Billionaires of Ben Buckler set to swoop on $30m worth of apartment blocks

The late holocaust survivor Naftali Kirsch and his late widow Rose arrived in Sydney penniless more than 70 years ago, but using what family describe as his building skills and her brains they built a property portfolio that is now expected to capture the interest of a who’s who of Sydney’s billionaire class.

A block of six apartments and a duplex next door on the Ben Buckler headland hit the market this week carrying price tags of $15 million each, making it an impressive legacy for the generations of Kirsches who have retained the North Bondi property ever since.

Steven Zoellner, of Laing+Simmons Double Bay, expects at least one of the properties to be sold as knock-down rebuild and the apartment block potentially turned into a far more glamorous private residence, and reveals just how far values have soared in recent years as Sydney’s wealthy turn their attention on the oceanfront neighbourhood.

Naftali arrived in Australia from Poland in 1949 and Rose arrived three years later penniless and stateless from Egypt. While they both spoke eight languages between them, neither of spoke English when they met.

Naftali, a plumber, purchased his first of the two clifftop properties in 1965, paying £50,000 for a cottage that he later knocked down and rebuilt into what is now a block of six two-bedroom apartments.

Records show the duplex next door was already built in 1971 when the couple purchased it for $33,750.

Family members say that at the time they were purchased no-one wanted to buy in Bondi, and Sydney’s wealthy preferred to be in Bellevue Hill and Vaucluse.

Over the years the iconic beach has drawn a who’s who of Sydney’s establishment, from James Packer, who sold his bachelor pad for $29 million in 2018, to heiress Ginia Rinehart in her almost $15 million penthouse in the Bondi Pacific, nursing home scion Mark Moran in his $11.5 million apartment consolidation, and Westfield heiress Monica Saunders-Weinberg with a slew of local investment houses.

But it is the Ben Buckler neighbourhood that has become known as the billionaire’s preferred home address thanks to the likes of Afterpay’s Nick Molnar, heiress Dr Orna Triguboff and rich lister Will Vicars.

Molnar holds the North Bondi record after he paid about $27 million for his consolidation of a triplex on the clifftop at Ben Buckler, adding the 1970s block of apartments next door for $18.5 million earlier this year.

In May, Dr Triguboff, the eldest daughter of Meriton founder Harry Triguboff, purchased a block of four apartments for $11.5 million, and Vicars has an extensive portfolio of local property interests, including an art deco block he bought last year for $11.3 million.