Where Does Elin Nordegren Live? Her Palm Beach County Homes

Where does Elin Nordegren live? Today the answer is Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, inside the gated Old Palm Golf Club, where Tiger Woods' ex-wife bought a home in 2020. Before that she was known for one of the most talked-about tear-down-and-rebuild projects in Palm Beach County: a 1930s oceanfront mansion in North Palm Beach that she demolished and replaced with a much larger estate. Here is what public reporting says about the homes she has owned and where she lives now.

Key takeaways

• Elin Nordegren currently lives in Palm Beach Gardens, in the gated Old Palm Golf Club, a home she bought in 2020 for a reported $9.9 million.
• From 2011 to 2020 she owned an oceanfront estate in North Palm Beach (the Seminole Landing community) that she famously demolished and rebuilt.
• She sold that North Palm Beach estate in 2020 for a reported $28.6 million.
• She is the ex-wife of Tiger Woods (they divorced in 2010) and stayed in Palm Beach County to raise their two children.

Where does Elin Nordegren live now?

Since 2020, Elin Nordegren has lived in Palm Beach Gardens, a golf-heavy city in northern Palm Beach County. Her home sits inside Old Palm Golf Club, a gated community built around a Raymond Floyd signature course. Property reporting put the purchase at about $9.9 million, closing in September 2020, just days after she sold her longtime oceanfront estate a few miles east. The house is described as roughly 13,500 square feet (some later write-ups cite closer to 16,800) with six bedrooms on about two acres, built in 2010.

As with our other celebrity-home guides, we do not publish an exact address. What is useful for readers is the market she chose. You can browse current listings on our Palm Beach Gardens homes for sale page and see the wider Palm Beach County market she has stayed loyal to for well over a decade.

The North Palm Beach estate she tore down and rebuilt

The property that made Nordegren a fixture of local real-estate news was in North Palm Beach, in the gated oceanfront community of Seminole Landing. She bought it in early 2011, roughly a year after her divorce, for a reported $12.2 to $12.3 million. The existing home was a 1930s mansion of around 17,000 to 18,000 square feet, and rather than renovate it, she had it demolished at the end of 2011.

The reasons were practical. An engineer reportedly advised that bringing the old house up to modern South Florida hurricane wind-load codes made less sense than starting over, and removing the windows exposed significant termite damage. Before the teardown, she let Habitat for Humanity salvage cabinets, fixtures, and appliances for weeks. The replacement home, completed around 2014, was far larger, reported at somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000 square feet with about 200 feet of ocean frontage, retractable glass walls, a roof deck, a wine cellar, a home theater, two kitchens, and a pool. Sources differ on the exact size and bedroom count, so read those figures as a range rather than a spec sheet. If oceanfront living is what draws you to this stretch of coast, our North Palm Beach homes for sale page is the place to start.

Why she sold and moved inland

Nordegren first listed the rebuilt estate in 2018 for $49.5 million, then cut it to $44.5 million in 2019. It finally sold in September 2020 for a reported $28.6 million to Russell Weiner, the billionaire founder of Rockstar Energy Drink (The Real Deal). In a twist that says a lot about the top of this market, Weiner reportedly flipped it just weeks later for around $48 million.

With the sale done, Nordegren moved a few miles inland to Old Palm in Palm Beach Gardens. Trading a sprawling oceanfront compound for a large but more manageable golf-community home is a familiar pattern among owners whose needs have shifted, and it kept her close to the schools and family life she had built in the area.

Her connection to South Florida

Nordegren is best known as the ex-wife of golfer Tiger Woods. The couple divorced in 2010 and share two children, a daughter and a son, which is a big part of why she stayed in Palm Beach County rather than leaving the area. Woods lives about 16 miles north on Jupiter Island, and reporting has noted their son attending school in the county, so the family's footprint has stayed concentrated in this corner of the coast. You can read more about Woods' side of the county in our guide to where Tiger Woods lives.

In the years since, Nordegren has largely stepped back from the spotlight. She earned a psychology degree, has worked in mental-health counseling, and has expanded her family. The through line, for our purposes, is simple: she has spent more than a decade as a Palm Beach County resident.

North Palm Beach and Palm Beach Gardens: the market

The two towns Nordegren has called home sit at very different points on the price ladder, which makes them a useful lesson in how this market works. North Palm Beach is a waterfront village that holds some of the state's most exclusive addresses, including Seminole Landing and Lost Tree Village, the community that was for decades home to Jack Nicklaus. The village-wide median runs in the mid-$500,000s, yet the oceanfront enclaves inside it trade well into the multi-millions, and occasionally into the tens of millions.

Palm Beach Gardens, a short drive inland, is defined by its golf communities, including Old Palm, PGA National, BallenIsles, and Frenchman's Reserve. It offers a wide spread of homes, from condos and townhomes to gated estates. To explore either market, start with our Palm Beach Gardens and North Palm Beach pages, then widen out with our luxury homes and golf and country club homes collections. For a broader picture of who else lives in the area, see our roundup of celebrities who live in Florida.

Frequently asked questions

Where does Elin Nordegren live now?

She lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in the gated Old Palm Golf Club community, in a home she bought in 2020. We do not publish her exact address out of respect for privacy.

Did Elin Nordegren really tear down a mansion?

Yes. She bought a 1930s oceanfront mansion in North Palm Beach in 2011 and had it demolished later that year, then built a much larger estate in its place, reportedly because the old home could not be brought up to modern hurricane codes and had termite damage.

How much did Elin Nordegren's house sell for?

She sold her North Palm Beach oceanfront estate in September 2020 for a reported $28.6 million. The buyer reportedly flipped it weeks later for around $48 million.

Is Elin Nordegren related to Tiger Woods?

She is his ex-wife. The two divorced in 2010 and share two children, and both have kept homes in Palm Beach County.

Does Elin Nordegren still live in North Palm Beach?

No. She sold the North Palm Beach estate in 2020 and moved to Palm Beach Gardens, where she has lived since.

Thinking about buying or selling in Palm Beach Gardens, North Palm Beach, or anywhere in northern Palm Beach County? Explore our luxury listings or reach out through the form below, and a local Pure Equity agent will give you a straight read on the market.

When the lot is worth more than the house

A demolition on a waterfront estate parcel reads as extravagance. In this market it is often the rational decision, and understanding why is useful to anyone shopping the same kind of property.

On a scarce waterfront lot, most of the value sits in the land: the frontage, the width, the depth of water, the direction it faces, the access to open water. The structure on it is a depreciating asset that was designed for whoever built it, on the code and the tastes of its time.

Once a house is old enough that it would need to be substantially rebuilt anyway, and once current code would require significant upgrading, the arithmetic changes. Renovating an obsolete structure can cost more than replacing it and still leave you with a compromised layout, an older envelope and a shorter remaining life.

So the question on any older waterfront property is not what the house is worth. It is whether you are buying a house or buying a lot, and those are two different purchases at the same price.

How to tell which one you are buying

Four checks answer it, and they should happen during the inspection period rather than afterwards.

• What the land alone has sold for nearby. If recent teardown sales in the area approach the asking price, you are buying a lot and paying nothing meaningful for the structure.
• What the current code and elevation requirements are for that parcel. These determine what can be built, how high the finished floor must sit, and what setbacks apply, and they may not match what stands there now.
• Whether the existing structure can be renovated at all under current rules. There are thresholds beyond which a substantial renovation triggers requirements to bring the whole building up to current standards, which frequently changes the economics.
• Whether the property is insurable as it stands. An older structure that no standard carrier will write is difficult to finance and difficult to resell, which is itself an argument about its remaining value.

What a rebuild really costs on a waterfront lot

Anyone drawn to this idea should price the parts that are not construction, because they are where waterfront projects diverge from ordinary builds.

Demolition and disposal come first, and they are their own permitted job. Then the site: fill and grading to reach the required finished floor elevation, which on a low coastal parcel can be substantial. Then the seawall, which on an older property is frequently at or near the end of its life and is expensive to replace, and which usually has to be sound before anything else proceeds.

Add the docks and lifts, their permits, and whatever the local jurisdiction and any applicable state or federal review require for work near the water. Then the approval time, which is longer for waterfront work than for an inland parcel and which you carry while owning the land.

None of this makes it a bad decision. It makes it a decision that has to be priced before purchase rather than discovered after, since the total is what determines whether the lot was worth what you paid.

The same logic at ordinary prices

This is not only an estate market phenomenon. It runs throughout our counties wherever land is constrained.

On any older canal or intracoastal property, on a large infill lot in an established neighbourhood, and increasingly on well located parcels in built out cities, buyers are paying for position and treating the structure as optional. If you own such a property, that is worth knowing before you spend on a renovation, because improvements to a house that a buyer intends to remove return very little.

The practical advice for a seller in that position is to find out first. If the market is buying your lot, presenting the property as a site and marketing to that buyer usually beats renovating for a buyer who is not shopping.

More common questions

Why demolish a perfectly large house?

Because on a scarce waterfront parcel the land carries most of the value and an obsolete structure can cost more to bring up to standard than to replace.

How do I know if I am buying a lot rather than a house?

Compare recent teardown land sales nearby against the asking price. If they are close, the structure is not what you are paying for.

What is the expensive surprise on waterfront rebuilds?

Usually the seawall and the site work needed to reach the required elevation, plus the approval time you carry while owning the land.

Sources

• Elin Nordegren (Wikipedia)

Based on publicly reported information; details may change and are not independently verified by Pure Equity. We do not publish private addresses.