WORLD PROPERTY CHANNEL ®

Basketball star Tony Parker, of the San Antonio Spurs, and his wife, actress Eva Longoria Parker, of the ABC series "Desperate Housewives," have put their home in San Antonio, Texas, on the market for about $900,000.

The couple, married in 2007, already relocated and are building a house for themselves in a master-planned community in northern San Antonio.

Parker was drafted by the Spurs in 2001, and he subsequently bought the home for $782,040 at age 19.  The 1997 house has five bedrooms, tile floors and a master-bedroom suite with a double-sided fireplace. He added a pool and a half basketball court.

Parker is a three-time NBA All Star and has played for France's national team.  He is a French citizen.
Longoria Parker, 33, plays Gabrielle in "Desperate Housewives," now in its fifth season.

Liz Blue Braden, of Kuper Sotheby's International Realty, has the listing.

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Jenni Rivera, the singer-songwriter from Long Beach, CA who became a major star in the regional Mexican market during the '90s, has purchased a home in Encino for $3.3 million.

Jennie Rivera, photo by Andrew Takeuchi

Rivera is considered one of the world's best-selling Latin artists.

The house she bought has seven bedrooms and 11 bathrooms in 9,527 square feet. It sits on four acres and has a grassy lawn, a pool, a patio, a spa and a waterfall. The house has marble and hardwood floors, walls of windows and city views.

There is a grand two-story entry, and the property is behind gates.

Ben Lee of Coldwell Banker, in the Beverly Hills East office, had the listing. Faby Lierandi of Divina Realty represented Rivera in the purchase.

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Even properties formerly owned by Presidents of the United States can be affected by the real estate slump.

Kevin Hayes, the investor who bought and refurbished the Vail, Colorado, get-away that once belonged to President Gerald Ford, has reduced his asking price from $14.9 million to $12.95 million.

Hayes had purchased the retreat from the president's estate for $6.65 million in early 2007. He spent $4 million on refurbishing.

The home has seven bedrooms in 10,000 square feet, and it is a ski-in, ski-out floor plan with an indoor lap pool on .8 of an acre in the resort of Beaver Creek.

Matt Fitzgerald and Anna Menz, both of Slifer Smith & Frampton Real Estate, have the listing.

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John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, couldn't remember how many homes he and his wife, Cindy, owned during the primaries, but in 2006, they sold their Phoenix home to an investor for $3.2 million, and then it was renovated before it was put back on the market.

The investor has been trying to sell the home conventionally since July and at an auction in October.

Neither worked. So now the investor is playing with the asking price, reducing it from $12 million to $10 million.

Both prices are so high they don't make sense to most Americans, even those who can remember how many homes they own. People rarely have more than a couple.

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A home owned for about a decade by William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel and screenplay for "The Exorcist," has come on the market at $27 million.


The gated estate, in Hidden Hills, has a theater room that seats 28 people; a tennis court, a sandy volleyball court, an equestrian ring, horse stables, a spa with a tanning booth, a gym, a wine cellar with a tasting room, and an outdoor chessboard with life-size pieces. 

"In what is likely a first for a home in this column, there is also a mechanical bull in its own sandy arena," according to Ann Brenoff, who has been writing "Hot Property" since Ruth Ryon, its creator, took a buyout in April.


The mechanical bull in a sandy arena is probably a first, Ryon said, but something else in the same column was definitely a first, and it was one of the 11 bathrooms. In that one bathroom are about 10 urinals. A bathroom with one urinal appeared in "Hot Property" years ago, but that one urinal was extra large--more than a dozen feet high and several walls long, and from it descended a sizable waterfall. The bathroom with about 10 urinals was in a penthouse of a high-rise, newly built at the time on Wilshire Boulevard.

The home owned by Blatty also has six bedrooms and a free-form swimming pool with a waterfall, cave, grotto and swim-up bar.

Blatty, best known for writing "The Exorcist," owned the home from 1990 to 2000.

Robert Kass, estate director for Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, and Logan Fenton, of the same agency, share the listing.

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