Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has sold his one-bedroom co-op unit on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for $565,000.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on Krugman’s sale of his unit, which is in the building at 304 W. 89th Street in Manhattan. We previously had written on August 14 about Krugman’s recent $1,700,000 purchase of a three-bedroom co-op unit in a prewar building on Riverside Drive on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And in that August 14 post, we also had noted that Krugman’s unit on 89th Street was under contract after having been listed for $599,000. (He had bought the unit in 2005 for $539,999.)

Now, we can break the news that Krugman’s ninth-floor, 89th Street co-op no longer is in the Nobel laureate’s real-estate portfolio. Renovated from top to bottom, the top-floor unit on West 89th Street has one bath and a recently renovated, windowed kitchen with an open layout, stainless steel counters and stainless steel appliances, including a dishwasher, a Thermador oven and a Jenn-Air side-by-side refrigerator, according to listing information. Alas, however, there is no in-unit washer and dryer.

Krugman’s sale deed was recorded on August 28.

A few weeks back, the New York Observer’s Max Abelson noted that Krugman “wouldn’t be making any money” on the sale of his old unit. Indeed, with a final sale price public, it’s now pretty clear that Krugman and his wife saw annual appreciation of a little over 1 percent a year in the unit. It’s hard to believe how much things have changed in New York City; several years ago, it would have been heresy to suggest that a unit would appreciate at that rate. (And yet, by the standards of the American real estate market today, Krugman came out OK; there are plenty of other parts of the country where the seller of a home purchased in 2005 would kill for a 4.6 percent return when selling that same home in 2009.)

Check out the attached photos, which are the first ones made public of the unit that Krugman just sold.

A 1,400-square-foot house on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Calif. that actor Steven Weber owned until selling it in 2007 has come back on the market, this time for $4,295,000.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on the return to the market of the house at 32052 Pacific Coast Highway, which Weber had owned through his Trumpton Trust from April 2006, when he purchased it for $2,849,000, until May 2007, when he sold it for a massive profit of $3,820,000. We exclusively wrote in August 2007 about Weber having sold the house for $3,820,000. (It clearly was never Weber’s principal residence; he’s lived up in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood for years.) The current owners are not celebrities.

Now, at long last, we have some pictures of the house and 0.42-acre property; back when Weber had sold it, the property did not appear to have ever been on the market, so pictures of it have eluded us until now.

Built in 1965, the property’s main, one-story house has three bedrooms, two baths and walls of glass, according to public records and listing information. Also on the property are two more bedrooms and two more baths, spread across two other buildings: a separate space that the listing agent helpfully suggests could be a “guest home/gym/production office or music studio,” and “another maids or guest suite.” The house and property sit south of the Pacific Coast Highway but not quite on the Pacific Ocean, since two lots lie between the home and the ocean. The property does have deeded beach access, however.

Check out an online listing sheet for the house – complete with photos — here.

Actress Julie Bowen has sold her 3,570-square-foot house in Los Angeles’ Studio City area for $2,100,000.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on Bowen’s sale of the four-bedroom house, which is at 3541 Berry Street in Studio City. Her Shire Trust, which was represented by money manager Bruce Lagnese, sold the house on June 12, with the transaction being recorded on June 24. The buyers are not celebrities.

We had written about Bowen’s listing of the house – for an asking price of $2,695,000 — back on January 28.

Built in 1959, the house that Bowen sold has three and a half baths, a gourmet kitchen opening to a great room, high-beamed ceilings, walls of glass, stone floors, and a media/family room, according to listing information. Features on the 0.71-acre (30,719-square-foot) property include a pool, canyon views, and a two-story guesthouse with another three bedrooms and one and a half baths, according to public records and listing information.

Bowen had purchased the house in 2004 for $1,875,000. It’s just down the street from the longtime Eddie Van Halen/Valerie Bertinelli family compound, which we have written about in the past.

Bowen sold the house because she paid $2,750,000 in late 2007 to purchase another, 3,475-square-foot house on nearly an acre in Studio City, according to public records.

Pop singer Natasha Bedingfield has paid $2,300,000 to purchase a four-bedroom, contemporary-style house in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz area.

This is a house that is long overdue for us to write about. The Los Angeles Times’ Lauren Beale broke the story of it way back on July 24, and then our friends over at the Real Estalker wrote about it a few days later. So why are we only getting to it now? The reason is that Beale broke the story online but then never put it into print until this past Sunday, and that reminded us that we needed to weigh in on it.

As far as celebrity purchases go, this is one of the odder ones. This house, situated on a private street in the gated Laughlin Park area of Los Feliz, originally was listed in 2008 for a whopping $4,495,000, and found no takers. The seller cut the asking price several times (including down to $3,795,000), eventually dropping $2 million off the listing price of the 4,792-square-foot house.

Built in 1953 and recently redone, the three-story house has a living room with walls of glass, a gourmet kitchen, a media room, five and a half baths, a gym and an office, according to public records and listing information. Outdoor features on the 0.32-acre (13,940-square-foot) property include a detached guesthouse/cabana, a resort-style swimming pool, a grassy yard, city and mountain views, a three-car garage and a motor court, according to public records and listing information.

Many others — including one glossy gossip magazine on newsstands now — have noted that there have been plenty of other celebs over the years in Laughlin Park, including Natalie Portman.

Singer Bjork reportedly will close later this month for a four-bedroom, penthouse co-op unit in Brooklyn that last was listed for $4,250,000.

Rumors about Bjork heading to Brooklyn have been all over the Internet for the last few weeks, and our friends over at the Real Estalker provided many of the details on Bjork’s process of acquiring this property back on August 19 — another of Your Mama’s many fine scoops of late. And this morning, the New York Post’s Jennifer Gould Keil reported that Bjork and husband Matthew Barney have gotten the go-ahead from an “unusually hostile” co-op board in Brooklyn to buy the 3,000-square-foot-plus, prewar unit, which is in Brooklyn Heights. Bjork and Barney apparently will close on the deal later this month, and we’ll get you a purchase price after that point.

Features in the nine-room unit include four baths, a large entry foyer, a spacious living room with a wood-burning fireplace and south-facing windows, a living room with windows facing west and north, a large gallery between the living room and dining room with a climate-controlled, 350-bottle wine closet, French doors that lead to the south side of a wrap-around, landscaped terrace (which itself has a computerized watering system), a dining room that has French doors leading both to a sunlit solarium and to a gourmet eat-in kitchen, a kitchen with access to the east side of the terrace, an office, a laundry room, walls of closets, a master bedroom with a bath en suite, a back den with a bath and a door leading to the largest portion of the wraparound terrace, and three zoned air-conditioning units, according to listing information.

Meanwhile, there also have been reports aplenty over the last couple of weeks regarding what Bjork and Barney have been attempting to sell, including Barney’s place in Manhattan, which has been up for $1,700,000; and the couple’s place in Sneden’s Landing, N.Y., which has been listed for $1,800,000 and up for lease for $7,000 a month.

Stay tuned — there will be lots more to write about all of these properties once some of these deals close.

Actor Mark Ruffalo has accepted an offer to sell his has three-bedroom house in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills, which has been on the market for $1,685,000.

Again, we give major props to our friends over at the Real Estalker for sussing out who the celebrity is behind the trust that owns this property (the Piccolo Trust, and the trustee Stuart Gelwarg, for those fellow public-records fanatics out there). Your Mama broke the story on Wednesday of Ruffalo’s listing of the 2,957-square-foot house.

The offer still may fall through, although most of the time, offers don’t.

We should note that long before this house hit the market, it actually had been on our “to-do” list — i.e., it was one of literally dozens of Los Angeles-area houses owned by whimsically named (and likely celebrity-owned) trusts whose owners had remained a mystery to us. Had we bothered to do even a scintilla of digging (consulting our friend E.J.’s Movieland Directory, for example), we’d have unmasked Mark and his ownership. One of these days, we should just post the entire raw data — all the L.A.-area houses that we know of that are owned by trusts that we believe are controlled by celebrities — and just let our readers go to town on that. Would you all be interested in seeing something like that?

Back to Ruffalo (who is shown here with his wife Sunrise). Built in 1933, his East Coast traditional-style house has two and a half baths (a third full bath is in a guest unit), superb original detail, French doors throughout, two wood-burning fireplaces, central air, a sun room, a separate breakfast room, a living room with an exposed-beam ceiling, and a kitchen with granite counters, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and Viking appliances, according to public records and listing information.

To answer a question that had vexed the Real Estalker on Wednesday, we can report that Ruffalo’s Piccolo Trust paid $1,650,000 for the house back in late 2004.

As Your Mama noted, the house was featured in the now-defunct Domino magazine in January 2009. Our own personal style maven (a physician by day, an interior designer by night) called the house’s interior “rustic,” “monochromatic” and “kind of spare.” She also described some of the furniture as being “a grandmother’s furniture” — a far cry from the kinds of adjectives Domino used (”relaxed Bohemian,” “adorable and eclectic”) in its write-up.

Where is Ruffalo off to? We don’t rightly know, but we’d assume that he and his large family (three kids) will stay in L.A. We will keep you posted on if this deal closes and if so, how much Ruffalo fetches for it. Stay tuned.

Actor Ben Stiller and his wife have placed their compound in the Outpost Estates area of Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills for $12,500,000.

Credit where credit is due, and we have to give a lot of credit lately to the Real Estalker, who has been at the absolute top of “her” game, with tons and tons of scoops of A-list celebrities. Stiller is just one of many of those, and Your Mama yesterday broke the story (but really broke the story back on May 20, before Stiller’s property even went on the market) of Stiller’s listing of his longtime, three-property compound on Castilian Drive in Outpost Estates.

As Your Mama noted back in May, Stiller assembled three parcels to create his compound. In late 1999, he purchased the principal parcel and house — a six-bedroom (and six-bath), 5,334-square-foot, Spanish-style house on a 0.29-acre (12,628-square-foot) lot — for $1,825,000, according to public records. Then in 2001, Stiller paid $1,840,000 for a five-bedroom (and five-bath), 4,062-square-foot house that was built in 1930 and that sits on a 0.28-acre (12,197-square-foot) lot, according to public records. As part of that same 2001 transaction, Stiller also picked up *another* adjacent 0.29-acre (12,628-square-foot) lot (PIN # 5549-010-017) that was vacant, and on which he constructed a one-bedroom, 1,161-square-foot guest house in 2003.

So in all, Stiller’s compound measures 86/100 of an acre, according to public records. Other features on the estate, according to the minimally written listing information, include lush landscaping and grounds “that rival the Beverly Hills Hotel” (that’s one bold statement), two separate homes (one an authentic Spanish-style that was “meticulously restored” and the other a “stunning Mediterranean redefined with a contemporary point of view,” a one-bedroom guest house, a pool, an outdoor dining/living area and a beautiful grassy yard, according to listing information. In all, the estate has 10 bedrooms and 11 baths, listing information says.

Check out a virtual tour of Stiller’s compound.

As Your Mama also noted, Stiller weirdly owns a 1,608-square-foot house in Los Angeles’ Studio City area that he purchased in 2006 for $1,100,000. He also was reported to have been the buyer of a $10,000,000 duplex in Manhattan, which we wrote about last September.

We will keep you posted on if Stiller gets anywhere near his desired asking price for this compound (doubtful), and where he is off to — including whether that might involve owning other property in the L.A. area or not. Stay tuned.

Imprisoned and disgraced financier/Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff’s four-bedroom, 3,014-square-foot beach house on Long Island is set to be put up on the market this week by the U.S. Marshals service, which seized the property from Madoff on July 1.

The news is all over the Internet today, so we know we’re not exactly sharing “new news” with some of you. However, we wanted to weigh in on his beach house at 216 Old Montauk Highway in Montauk, which Madoff had owned since 1979 or since 1981, depending upon which source one consults. And, we wanted to share a collection of photos of the place as well.

The Associated Press recently got a tour of the estate (which is why the news of its upcoming listing is all over the wires), and the AP noted that the 1.2-acre lot sits closer to the shore than larger neighboring homes. The AP also remarked that the house has a grand, columned porch with terrific, panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean, and that federal marshals believe the property could be worth as much as $8 million. For what it’s worth — and it’s probably not much — Madoff himself had stated in a court filing last year that he thought it was worth $3 million.

Other features in the house include three baths, a second-floor entrance that leads to a small master bedroom with a private terrace, a staircase that descends to a living room with vaulted ceilings, exposed beams and a stone fireplace. The house has a “tired set of leather couches, kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures” that “appear to date to the 1980s,” the AP noted. Outside are a small swimming pool overlooking the ocean, a private path that winds to the beach through pine trees, and a porch, the AP reported.

Today we give our readers a bonus — two different entries in our longstanding “Which celebrity’s house is this?” feature, in which we provide the details of a transaction that pretty clearly to us involved a celebrity buyer or seller, and we throw it out to our readers to help us suss out the identity of the buyers and/or sellers (which they have made every effort to mask for privacy reasons).

The second of the two “Which celebrity’s house is this?” properties that we’ll discuss today is the 2,200-square-foot house at 4969 Ambrose Avenue in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz area, which sold recently for $1,020,000. The reason we believe that a celebrity purchased this home is because the buyer of this house was shown in public records as being something with called the Ambrose Trust (ostensibly named for the house’s street). More important, the money manager whose name is on the deed is that of Barry Greenfield, whom veteran celebrity real estate-watchers and regular readers of this blog will know often represents anonymity-seeking celebrities in their Los Angeles-area home purchases and thus appears on their deeds instead of said celebrities. Among the celebs that Greenfield has represented over the years in personal real-estate transactions (and therefore has wound up having his name on the deeds of their properties) are Hilary Swank, Jason Priestley, Ivan Sergei, Milla Jovovich and others. The deal was recorded on July 23, according to public records.

Built in 1923, the updated, Mediterranean villa-style house had been listed for $1,049,000 and sits on one of Los Feliz’s most picturesque streets, according to public records and listing information. Features in the house, which has either three bedrooms (according to listing information) or four bedrooms (according to public records), include large rooms, high ceilings, French windows and doors, a full-length living room with a fireplace, a spacious dining room, and an over-scale master bedroom suite, according to public records. Outdoor features on the 0.15-acre (6,499-square-foot), mostly flat lot include landscaping a long driveway and a detached, two-car garage, according to public records and listing information.

So, dear readers, we ask you as we always do: who was the celebrity who purchased the house at 4969 Ambrose Avenue in Los Feliz? Who is behind the Ambrose Trust?

Today’s installment of our ever-popular “Which celebrity’s house is this?” feature involves the 934-square-foot town house at 2613 6th Street in Santa Monica, Calif., which recently sold for $746,000.

The reason we believe that this town house is owned by a celebrity is because the buyer of this unit was shown in public records as being something with the whimsical name of the Freckle Trust. And the money manager whose name is on the deed is that of Barry Greenfield, whom veteran celebrity real estate-watchers and regular readers of this blog will know often represents anonymity-seeking celebrities in their Los Angeles-area home purchases and thus appears on their deeds instead of said celebrities. Among the celebs that Greenfield has represented over the years in personal real-estate transactions (and therefore has wound up having his name on the deeds of their properties) are Hilary Swank, Jason Priestley, Ivan Sergei, Milla Jovovich and others. The deal closed on May 7, with the deed being recorded on June 16, according to public records.

Built in 1976, the two-bedroom town house has two baths and is in a development of 12 town homes, all of which share the same street address, according to public records.

So, dear readers, we ask you as we always do: who purchased the town house at 2613 6th Street in Santa Monica? Who is the celebrity behind the Freckle Trust?