Venus and Serena Williams Go Separate Real Estate Ways

After 15-plus years sharing an 8,500-square-foot mansion in a gated Palm Beach Gardens enclave in Florida, and amid tabloid reports of a rift that their reps say is all hooey, celebrated professional tennis sisters Venus and Serena Williams — now in their 30s and still forces to be reckoned with on the court — will soon move into their own custom-built mansions in guard-gated golf developments about five miles apart.

It was Venus who bit the real estate bullet first, in December 2013, with the $825,000 purchase of a 1.03-acre parcel near the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet corner of the Old Palm Golf Club where she’s in the process of building a contemporary residence. Younger sister Serena volleyed a huge return, shelling out $4.125 million on a privately situated 2.4 acre lot in the super-swank Bear’s Club enclave in neighboring Jupiter, where some of the other estates are owned by golfer Ernie Els, Band-Aid heiress Libet Johnson and Michael Jordan.

After Serena won the 2014 U.S. Open in September, she joked with reporters that she needed the $4 million in prize money to complete her new house, reported in Tennis magazine to be a European-style villa designed by a San Francisco architect with plans for trophy, purse and karaoke rooms. Venus sold her house in L.A.’s Nichols Canyon in March for $1.775 million to Ellen Page. Multilingual Serena owns an apartment in Paris, as well as a mini-estate in Bel Air’s Stone Canyon that she picked up in 2006 for $6.612 million.