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Matt Lauer Lists Massive Hamptons Estate For $17.9 Million

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 07:14 PST, Jul 15, 2016

Matt Lauer continues to deal in Hamptons real estate in a very big way. The longtime Today show co-anchor has listed his 8,000 square foot Sag Harbor estate for $17.995 million, according to People.

Lauer’s house sits on 25 acres and boasts 6 bedrooms, 7.5 baths, and large rooms that have wooden beams and cathedral ceilings. The lush lawns were designed by Anna Wintour’s landscape architect, Miranda Brooks, and the rolling landscaping even features “secret” gardens. There’s also a 70’x20? pool and a tennis court on the gated property. Matt Lauer and his wife, Annette, built the house in 2001.

Matt Lauer makes big bucks as co-anchor of Today—his last contract with the NBC morning staple was reportedly for $20 million—but even he may need the money from this sale. According to the Wall Street Journal, Lauer is reportedly under contract to buy actor Richard Gere’s bayfront estate, Strongheart Manor. While the price that Matt Lauer will pay for the North Haven property has not been revealed, the supersized estate was originally listed for a whopping $36.5 million, down from a firm $65 million asking price in 2013.

Matt Lauer is also selling another, smaller Hamptons property, a three-bedroom cottage that faces a pond in Southampton. Lauer bought the place in 2009 for $2.15 million and he is now asking $3.95 million for it. That sounds like small potatoes compared to some of Matt’s other real estate transactions. And Lauer also owns yet another property, a 40-acre horse farm in Water Mill, but he’s keeping that one.

Matt Lauer clearly has a love affair with the Hamptons, and it’s not just because he can afford it now that he’s making big bucks on NBC. In an interview with fellow Today host Hoda Kotb for Hamptons Magazine, Lauer, 58, revealed he has been going to the Hamptons ever since he was a child.

“My folks used to take us out there when we were about 8 or 10 years old,” Lauer said. “We went to Amagansett, which seemed like the end of the earth at that time, and you would literally drive through cornfield after cornfield and potato field after potato field to finally get out to this just incredibly ideal spot along the ocean.”

Lauer said that the area has changed “enormously” over the past five decades. Back in his day, Lauer said there were “little pockets of stores and houses,” and the space between them was filled by farms and dunes. Now, there’s much more development in the area—and trash. Matt even revealed that he and his daughter have even gone out on weekends with big trash bags and rubber gloves and picked up trash from the roadside. Lauer said he wants people to appreciate the beauty of the celebrity-filled seaside towns.

Lauer also told Kotb that his view of the Hamptons has changed over the years.”I think at a certain phase of my life, when I was single, yeah, it was a rocking, hot party beach location, but now Annette and I raise our family here; my kids go to school here,” Matt said.

While the image of the New York hotspot is often along the lines of polo fields and cocktail parties, Lauer said for him it’s about “parent-teacher conferences and Little League and music lessons.”

“We have a painfully normal existence out here, and I think some people would be rather shocked by that,” Lauer said in 2012. “It is very much small-town America—it just happens to have a reputation and a name like the Hamptons.”

Matt Lauer also said he thinks Sag Harbor is the most “normal” Hamptons town, describing it as “a little bit like Mayberry on the French Riviera.”

Of course, that commute from NBC’s Rockefeller Center studios to the Hamptons is a bear, but Matt has that figured out, too. The New York Post‘s Page Six revealed that Lauer’s lucrative contract with the network includes helicopter rides in and out of his Hamptons residence so he can spend more time with his wife and kids during the workweek. But a Today rep made it clear that the free copter rides are not a daily occurrence.

“On rare occasions, Matt will fly home, but most of the time you’ll find him stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway with everyone else,” the source said.

Take a look at the video for more on Matt Lauer’s Hamptons estate that’s for sale.

[Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Hamptons Magazine]

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