No One Will Buy Elvis Presley’s Huge Home in the Desert

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 12:55PM EST · Published Jan 6, 6:52AM EST

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No One Will Buy Elvis Presley’s Huge Home in the Desert — © Keystone / Getty Images

Elvis Presley owned a home over 1,500 miles from his hometown of Memphis, where he died when he was 42. He bought the house as a honeymoon location for his wife Priscilla. It is a cavernous mid-century home in Palm Springs that has languished on the market since it came up for sale in 2014. One reason may be it carries a price tag of $2.975 million in a part of the desert community where an average home costs one-third of that.

The price of the home has been slashed more than once from the original price of almost $10 million. It was first put on the market for $9.5 million, well out of the reach of almost anyone who might live in Palm Springs. The price changed against last week.

The house has an impressive pedigree. It was designed by architect William Krisel, who designed another 300 homes in the area. However, he designed few if any that have the five bedrooms and five baths of the Presley home. Listing agent Scott Histed told realtor.com:

It’s going to take a very specific buyer who wants to spend a few million on 5,000 square feet of space for a secondary home. Since Palm Springs is much more of a secondary residence–style city, the market just moves a little slower as well.

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Histed also said the house is in much less than perfect shape, to some extent because no one has lived in it for so long. Paint, floors and old bathrooms are on the list of things a new owner might want to address immediately. That ratchets up the price to own the home by at least another six figures.

Another issue with the house is that it is not near any city, and the climate limits the appeal of homes in Palm Springs as well. Palm Springs is over 100 miles west of Los Angeles. It gets less than five inches of rain a year. It is not unusual for temperatures to top 100 degrees in the summer, with a record temperature of over 120 degrees. Palm Springs has a population of just over 48,000 people, according to the Census, up from just over 32,000 in 1980. Median household income in Palm Springs is about $45,000, well below the national average. The poverty rate is 18.2%, well above the national number of 12.3%.

The Presley house is so out of character with all of Palm Springs that it could sit on the market for another few years.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.