Another Broke R&B Singer? R Kelly’s Chicago-area house listed as short sale

The suburban Chicago mansion of Grammy-winning singer R. Kelly is on the market.

A real estate listing shows the 22,000-square-foot mansion in Olympia Fields with a $1.595 million price tag. It’s a short sale, meaning Kelly owes more on the house than it’s worth.

A guard shack sits inside the gates of R. Kelly's mansion in Olympia Fields. (John Smierciak/Chicago Tribune)

Kelly custom-built the 16-room gated mansion in 1997. The house includes eight full bathrooms, four fireplaces, an indoor pool, sauna and theater room. There’s also a private lake.

Over the summer the house was the subject of a $2.9 million foreclosure lawsuit because Kelly reportedly failed to make monthly mortgage payments for more than a year.

Kelly’s spokesman, Allan Mayer, says the singer hasn’t lived in the home for more than a year.

Records also show that the “I Believe I Can Fly” singer has been renting a high-floor unit in the Trump Tower in downtown Chicago.

Another former property of the singer’s also has made news in recent months, with the 11-room, 8,000-square-foot Lakeview mansion that Kelly once owned selling in August for $2.64 million. Kelly had owned that residence from 1994 until selling it in 2002 for $2.25 million.

It was in that house where Kelly had been accused of having made a sex tape with an underage girl.  Kelly denied that he was the man in the tape, and he was acquitted of child pornography charges stemming from that tape in 2008.

Source: Associated Press; Chicago Tribune