Selena Gomez closed the sale of her Encino estate on September 9 for $5.4 million, according to The Real Deal — a price that landed right at the edge of a tax threshold nearly every seller of a high-value Los Angeles home tries to avoid. The house itself has a history that predates Gomez by three decades, built originally for a rock icon whose family lost it to fire, then foreclosure, before it ever reached her.
A House Built to Replace One That Burned
The 11,500-square-foot estate was custom-built in 1989 for Tom Petty and his first wife, Jane Benyo, according to Hoodline, replacing a previous Petty family home destroyed by arson in 1987. The property changed hands several times after that, including a 2015 foreclosure, before developers bought it out of the bank in 2017 for $2.6 million and gave it a comprehensive renovation. Gomez purchased the finished product in March 2020 for $4.89 million and owned it for roughly six years before this sale.
The six-bedroom, ten-bathroom home includes a wine cellar, a media room, a massage room, and a kitchen with white-painted exposed brick that served as the filming location for the first three seasons of Gomez’s cooking show, Selena + Chef. Gomez listed the property in May 2026 at $6.49 million and ultimately accepted roughly $1 million less to close the deal, per Hoodline’s reporting.
The Price That Wasn’t an Accident
Los Angeles’s Measure ULA imposes a 4% transfer tax on residential sales between $5.4 million and $10.9 million, and a 5.5% tax above that, funding homelessness and affordable-housing programs in the city. Gomez’s $5.4 million closing price sits exactly at the bottom edge of that bracket, meaning the sale still triggered the tax rather than dodging it outright — but avoided the steeper 5.5% rate that would have applied to anything over $10.9 million, and priced the deal well clear of any ambiguity about which bracket applied.
Measure ULA has reshaped how agents and sellers approach pricing above the $5 million mark since voters approved it in 2022, with many listings clustering just under threshold lines rather than drifting a few hundred thousand dollars past them. A sale that closes precisely at a bracket boundary, as this one did, is typically the result of negotiation rather than coincidence — buyer and seller meeting at a number that both sides’ tax advisors had already flagged. For a house with as layered a history as this one, from arson to foreclosure to a six-year celebrity chapter, the final number turned out to be as calculated as the address itself.
