Who says you can't make a profit on real estate in the current market?

Emmy Award-winning TV-talk show host Ellen DeGeneres likely performed her famous sneaker dance after selling her Southern California estate with a $4 million profit.

She purchased the home little more than a year ago.

The comedian and actress had to settle on a $20 million offer rather than her original $24 million asking price. But DeGeneres boogied off with a 27 percent profit on the Santa Barbara County property, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Fifteen months ago, she purchased the Montecito, CA, property for nearly $16 million. The home is near Oprah Winfrey's 40-acre estate.

DeGeneres sold the home with the help of a comedic video home tour she hosted and aired on her daytime TV show and website. She also upgraded the interior and grounds during her ownership.

The property was listed by Suzanne Perkins with Sotheby's International Realty in Santa Barbara.

The four-acre compound built in 1926 includes a four-bedroom, two-story Spanish Colonial main home with a three-car garage and 5,000-bottle wine cellar. There's also a guest home, fruit trees, swimming pool, tennis court and 5,000 bottle wine cellar on the grounds.

The town of Montecito, where DeGeneres house is located, is in Santa Barbara County's posh South Coast region where single-family home sales were down 33 percent in October from a year earlier. But prices in the region rose 22 percent during the same period, according to the California Association of Realtors.

Brisk sales in California's high-end housing markets like Santa Barbara as well as Silicon Valley, San Francisco and other Southern California hot spots is what has kept the statewide median price from falling until recently.

California's single-family median price plunged 9.9 percent over the past year ending in October.

That's the largest year-to-year price decline since the California Association of Realtors has been keeping records. Sales are down more than 40 percent.

Published: December 17, 2007

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a 30-year career in old-school journalism into a digital-age news service offering editorial content and related consulting services. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based content provider specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and consulting. An open house for news that really hits home, the DeadlineNews Group includes the umbrella website DeadlineNews.com the flagship blog Deadline Newsroom, and three Examiner.com outposts -- Real Estate News Examiner; Consumer News Examiner; and Offbeat News Examiner. Along with a decade of work here with Realty Times, Perkins also provides content for Silicon Valley based ERate.com and the new AOLNews.com, where now "You've got news....that really hits home." His current work can also be found in Californian publications, the San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco's The Registry and the Salinas Californian. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News, before launching DeadlineNews Group. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Nolo.com among more than four dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins served as chief editorial consultant for "Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home."