Bronte house sells for $23.3m to blockchain entrepreneurs, smashes suburb record by $5m

A house in Bronte widely rumoured to have sold recently for a record high of $18 million actually sold for almost $5.5 million more to returning Singaporean expats and blockchain start-up co-founders Joanne Way Yee Huynh and Dorjee Sun.

The $23.3 million sale has shocked local property and industry watchers given it is an out-on-line result secured a week after the house hit the market with a bullish $18 million guide.

The Agency’s Ben Collier has remained tight-lipped on the result and buyer, leaving it to independent sources to reveal the result has set a house record for the Eastern Beaches.

A caveat on title reveals the purchase by Joanne Huynh, who has no property in her name nor is registered on any corporate filings in Australia, but who is well-established in Singapore’s start-up community as a co-founder of blockchain company Perlin, where she is in charge of strategy and finance.

Husband Dorjee Sun is Perlin’s chief executive, and is the founder of Carbon Conservation, which works to tackle the problems of deforestation in Indonesia, as chronicled in the 2008 award-winning documentary, The Burning Season, narrated by Hugh Jackman.

The North Sydney Boys High and University of New South Wales alumnus was also named by TIME Magazine a TIME Hero of the Environment in 2009, and recently honoured with an Earth Day Award by the African Rainforest Conservancy.

The purchase by the returning expats tops Bronte’s $17.9 million record set last year by green energy entrepreneur Carl Prins, and follows Mr Collier’s sale a month ago of the hillside Bronte home of Simon Baker and Rebecca Rigg for $17 million.

The Eastern Beaches house price high was previously $22 million, set in June by the sale of the North Bondi home of interior designer Michalle Smith and architect Alex Smith to businesswoman Lenka Dransfield.

Huynh and Sun’s new Sydney home has five bedrooms and is set on Bronte Marine Drive, opposite the surf break, on 485 square metres.

It was last owned by head of private equity firm Colinton Capital Partners, Simon Moore, who purchased it five years ago for $8.05 million.

The deal translates to more than $48,000 per square metre.

Mr Moore and his partner Lucinda Cowdroy are trading up to Vaucluse where they purchased the $35 million mansion of Hong Kong arts patron Yang Yang.

Mr Moore also scored on his Queensland getaway on the weekend when his Sunshine Beach house sold under the hammer for $14.25 million through Tim McSweeney, of Tom Offermann Real Estate.

The Frank Macchia-designed house on Sunshine Beach went to auction on Sunday, the day after Mr Moore’s Bronte house was scheduled to go to auction in Sydney.