Every major real estate publication rushed to cover Simone Biles listing her suburban Houston starter home for one point two million dollars. The breathless narrative followed a predictable script: she bought a modest property, achieved legendary status, won gold, married an NFL safety, built a custom mega-mansion, and is now casually shedding her starter asset.
The media wants you to believe this is a heartwarming fairy tale of lifestyle upward mobility. It is actually a masterclass in terrible financial asset management disguised as celebrity success.
I have watched high-net-worth athletes and entertainers bleed millions into real estate because they treat houses like emotional trophies rather than illiquid inventory. Biles is a cultural icon and arguably the greatest gymnast to ever breathe, but unloading a starter home after a few short years while simultaneously sinking capital into a massive custom build highlights a systemic blind spot in how high-earning young phenoms handle liquidity.
Let us dismantle the lazy consensus.
The Starter Home Fallacy in Celebrity Portfolios
The standard advice handed to athletes by wealth managers is simple: buy something conservative, let it appreciate, trade up. It sounds sensible on a napkin. In practice, residential real estate below two million dollars in suburban Texas is a friction-heavy trap.
When you factor in transaction costs, agent commissions, property taxes in Texas—which notoriously sit among the highest in the nation—and the carrying costs of maintaining a vacant asset while your custom mega-mansion gets finished, the math on flipping a starter home starts looking bleak. You do not buy a starter home to build wealth if you are earning eight figures in endorsements and prize money. You buy it because you have not yet learned how to structure a balance sheet that separates liquid capital from non-yielding square footage.
People look at a one point two million dollar price tag and assume a massive profit margin. They forget what she likely paid for it during the pre-pandemic boom, the custom upgrades installed to make it livable for an elite athlete, and the sheer cost of holding two properties simultaneously in a cooling luxury market.
Real estate agents love to talk about appreciation. They rarely talk about the drag on portfolio velocity. While Biles was tied to a suburban subdivision, broader market instruments were compounding elsewhere with zero property tax liability and instant liquidity.
The Custom Mansion Trap
The counter-narrative to her selling the starter home is her entry into the custom dream mansion market with her husband, Jonathan Owens. Fans cheer the custom builds. They see the soaring ceilings, the custom training spaces, the bespoke kitchens, and the magazine spreads.
Anyone who has ever built a custom home from the ground up knows the dirty secret. Custom mega-mansions are financial sinkholes.
Imagine a scenario where a twenty-something elite athlete locks twenty million dollars into a heavily customized, highly idiosyncratic compound tailored entirely to their personal whims. If you build a house with specialized gymnastics modifications, custom layout quirks, and ultra-specific luxury finishes, you are shrinking your future buyer pool to a microscopic fraction of the population. When you sell a standard tract home, you appeal to hundreds of families. When you sell a hyper-customized celebrity fortress, you are praying for a very specific eccentric buyer with deep pockets who shares your exact taste.
Celebrities treat custom builds as permanent monuments to their peak earning years. The market treats them as illiquid depreciating nightmares once the initial gloss wears off.
The Tax Illusion of Texas
Every time a celebrity relocates to Texas or buys property in the Lone Star State, financial journalists applaud the lack of state income tax. It is the oldest sleight of hand in personal finance.
Texas makes up for its lack of income tax through brutal, unyielding property taxes. When you own a massive custom estate, your effective tax rate turns into an aggressive annual penalty just for existing. A starter home at one point two million dollars hits you with staggering municipal and school district levies. Scale that up to a custom dream mansion, and you are writing five-figure checks to the county every single year, win or lose, gold medal or injury.
Biles is wealthy enough to absorb the tax burden, but the underlying principle remains toxic. Relying on property tax havens without accounting for the actual carrying cost of high-valuation real estate is amateur hour. The smart money moves capital into tax-advantaged vehicles that generate yield instead of parking millions in wood, brick, and high-maintenance landscaping that bleeds cash monthly.
What Elite Wealth Management Should Look Like
If Simone Biles walked into my office tomorrow asking how to handle her real estate footprint, I would tell her to stop treating houses like milestones.
The playbook for young phenoms needs a complete rewrite. First, stop buying suburban middle-tier assets if your income bracket has already lapped the neighborhood. Second, view real estate strictly through the lens of optionality. If a property cannot easily pivot to a cash-flowing rental or a liquid asset in under ninety days, it is a liability masquerading as an investment.
The media wants you to focus on the romance of the upgrade. Simone Biles earned every single dollar and every ounce of praise she receives. Her gymnastics legacy is untouchable. But her real estate choreography—moving from a starter box to a custom monolith—is playing an outdated game designed for people who do not have access to private wealth advisors.
Stop romanticizing the real estate transactions of the ultra-rich. Most of the time, they are just expensive ways to change scenery.
