WHILE some wouldn't look twice at a former celeb home with a dark past, property flipper Bo Belmont sees a million-dollar opportunity.
In fact, Bo has just sold Kanye West's stripped concrete Malibu mansion for a whopping £23 million – pocketing a cool £7 million profit – and now, he’s set his sights on Diddy’s notorious ‘sex party' villa.
Born in a blue-collar town in northern California, Bo, 42, has made a name for himself in LA's competitive property industry.
His method is snapping up homes “other people don't want to touch”;, transforming them and flipping them for profit – funded and repaid with interest via crowdfunding investment.
Speaking to Flying Eze after selling Kanye's former home just days after listing, he says: “As somebody who's a seasoned restoration guy and flipper, if you will, I saw it as an easy project.”
He snagged it for a mere £16 million ($21 million) – a far cry from the £44 million ($57.25 million) West paid in 2021.
“Kanye was liquidating a tremendous amount of assets – art, vehicles, jewellery – he needed capital for some reason,”; Bo says.
The mansion sparked a media frenzy after West stripped it to the bone – ripping out floors, finishes, plumbing, electrics and windows.
“He was trying to create an end-of-days bunker,”; Bo explains, adding the rapper wanted something that “could be lived in without the dependence of utilities.
“To destroy this home would take explosives.”
Bo reckons not even the deadly wildfires that ravaged the area and would have dented the concrete structure.
“There may be something to what he was thinking as far as withstanding some sort of natural disaster,” he says.
The home was ultimately left unfinished after Malibu’s city council and the Coastal Commission halted construction over unapproved alterations.
Besides its sterile form, Bo found “some weird biblical writings”; scrawled behind the caissons that go into the bedrock – confirmed to be in Ye’s handwriting.
“Kanye had written biblical verses. There was a Star of David. No swastikas, thankfully – with a Jewish background, I was glad I didn't see that.”;
West was recently dropped by his talent agency and sued after he and in his online shop.
At the time, Kanye also posted messages pleading with President Donald Trump to free Sean “Diddy” Combs, despite major allegations against the music mogul.
Diddy's notorious LA mansion
The two controversial rapper pals may soon share one more thing – Bo Belmont selling off their fallen real-estate empires.
The investor recently put in an offer on Diddy’s Holmby Hills mansion – well below its £49 million ($61 million) listing price.
“I offered $30m (£24m). The agent felt disrespected – which is fine, I'm not in this to make friends.”;
The sprawling estate was raided in March, as the rapper faces .
The 17,000-square-ft estate boasts 10 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, a 35-seat theatre, wine cellar, basketball court and a pool linked to a grotto by an underground tunnel – but Bo wasn't impressed when he visited.
“It definitely did not have the wow factor,” he says.
“It looked like just a standard Bel Air home – it wasn’t what I felt stood up to a $60 million value.
“It was pretty run-of-the-mill – Calcutta marble, shaker cabinets.”;
He also points out the “relatively small garage”, adding, “If you're spending $60 million on a property, you need a motor court – an area for your supercars.”
When the FBI raided the mansion in March, they found over 1,000 bottles of baby oil – reported to have been used at Diddy’s ‘sex parties'.
Bo reveals his content creator friend Daniel Mac allegedly found baby oil in the bushes outside the home during their tour.
“I don’t know if it was planted or not,”; Bo says, “but he did post that on his Instagram and then got flooded with a whole bunch of legal threats from friends and associates of P. Diddy.”;
After initially snubbing Bo's lowball offer, Diddy's agent had a change of heart.
Bo believes that given , his crowdfunding property company, Belwood Investments, has a “75 percent” chance of securing the deal.
While Bo worked to restore Kanye’s home “to look exactly as it was”;, he says that if he snags Diddy’s mansion, it will be unrecognisable.
“When it comes to the P. Diddy house, we actually have to change the whole façade.
“It needs to be completely gutted,”; he stresses – though he’ll skip the sage-burning rituals suggested to him on Instagram.
He plans to completely redesign and modernise both the interior and exterior – without tearing it down – and admits it won’t come cheap.
“We should have an exit on the Malibu house by May 1st, in which you can expect the acquisition for the P. Diddy home – provided they agree to our terms, somewhere not long after that.”
From prison to celeb mansions
Bo’s success today is a far cry from where he was a decade ago.
In 2015, he was jailed after hitting a man with a pitchfork – an incident he claims was self-defence during a row while on holiday in Napa Valley.
Bo says neighbours of the Airbnb he and his family were renting came onto the property, threatened them and told them to leave.
A fight ensued, Bo was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to five years but served only three.
“They gave me a million dollar bail, which was egregious – something that you would apply to somebody that was being charged with murder.”;
While at San Quentin, California’s oldest and once death-row prison, Bo set up a property consultancy, offering free advice to inmates, guards and wardens.
This, he says, helped shield him from prison politics.
“It was extremely toxic in there – a lot of drugs, a lot of death, a lot of everything that you can imagine.”
Upon release, Bo jumped straight back into real estate, a field he’s been active in since the 2007 market crash.
Though he has made headlines for targeting the homes of disgraced celebrities, Bo insists the real appeal lies not in their notoriety – but in their price.
“I’m not targeting rappers, I’m not targeting African Americans, I’m targeting people that need to sell their home quickly.”
His goal is to “to fully democratise luxury real estate investing, bringing it to people that would have never had the opportunity to invest in a Kanye house or a P. Diddy house.”
“We even have a house that's right next to Rihanna – and this is something that's out of reach for a lot of people.”
With his sights already set on his next property, Bo might soon find himself stumbling upon other celebrity estates with a dark past.
