Robert Kardashian House: The Encino Home He Rented, Not Owned

The Robert Kardashian house is one of the most recognised private addresses in modern American history, and two things about it are almost always reported wrongly. He did not own it: he had leased it roughly a month before the events that made it famous. And the building standing on the site today is not the house from 1994. It has been comprehensively rebuilt, and now runs to about 8,000 square feet with six bedrooms and nine bathrooms.

The original was a contemporary five-bedroom house built in 1957 in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley. Its place in the record comes from June 1994, when O.J. Simpson stayed there in the days after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and left from it on 17 June with Al Cowlings, beginning the freeway pursuit watched live by an enormous television audience.

This guide covers the property, its price history since, and what Robert Kardashian actually owned.

The property’s timeline

Who was Robert Kardashian?

Robert Kardashian was an American lawyer and businessman, born in Los Angeles in 1944. He built his money in business rather than law, including as a co-founder of the trade publication Radio & Records, and reactivated his law licence in 1994 in order to join O.J. Simpson’s defence team, having been a close friend of Simpson’s for years. He sat alongside Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran on what the press called the Dream Team, and on the afternoon of 17 June 1994, with Simpson missing, he read Simpson’s letter aloud to reporters.

He was married to Kris Jenner, then Kris Kardashian, from 1978 to 1991, and they had four children: Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob. He died of oesophageal cancer in 2003, several years before his children became famous in their own right. Weeks before his death, he had married Ellen Pierson.

That last point matters for a property article. Kardashian died before the family’s television career began and before the fortunes associated with the name existed. He was a well-off Los Angeles businessman, not a wealthy one by later Kardashian standards, and his property record reflects that.

The Encino house: leased, not owned

Kardashian took the Encino house on a lease around a month before the June 1994 murders. When the press presence outside Simpson’s own estate became overwhelming, he offered his rented house as somewhere Simpson could stay.

The original building was a contemporary house from 1957 with five bedrooms, unremarkable for the neighbourhood and unremarkable in itself. Its significance is entirely circumstantial: it is where a defendant in the most heavily covered criminal case in American television history spent several days, and where the events of 17 June 1994 began.

It came back to public attention in 2016, when The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story retold the case with David Schwimmer as Kardashian, and Los Angeles Magazine traced the house as one of the real places behind the drama.

The distinction between leasing and owning is the correction this article exists to make. A great deal of later coverage, including listing material, describes the property as having been owned by Robert Kardashian. It was not. He was a tenant of about a month’s standing.

What happened to the house

The property sold in 1997 for $830,000, a normal Encino price for a 1950s house at the time and notably unaffected by its notoriety.

It changed hands again in 2016 for $1.3 million, and was then comprehensively rebuilt. What exists now is effectively a new house: around 8,000 square feet, six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, with floating staircases, a custom pool and spa, and a fire pit. The comedian Russell Peters bought the rebuilt property in 2017 for $5.6 million.

Peters listed it in late December 2024 at $5.995 million, and it sold in March 2025 for $5.1 million, roughly $500,000 below what he had paid eight years earlier and about $900,000 below the asking price.

The pattern of a notorious house being sold cheaply, torn down or gutted, and rebuilt into something unrecognisable is a recurring one in Los Angeles. It is exactly what happened at the site covered in the guide to Brittany Murphy’s house. The land keeps its value; the building carrying the association does not survive.

What Robert Kardashian actually owned

No property purchase or sale by Robert Kardashian appears in any reliable source reviewed for this article. He and Kris Kardashian lived in the Los Angeles area through their marriage, and he lived in Los Angeles until he died in 2003, but no deed, price, or address of a home he owned has been documented in mainstream reporting.

That absence is straightforward. He was not a public figure in a way that generated property coverage before 1994; the case itself made him briefly famous rather than newly rich, and he died in 2003, five years before the family’s reality series began. Property journalism about the Kardashians is a phenomenon that postdates him entirely, and it attaches to his former wife and his children rather than to him. Kris Jenner’s own subsequent purchases are set out in the account of her Hidden Hills house.

What stands there now

Because Kardashian died in 2003, the question of where he lives does not apply. The relevant question is what became of the house associated with him, and the answer is that it no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

The site in Encino now holds a large modern house, owned by private buyers since March 2025 who have no connection to any of the events of 1994.

Sources

• Los Angeles Magazine on the house’s 1957 construction, Kardashian’s lease taken about a month before the murders, and the events of June 1994.
• The Real Deal on the 2016 sale at $1.3 million.
• TMZ and AOL on Russell Peters’s 2017 purchase at $5.6 million, the December 2024 listing, and the March 2025 sale at $5.1 million.
• Wikipedia for his biography, business career, and death in 2003.