical property—regardless of where it is located— they would best think again.

Some observers predict that students might be disappointed when they start their full-time jobs because of the shift from doing the highest-level work of managing a fund to being a lowly analyst at a large firm.

“To have all of these skill sets in a short period of time and then to go be an associate for Blackstone would be mentally defeating,” said Rhett Trees, an investor in Sample Gates and Indiana alum who is the chief executive of a Denver-based real-estate private-equity firm.

Pamela Anderson Wants $19.4 Million For Malibu Beach House

Inspired by some of California’s best known Modernist architecture.