Chinese shipping magnate Shannian Huang sells Hyde Park penthouse for $14.5m

Chinese shipping magnate Shannian Huang has copped a multimillion-dollar loss on his penthouse atop The Residence at Hyde Park after he sold it on Saturday morning for $14.5 million to a developer.

The two-storey “Sulman” penthouse set a record for the building when the founder of shipbuilding giant Shanghai Zhouji bought it new at the start of the property boom in 2013 for $17 million, making it the second most expensive apartment sale recorded in Sydney.

In the six years since, Sydney’s prestige apartment market has skyrocketed, with high-end records smashed first by the $60 million sale of an apartment in Crown Resorts tower at Barangaroo to James Packer and again last month when the penthouse and sub-penthouse in Lendlease’s yet-to-be-built Tower 1 development at Barangaroo South sold for $140 million.

Mr Huang’s level 23 apartment – complete with private lift and rooftop swimming pool – was listed last year with bullish $26 million hopes but it never sold, and the listing was handed to Pillinger’s Brad Pillinger in more recent months with buyers told it carried $21 million hopes.

Pillinger declined to comment when approached, but multiple independent sources say it sold for $14.5 million to a local developer.

The Shanghai-based Mr Huang is not the only well-heeled buyer from China to buy in the prized College Street tower.

China’s “Red Princess” Bao Bao Wang, whose late grandfather Wan Li was vice-premier and chairman of the National People’s Congress, bought the adjoining penthouse in the name of a local representative, Jun Yang, in 2015 for $10.5 million – $1 million higher than the nearest offer.

It was sold 18 months later with no sale price revealed on official transfer documents.

On Saturday, property records revealed Pilot Energy chairman Wilson Hui Xiong Xue, the self-described “shoe king” of China, had taken a 15 per cent loss on his Mosman trophy home after he quietly offloaded it on Friday for $20 million to Ying Yu, a 37-year-old from China’s Fujian province and director of registered corporate entities Panda College, Join ABC Culture and Dynasty Investment.

Mr Xue, who is honorary president of the Beijing-linked Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China, bought the seven-bedroom mansion last year for $23,733,800 from former Foxtel chief executive Richard Freudenstein and his wife Jane after it had spent only three weeks on the market.

China’s youngest female billionaire “Nancy” Zetian Zhang sold her penthouse near The Rocks in the Stamford Residences for $13.5 million early this year, pocketing $2.7 million less than she paid for it new in 2015.

Ms Zhang had paid $16.2 million six months before she married China’s e-commerce billionaire and JD.com chief executive Richard Qiangdong Liu, incurring more than $1 million in stamp duty charges.

The Vaucluse waterfront mansion that was already the Sydney home of her husband Mr Liu, has also since been sold.

Mr Liu’s business associate Huang Qiaorong bought it for $36 million in 2015, incurring $2.5 million in stamp duty at the time, and it was sold for $38.8 million three years later.

Early this year updated settlement records on the Bayview house sold by high-profile property developer Richard Mingfeng Gu, revealed he had sold it for a $1 million loss.

The modernist landmark Walker House was bought by Mr Gu’s  AXF Group in 2017 for $7.95 million and resold for $6.95 million.

Mr Gu, whose AXF Group is the Australian arm of Shanghai-based Xiangfu company headed up by his father Gu Qi Liang, is best known in trophy home circles for defaulting on the $19.8 million purchase of Cate Blanchett’s Hunters Hill mansion Bulwarra in 2015 due to capital controls out of China.

As of July 2017 foreign buyers have been slugged an 8 per cent stamp duty surcharge on all property purchases in NSW, followed more recently by the introduction of a 2 per cent land tax surcharge.

However, prestige agents have pointed to capital controls coming from China and stricter lending criteria by the Australian banks to explain a drop-off in foreign buyer numbers in recent years.

In the most recently released Foreign Investment Review Board annual report, figures show foreign buyer real estate approvals totalled $12.5 billion in the 2018 financial year – a drop of $17.5 billion from the 12 months prior.