Ant Anstead Quietly Sold O.C. Home Amid a 'Change in My Personal Life I'm Really Pleased About' (Exclusive)

Ant Anstead has sold his Laguna Beach home, Temple House, in an off-market deal, after listing and un-listing the property earlier this year.

"Temple is sold," the British car expert, 44, tells PEOPLE while chatting about his new docu-series Radford Reborn (streaming April 14 on Speedvision). Anstead originally listed the beachside cottage in October 2022 for $3.3 million, then removed it from the market after having a change of heart in February, he confirmed to PEOPLE at the time.

Now, he's officially let go of the property amid "a change in my personal life," he says.

He received an off-market offer from an interested buyer and "it came at the right time, for another property and a change in my personal life that I'm really pleased about," Anstead says. "So I was like, yeah. I made the call there and then."

Anstead has been dating Renee Zellweger, 53, since 2021 when they met on the set of his Discovery+ show, Celebrity IOU: Joyride. The couple have kept their relationship mostly private and, speaking with PEOPLE this week, Anstead doesn't get into specifics about the other "property" he found that encouraged him to sell Temple House. Though he confirms, "I'm going to absolutely keep a base in and around Laguna."

Zellweger listed her Los Angeles area home in October 2021 with an asking price of $6 million. A source told PEOPLE a month earlier that "Renée spends a lot of time with Ant in Laguna Beach" and "seems to love her new beach life." That was echoed by another source last month who said the pair have been living together in the Orange County enclave.

The longtime TV host also shared that he initially put the home up for sale because "I actually spent very little time there and then took it off [the market] and thought, actually I might [spend time there.]"

He started doing renovations on the property in order to make it suit his needs and those of his blended family, which includes children Amelie, 19, and Archie, 16, from his first marriage, and son Hudson, 3, whom he shares with his ex-wife, HGTV star Christina Hall.

He credits "Murphy's Law" for bringing the perfect buyer to him only after he'd done significant work on the house.

"I really love the guys that have bought it," he says. "I actually met with them, because I was so emotionally attached to that house and I had a really grand vision for it. I didn't accept the offer until I met them, but when I met them, I was like, 'Actually, yeah, you guys are the right people for Temple.'"

Anstead purchased Temple House in June 2021 following his split from Hall and called it "the house of my dreams" at the time.

"For me, it served as a sanctuary for that period, and that period's over," he says of his post-split journey of recovery. "I'm in a really fantastic place. I feel very, very blessed to be where I am now, privately. For that purpose, Temple did its job."