Charlie Lankston

Charlie Lankston is executive editor at Realtor.com, where she focuses on entertainment-driven stories anchored in property, homes, and the people who live in them. Her coverage blends celebrity, royals, and true-crime narratives with detailed reporting on residences, prices, and the circumstances that make those properties newsworthy. She previously worked at DailyMail.com as an associate editor covering news, celebrities, travel, lifestyle, and the British royals, and she has been part of a Daytime Emmy Award–winning entertainment news program.

Celebrity real estate

Much of Lankston’s current work centers on high-profile homes and the shifting fortunes of the people who own or occupy them.

She routinely covers celebrity listings and price moves, such as Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr putting their Los Angeles home on the market and Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson listing their Martha’s Vineyard property. In these pieces she details the asking price, notable features, and the couple’s history with the home, framing the real estate transaction as part of a larger career and life story. She takes the same approach to market updates, as in her coverage of Hulk Hogan’s Florida mansion, where a multimillion-dollar price cut becomes a way to explore the evolution of the property and its place in the wrestler’s public image.

Even when the setting is less glamorous, such as Sam Worthington’s decision to sell his belongings and live out of his car at a pivotal point in his career, she treats the living arrangement as central to understanding the pressures and choices behind a celebrity’s trajectory.

Royals and their residences

Lankston brings a long-standing interest in royal families to her property coverage, using homes and estates as lenses on their public and private lives. Her reporting on Prince William and Princess Kate’s rental of Forest Lodge focuses on the eye-catching rent attached to the residence and what that figure reveals about the couple’s lifestyle and the expectations around royal housing. She also covers lower-profile but high-friction stories involving royal-adjacent figures, such as neighbors accusing Pippa Middleton of altering a public footpath near her home and sparking a local controversy. In these pieces she links planning disputes, access issues, and property decisions to questions of privilege, community relations, and how royals and their relatives are perceived beyond official engagements. Her earlier work on the British royals informs this angle, allowing her to connect estate details and local tensions to a broader pattern in how royal residences become flashpoints.

Unique homes and design stories

Alongside celebrity and royal coverage, Lankston devotes significant attention to properties that stand out for their architecture or artistic significance.

Her profile of David Hockney’s Los Angeles residence traces how the artist turned a modest home into a living work of art, focusing on design choices and daily routines that blur the line between studio and domestic space. She treats the house not just as an asset but as a creative environment, describing how layout, color, and curated clutter express Hockney’s sensibility.

In a different vein, her feature on a midcentury modern “glass tent” mansion in Montecito highlights the property’s dramatic design, expansive glass, and high asking price, positioning it within a market for statement homes that attract attention as much for their look as their location. These stories show her interest in how architecture, interior choices, and setting shape the identity of a home and the kind of owner it is likely to attract.

Crime, controversy, and the homes behind the headlines

Lankston frequently reports on properties that sit at the center of darker narratives, treating the home itself as a key character in the story. Her coverage of Jeffrey Epstein’s former New York mansion, for instance, details its high valuation and transformation following legal settlements involving Virginia Giuffre, using renovation plans and ownership changes to chart how a notorious address is being reshaped after scandal.

In a piece on the missing mother of Savannah Guthrie, she focuses on disturbing new evidence found at the woman’s home, tying specific locations and items within the property to the progress of the investigation. She takes a similar approach to the death of actor Patrick Muldoon inside his Beverly Hills residence, where the circumstances of his passing are closely linked to the setting and layout of the home.

Across these stories she gives readers both the narrative beats of the case and concrete details about the property - its rooms, history, and market context - showing how physical spaces become inseparable from the human events that unfold within them.

Across her work at Realtor.com, Lankston’s distinguishing feature is the way she treats real estate as the organizing principle for entertainment, royal, and true-crime stories, using specific homes and living arrangements to make broader narratives tangible. She combines accessible, tabloid-ready subjects with precise reporting on valuations, design, and ownership, giving each piece a clear sense of place and stakes while staying grounded in the property at the center of the story.