A Marrickville boy at heart: Anthony Albanese's property buys from 1990 to now

If the Labor Party faithful have their way come the next federal election in 2022, party leader Anthony Albanese will be the next prime minister of Australia.

For the Labor leader such a victory would also likely mean moving to the official PM’s residence in Sydney, Kirribilli House, and The Lodge in Canberra, making it the first time he has lived outside of the inner west.

Albo, as he is affectionately known, comes from Camperdown, more specifically 41 Pyrmont Bridge Road, where his late single mother Maryanne raised him in a council-owned housing estate.

In early 1990, Albanese was all of 26 when he debuted on property title records as a “political party official” buying a two-bedroom semi in Marrickville for $146,000. He has come a long way in the party since then, but remains firmly entrenched in Marrickville’s riverside neighbourhood.

In 1995, Albanese went to work as a senior adviser to then-premier Bob Carr and sold the Marrickville semi so he and his then-girlfriend, Marrickville deputy mayor Carmel Tebbutt, could buy a house up the road for $242,000. They did well on the purchase, making a capital gain of almost $200,000 when, as a newly elected federal MP six years later, he sold it.

The darlings of Labor’s left married in 2000 and bought a double-fronted worker’s cottage in Newtown for $646,000 – well above Newtown’s then-median of $340,000. It was a brief stay in the grand scheme of things. Six years after they bought in Newtown they sold for $755,000 to return to Marrickville.

The Federation bungalow with a contemporary rear extension and a swimming pool that the recently separated couple bought in 2006 for $997,500 – about 200 metres up the road from his first buy – remains his primary residence.

Albanese has shown he shares that very Australian penchant for property investment, buying an investment house down the road from his Marrickville home in 2012 for $1,115,000 and another investment in Dulwich Hill in late 2015 for $1,175,000.

The Labor Party lost the May 18 election – due, many claim, to its housing market policies which are now under review – but Albanese kept his safe Labor seat for the seventh election in a row. Four months ago he was elected unopposed as the party’s leader.