Joakim Noah’s property history is well documented for the years he was playing and almost blank for the years since. During his career, there is a clear paper trail: a north-suburban Chicago house he bought as a rookie-era Bull and sold at a loss the same month he’d been retired for months, a Lincoln Park mansion he flipped within about a year for almost exactly what he paid, and a Chelsea penthouse in Manhattan he bought for $5.8 million within weeks of signing with the New York Knicks.
After he stopped playing, the trail goes cold. Several celebrity property sites state confidently that he now lives in a large house in Pinecrest, near Miami, but that claim does not hold up to the standard of evidence used elsewhere in this article.
What follows separates the transactions that are actually on the record from the ones that are not, and says plainly what is and is not known about where he lives today.
All the documented properties
| Property | Location | Reported figures | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five-bedroom suburban house, 5,018 sq ft, built 1998 | Bannockburn, Illinois | Bought July 2008 for $1.5 million; listed Sept. 2020 at $1.44 million; sold Dec. 15, 2020 for $1.09 million | Sold at a loss |
| Mansion, roughly 7,000–7,500 sq ft | Lincoln Park, Chicago | Bought July 14, 2014, for $2.85 million; listed July 2015 at $3.15 million; sold for $2.875 million | Sold |
| Penthouse, about 2,300 sq ft indoors | Chelsea, Manhattan | Bought September 2016 for $5.8 million, via his Joux LLC | No public report of a sale |
Who is Joakim Noah?
Joakim Noah is a retired French-American basketball player who spent most of his NBA career with the Chicago Bulls. He was born in Manhattan and raised partly in France, the son of Yannick Noah, the French tennis player who won the 1983 French Open, and Cecilia Rodhe, a Swedish sculptor and former Miss Sweden. He won two NCAA championships at Florida before the Bulls drafted him ninth overall in 2007.
In Chicago, he became a two-time All-Star and was named NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 2014. He left for the Knicks in 2016, then moved through the Westchester Knicks in 2017, the Memphis Grizzlies in 2018–19, and finally the Los Angeles Clippers in the 2019–20 season, his last in the league. Off the court, he co-founded the Noah’s Arc Foundation with his mother in 2010, working on youth programmes and anti-violence initiatives in Chicago and New York.
That biography matters here because his homes track his employment almost exactly. Every documented purchase happens in the city where he was playing at the time, and the buying — and, as it turns out, the selling — stops when the career does.
The Bannockburn house he bought as a young Bull, and sold at a loss
Noah’s first significant Chicago-area property was a five-bedroom house in Bannockburn, a small village in the northern suburbs, bought in July 2008 for $1.5 million shortly after he entered the league. Built in 1998, the 5,018-square-foot house sat on a 1.87-acre lot and was a conventional suburban trophy house for a young athlete: a two-storey marble fireplace, a heated three-car garage, a wine closet, a full bar, a mirrored basement gym and an outdoor basketball court.
He listed it in September 2020, by then well retired, asking $1.44 million — already below what he had paid twelve years earlier. He cut the price further to $1.37 million in October, and the house finally sold on December 15, 2020, for $1.09 million. That is a straightforward loss of $410,000 against the original purchase price, before any transfer taxes, commissions or years of carrying costs are even factored in. Public property records from the Lake County Recorder of Deeds confirm both the 2008 purchase price and the identity of the buyer.
The Illinois suburbs north of Chicago were, at the time he bought, home to a cluster of NBA players — teammate Kirk Hinrich owned nearby in Bannockburn too — so the purchase was less a personal statement than a default. The loss on the eventual sale is a reminder that suburban athlete houses, built for a specific decade’s taste and a specific owner’s fame, don’t necessarily hold value the way people assume.
The Lincoln Park mansion bought to be closer to work
On July 14, 2014, midway through his Bulls tenure, Noah bought a mansion in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood for $2.85 million, at 712 W. Schubert Avenue. Reports vary slightly on size — 7,000 to 7,500 square feet across three floors — but agree on the substance: seven bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms, four or five fireplaces, an elevator, a grand circular staircase and multiple outdoor spaces including a rooftop deck. At the time, a listing agent told the Chicago Tribune the move was driven by a simple logistical reason: the Bulls had recently opened a new practice facility on the Near West Side, and Noah wanted to live closer to it than the suburbs allowed.
He held it only about a year. The house was listed at $3.15 million in July 2015 and went under contract within weeks, ultimately selling for $2.875 million — $25,000 more than he paid. Once transfer taxes, agent commissions, and a year of carrying costs are accounted for, a $25,000 gross gain on a one-year hold is a loss in practice. It is a useful reminder that a celebrity name attached to a property does not create a premium, and that the gap between an asking price and a closing price is where most of the real story sits.
The Chelsea penthouse he bought for the Knicks move
In 2016, Noah signed with the New York Knicks on a contract widely reported at around $72 million over four years, and he bought a Manhattan home almost immediately, in September 2016, through an entity called Joux LLC. The purchase price was $5.8 million for a penthouse in Chelsea, on the far west side near the Hudson.
The apartment has three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms across about 2,300 square feet with 12-foot ceilings, but the reason it drew attention was outside: a terrace of roughly 2,000 square feet, nearly matching the indoor space, fitted with a hot tub, a built-in grill, and a wet bar, with panoramic Hudson River and skyline views. Private outdoor space on that scale is genuinely scarce in Manhattan and usually accounts for a large share of a price like this.
It was, in effect, a homecoming purchase. Noah grew up in New York, and the Chelsea penthouse put him back in the city he came from at the moment his career took him there professionally. No reliable report indicates that he has sold it.
Where does Joakim Noah live now?
Public reporting does not clearly establish his current residence, and any confident answer you find online is going ahead of the evidence.
Here is what can be said. Both Illinois properties were sold — the Bannockburn house at a real loss in December 2020, the Lincoln Park mansion at a wash after costs in 2015. The Chelsea penthouse was bought in 2016, and there is no public record of a sale, which makes it the only documented home still plausibly in his name, though the absence of a reported sale is weak evidence on its own. He married the Brazilian model Lais Ribeiro in 2022, and the couple had a son in November 2024. Interviews with Ribeiro have described the family dividing time between the United States and Brazil rather than being fixed in one place.
A number of celebrity property blogs state that Noah lives in a large house in Pinecrest, an affluent suburb south of Miami, and give specific room counts and square footage for it. That claim traces back to low-quality aggregator sites rather than to property records, listings or mainstream reporting, and no independent confirmation of it appears to exist. It should be treated as unverified. The same pattern of a viral property claim outrunning the documentation has appeared elsewhere, as in the case of Dennis Rodman’s supposed mansion.
The honest summary is that Noah retains strong ties to both Chicago, through his foundation, and New York, where he grew up and last bought property, and that no reliable source establishes a current primary residence. Anyone stating otherwise is filling a gap rather than reporting one.
Does Joakim Noah still own the Chelsea penthouse?
There is no public record — no listing, no recorded deed transfer, no news report — of the Chelsea penthouse being sold since Noah bought it in 2016. That is not proof he still owns it; New York property sales are sometimes structured through LLCs specifically to keep resales quiet. But on the evidence available, it remains the last documented property in his name.
What the record shows about how he bought
Read as a whole, Noah’s property history is notably unflashy for a player who earned well over $100 million in career salary. Three homes, all in cities where he was contracted to play, none of them a mega-estate, and two of them sold for at or below what he paid — the Bannockburn house at a real, recorded loss. There is no portfolio of investment properties, no compound, and no evidence of the kind of accumulation seen among peers such as Charles Oakley and other players of his era.
That restraint is probably also why the public record thins out so quickly after 2020. A player who bought where he worked, and who has not worked in the league since his final season with the Clippers, simply stops generating property news.
Sources
- NBC Sports Chicago on the Bannockburn house, its 2008 purchase price and 2020 listing.
- Chicago Tribune on the December 2020 Bannockburn sale at $1.09 million and the resulting loss.
- Redfin and BlockShopper public property records for the Bannockburn purchase and sale prices.
- Chicago Sun-Times and CBS Chicago on the July 2014 Lincoln Park purchase date and the reasoning behind it.
- Patch Lincoln Park on the Lincoln Park townhouse sale at $2.875 million against a $2.85 million purchase, and the Joux LLC entity used for the Chelsea purchase.
- StreetEasy and 6sqft on the 2016 Chelsea penthouse purchase and its terrace.
- Wikipedia for the full team-by-team career timeline.
- Noah’s Arc Foundation for his continuing work in Chicago and New York.
