Having conquered the world with her record-breaking Eras Tour, Taylor Swift plans to conquer domesticity next.
According to plans filed with her local municipality and obtained by U.S. Weekly, the pop icon is giving her Rhode Island mansion a $1.7 million revamp, adding an additional bedroom, upgrading an existing room into an “enlarged bedroom suite,” and modernizing the kitchen.
A Home Away From The Stage
Hoping to enjoy some much-needed R&R with NFL player boyfriend Travis Kelce, Swift’s domestic upgrades to the home she bought a decade ago for $17.75 million suggest an extended down period away from the stage.
The sprawling 11,000-square-foot beachfront residence is located in the exclusive Watch Hill enclave in Westerly and features seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms. Swift’s upgrades will add an extra 400 square feet.
The renovation plans, drawn up on Nov. 25 and Dec. 4, 2024, expire on Dec. 4, 2025. A team of Rhode Island-based contractors led by David W. Shafovaloff will complete the work.
A String of Savvy Real Estate Buys
It’s not as if Swift will be short of places to live while her Rhode Island home is under construction. According to Forbes, the 34-year-old global icon, worth $1.6 billion, has a sizable real estate portfolio.
Other notable properties in her portfolio, as per Realtor.com, include two luxury Nashville homes – a luxury condo on Music Row and a Greek Revival-style mansion in the gated Northumberland Estate neighborhood.
She has also steadily snapped up New York City properties for over a decade, primarily in the glitzy Tribeca neighborhood.
Her first purchase was two penthouses for about $20 million. Swift combined them into a nine-bedroom, nine-bath luxury home with beamed ceilings, a curved staircase and oversize windows.
A few years later, she purchased a third unit comprising 3,500 square feet in the same building for $9.75 million. Then, in 2017, she snagged an adjacent 5,000-square-foot town house for $18 million.
Swift isn’t all East Coast. She owns a 10,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom Beverly Hills home, purchased in 2015 for $25 million, formerly owned by legendary movie producer Samuel Goldwyn.
A Fortune Made From Mostly Music
What makes Swift’s wealth interesting is that she accrued her fortune primarily from music, unlike other female music billionaires of her generation like Rihanna, who made the bulk of their money from outside business ventures. While Swift became wealthy at a young age, her most recent Eras tour financially put her over the top.
According to The New York Times, the tour grossed $2 billion over 21 months. Forbes reported that Swift earned between $10-13 million from each of the 149 shows on the Eras Tour, which ran from March 2023 to December 2024. The tour visited 51 cities across 21 countries.
However, that represents only one segment of the money the tour made for Swift. As revealed in The New York Times, merchandising became so in demand that Swift opened stadium sales booths a day early in some markets to sell T-shirts, hoodies and Christmas ornaments to fans, even those without tickets.
The nearly three-hour concert film “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” released in October 2023 through a direct distribution deal with AMC Entertainment, was another massive money spinner, generating $261 million in worldwide grosses, according to Box Office Mojo, before a streaming deal with Disney+. According to The New York Times, a 256-page hardcover tour book released last month through Target stores sold 814,000 print copies in its first two days on sale.
A Financially Astute Family
Breaking down Swift’s wealth further, Forbes relays that Swift earned an estimated $190 million after taxes from the first leg of the Eras tour and another $35 million from the first two weeks of screenings of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” movie. The publication estimated that about $500 million of Swift’s fortune was cash from music royalties and touring, another $500 million was from the increasing value of her music catalog – much of which she has been rerecording and releasing – and $125 million of her net worth comes from real estate.
It helps that the singer-songwriter comes from an astute, financially minded family. According to Harper’s Bazaar, her father, Scott Swift, worked as a financial advisor, forming the wealth management firm the Swift Group under Merrill Lynch. He moved his business to Hendersonville, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, to help his daughter’s career.
