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When a Chinese billionaire’s family quietly paid $55 million for Mark Wahlberg’s Beverly Park compound in February 2023, it looked at first like just another eye-popping celebrity real estate transaction in one of Los Angeles’ most exclusive zip codes. Two years later, the deal would turn out to be one piece of a much larger, quietly unfolding story — a global spending spree that connected a Hollywood A-lister, a reality-TV power couple, and one of China’s richest men.
A Mansion Built for a Movie Star
The story of the estate begins in 2009, when Mark Wahlberg — the actor known for “The Departed,” “Boogie Nights,” and the “Transformers” franchise — bought 6.2 acres of land in Beverly Park, the ultra-exclusive, guard-gated enclave that has long been home to some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Wahlberg paid $8.25 million for the raw land and then spent the next several years building his dream compound, enlisting Richard Landry, the architect behind some of the most extravagant mansions in Southern California, to design a French-inspired chateau on the property. The home — designed by the same architect behind Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s former Brentwood megamansion, later bought by Dr. Dre — was completed around 2014.
The finished estate was staggering by almost any measure: roughly 30,500 square feet of living space spread across a main house and guesthouse, with 12 bedrooms and 20 bathrooms. Inside, the home featured a grand entry anchored by dual staircases, a two-story wood-paneled library, a double-island kitchen, a movie theater, a wine cellar, multiple bars, and an expansive gym. Outside, the six-acre grounds were built for a family of entertainers alike: a resort-style pool with a grotto, a skate park, a five-hole golf course complete with sand traps, a sports court.
Wahlberg and his wife, model Rhea Durham, raised their four children in the home for roughly a decade before deciding on a major life change.
A $55 Million Sale
In 2022, Wahlberg made headlines when he and his family announced plans to relocate permanently to Las Vegas, Nevada, citing a desire for more space, a quieter lifestyle, better opportunities for his children’s sports pursuits, and Nevada’s considerably friendlier tax environment. He backed up the move by spending $15.6 million on a vacant plot near Las Vegas, laying the groundwork for a new home base.
That meant the Beverly Park compound had to go. Wahlberg listed the estate that April for a striking $87.5 million, briefly making it one of the largest and most expensive homes on the market in Los Angeles County. Buyers, however, weren’t rushing in at that price. By December, the asking price had been cut to $79.5 million, and the home continued to sit.
The deal finally closed in February 2023 for $55 million — well below the original ask, but still enough to make it the most expensive residential sale in Southern California that year. The timing wasn’t a coincidence: closing before April 1 allowed Wahlberg to avoid a roughly $3 million tax bill under Los Angeles’s newly enacted “mansion tax,” Measure ULA, which imposes a 5.5% transfer tax on high-value property sales. Listing agents Carl Gambino of Compass and Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency represented Wahlberg in the sale, while Ginger Glass of Compass represented the buyer — whose identity, at the time, remained undisclosed.
A Second Sale — to Paris Hilton
The Wahlberg estate’s story didn’t end with Xu and Gu. In June 2025, the property changed hands again — this time to Paris Hilton and her husband, venture capitalist Carter Reum, who paid $63.1 million for the compound, according to the Wall Street Journal. The purchase came shortly after Hilton lost her Malibu home in the Los Angeles wildfires that January, an experience she described publicly as devastating to watch unfold on live television. The Beverly Park estate had originally been re-listed for $68 million that March before trading at the discounted price.
For Xu and Gu’s LLC, the resale represented a tidy profit over their original $55 million purchase, even after accounting for Los Angeles’s mansion tax — a reminder that, for buyers operating at this level of the market, even a “trophy” purchase can double as an investment. For Hilton, the move placed her in one of the most star-studded residential communities in the country: Beverly Park counts Adele, Justin Bieber, Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, Rod Stewart, and Sofia Vergara among its past and present residents. Notably, Stallone had sold his own Beverly Park home to Adele for $58 million just a year before Wahlberg listed his estate — evidence of just how routinely nine-figure sums change hands in this particular corner of Los Angeles.
A House That Keeps Making Headlines
Few homes illustrate the strange intersection of celebrity, global capital, and real estate speculation quite like Wahlberg’s former compound. Built by a movie star, sold to escape a looming tax bill, quietly acquired by an offshore-linked entity connected to a Chinese medical device billionaire, and then flipped to an heiress rebuilding her life after a natural disaster — the property’s ownership history reads almost like a screenplay in itself. It also offers a rare, documented window into how ultra-high-net-worth buyers — whether from Hollywood or from Shenzhen — increasingly treat America’s most expensive homes not just as places to live, but as tradable assets in a very small, very exclusive global market.
