Former Test cricketer Shane Watson scores $10.5 million sale on Bronte house

Former Test cricketer Shane Watson and his wife Lee have scored a solid win on their Bronte home after it sold for more than $10.5 million.

The sale comes just three weeks after the couple listed the contemporary hillside home given plans to move to Brisbane.

Watson, billed the highest paid Australian cricketer of recent years by Forbes, paid a bullish $9 million for the property three years ago when sold by funds manager Aaron Rowe and his wife Tracey McKinley.

At the time they bought it Watson was trading up from the Caringbah South waterfront home he sold shortly before Christmas in 2014 for $3,925,000.

Ashley Bierman, of Ray White Double Bay, and co-agent D’Leanne Lewis, of Laing+Simmons Double Bay, were gagged from revealing the sale price, saying only that the vendors were “really happy with the result”.

The property was launched with a $10 million guide that was raised to $10.5 million a week ago.

​More than 70 groups inspected it before it sold and an independent source said it sold for above the $10.5 million hopes but fell short of $11 million.

Watson, who heralds from Queensland, said in a statement that continuing travel and family commitments meant they were looking to share their time between Sydney and Brisbane.​

The couple is expected to buy a Sydney bolthole in the new year.

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The star allrounder retired from international cricket last year to captain the Sydney Thunder. He married former Fox Sports presenter Lee Furlong in 2010 and the couple has two children, Will and Matilda.

The couple’s five-bedroom home with a swimming pool and ocean views has done well on the back of Bronte’s soaring values of recent years, with median values up 42 per cent in the three years they have owned it.