A real estate chain worth $56m stretching from Bronte to Bellevue Hill

A real estate chain of three deals by the one agent stretching from Bronte to Bellevue Hill was pulled off on the weekend, totalling more than $56 million.

Real estate chains are often regarded as the holy grail among selling agents because the domino effect multiplies their commission on a series of transactions involving sellers buying property from a seller who is buying another property, all through the same agent and within the same timeframe.

At the centre of the latest chain is the Bellevue Hill mansion of property developer “MJ” Martono Jaya Kusuma, founder of Indonesian mobile telco Nexian, and his wife Rosana, which sold on the weekend for just shy of $24 million.

D’Leanne Lewis of Laing+Simmons Double Bay had a guide of $18 million when it hit the market in March.

Architect Simon Hanson of Bureau SRH was commissioned to design the house after the Kusumas purchased the property – then known as the Rose Garden house – in 2016 for $7 million.

Ms Lewis declined to comment on the sale, but eastern suburbs agents were spruiking the deal by Monday as one of three deals in an impressive chain all tied together by Ms Lewis.

At the top of the chain, sources say, the Kusuma family have bought a  three-lot site on up the road for about $16.5 million to create a 1400-square-metre consolidation set between Buller Street and Victoria Road of houses sold by Ronit and Yoav Mark Lewis, the latter of whom is chairman of financial service firm YML Group.

The Kusuma family is expected to undertake another major rebuild on the site to designs by their preferred architect, Simon Hanson, to create a family compound.

At the other end of the chain, the buyer of the Kusuma home is the managing director of Chemist Warehouse, Tony Bassaly, and his partner Angela Ocariz, who bought on the back of the sale of their Bronte home for about $16 million.

The sale of the Bassaly home in Bronte is expected to set a new per-square-metre record when it settles at close to $45,000 per square metre for the 350-square-metre property.

Bassaly purchased the beachside house – next door to the former home of actor Heath Ledger – in 2017 for $9.4 million from French expat Michael Trocherie-Rey, founder of the food and beverage chain Wine Connection.

Real estate chains are a rarity in Sydney property circles but are common in England where the conveyancing process is much longer, and people prefer to do simultaneous exchanges, says Darren Curtis, who previously worked in London’s prestige market in Notting Hill before he moved to Australia in 2006 to join Christie’s International.

“In Australia, it doesn’t really happen because people prefer to buy before selling, perhaps with a delayed settlement,” Mr Curtis said.

“In the UK, the normal method of sale is by private treaty, so there is no deadline, and auctions tend to be held when the owner is in distress, or the bank has already repossessed the property.

“And marketing [in the UK market] is at a minimum because the agency pays for all of it, not the vendor, so it’s often reduced to just being shown on the agency’s website and by posters in the agency window.”