Businessman Michael Zammit sells Point Piper home for $36m

Gail and Michael Zammit, the student accommodation developer, have sold their Point Piper home for $36 million in the highest free-standing house sale of the year.

The Wolseley Road residence is set on what is arguably Sydney’s most exclusive patch of sand at Lady Martins Beach and was listed for $40 million in September.

Selling agent Bill Malouf, of LJ Hooker Double Bay, declined to comment.

But independent sources told Domain the home sold last night for $36 million.

Mr Malouf took the home to market after having sold the couple into a beachfront apartment on Seven Shillings Beach for about $18 million. The vendors were philanthropist, pub investor and former Sydney lord mayor Nelson Meers, AO, and his wife Carole.

Mr Malouf also refused to comment on the Meers’ sale, but Point Piper locals are already talking.

The Zammits have undertaken a major renovation of the three-level Wolseley Road residence since they bought it in 1998 for $3.6 million from medicos Kai Tai Yeung and Connie Chun-Man Leung.

At the time the Zammits were trading over from Centennial Park where they sold their former mansion for $2.5 million to Shari-Lea Hitchcock, the mistress of the late cardboard king Richard Pratt.

Their beachfront residence comes with five bedrooms  and a vast parents’ retreat, with a separate home office, formal and informal living areas, internal lift, swimming pool and a boat house.

It is one of a dozen houses that share the north-facing beach alongside the trophy homes of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, car dealer Neville Crichton and businessman Stanley Roth.

The $36 million sale is the highest free-standing house sale of the year. Although the families of the co-founders of Katies sold Edgewater on the Point Piper waterfront for $95 million, the residence is a duplex and strata-titled.