Ex-trade minister Andrew Robb sells Cremorne house for more than $4.2 million guide

Former trade minister Andrew Robb and his wife Maureen have defied early expectations of a market correction by selling their Cremorne Point home less than two weeks after it was listed and for more than the $4.2 million guide.

The sale indicates the couple are forging ahead with their plans to downsize closer to the northern beaches, where they sold their Palm Beach property Indigo last October for $4.075 million to chief of Abacus Property Group Steven Sewell and his wife Sarah.

The Robbs bought the four-bedroom house designed by architect Rolf Haefeli in 2018 for $3.985 million when the couple moved to Sydney from Melbourne and following the sale of their former home in Brighton a year earlier for $2.655 million in his former Goldstein electorate.

It was scheduled to go to auction on April 7 but sold on Tuesday morning by Ray White Mosman’s Geoff Smith and Richard Harding.

Mr Smith declined to reveal the sale result but confirmed it had sold above the guide.

The Ray White Lower North Shore office has six auctions scheduled for this Thursday, some of which were originally set to go under the hammer in April but were brought forward.

Louis Christopher, of property analyst SQM Research, was stumped by the top sale result in light of the record jump in unemployment in recent days.

“It’s a very bullish buy and indicates optimism the crisis will pass very soon,” said Christopher. “And certainly as a seller I wouldn’t want to be going to auction any time soon.”

Mr Robb retired as a Liberal minister in 2016 and went to work for businessman Ye Cheng, a member of President Xi Jinping’s advisory body Chinese People’s Consultative Committee.

It was a controversial career choice at the time because Mr Robb is widely credited with being the architect of Australia’s free-trade agreements with China, Japan and South Korea and because Mr Ye also owns Landbridge, which acquired the 99-year lease for the Port of Darwin in 2015, prompting former US president Barack Obama to complain because he hadn’t been warned.

Mr Robb quit his $880,000-a-year job with Mr Ye a year ago.