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Sheila Johnson has sold her home in Arlington, Virginia, for $3.15 million in a private sale, the listing agent told Axios.
The property has five bedrooms and seven bathrooms across more than 8,000 square feet, with an exercise room, a game room and a three-car garage. The agent declined to identify the buyer.
Johnson co-founded Black Entertainment Television with her then husband Robert Johnson in 1980 and became the first Black woman in the United States to reach billionaire status when the network was sold to Viacom for $3 billion in 2001. Forbes values her at about $1.3 billion.
She is chief executive of Salamander Hotels and Resorts and a shareholder in three Washington sports franchises, the Capitals, the Mystics and the Wizards.
The sale is the second Virginia property she has disposed of in three years. She sold Salamander Farm in Wellington in 2023 for $21.7 million, having listed it at $35 million. She and Robert Johnson had bought that estate for $940,500 in 2000, and she added surrounding parcels at roughly $3 million each following their divorce in 2002, which was reported to have produced a settlement of around $400 million.
The house sale comes as her hotel group makes a change in Washington. Axios reported that the Salamander property in Southwest D.C. has recently rebranded as a Marriott hotel, citing the Washington Business Journal.
Johnson acquired that hotel, formerly the Mandarin Oriental Washington D.C., in partnership with the investment firm Henderson Park in 2022, and put her own name on it. Neither she nor Henderson Park has publicly explained the rebranding.
Her principal property remains Salamander Middleburg, the 340-acre resort in Virginia horse country that she opened in 2013 after more than a decade of planning and local opposition. It is the only Forbes Five-Star resort in the Washington area.
Johnson was raised in Illinois, trained as a classical violinist and taught music before the launch of BET. She has built the hotel group over two decades into a collection of properties across Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, Jamaica and Anguilla.
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