Golfer Craig Parry's mansion ranks among inner-west Sydney's most expensive with $10m sale

Veteran golfer Craig Parry has sold his waterfront mansion for almost $10 million, ranking among the inner west’s most expensive sales and setting an Abbotsford suburb record.

The unconditional exchange comes more than a week before an expressions of interest campaign was set to close to a buyer who already owns impressive real estate in the inner west.

Parry is downsizing from the waterfront mansion to the northern beaches, where he bought a waterfront weekender in Newport in 2003 for $3.2 million and the following year added to the holding, buying the house behind it for $835,000.

The sale result through Tim Le, of BlackDiamondz, tops Abbotsford’s previous $9.5 million record set in 2017 when spiritual healers Mina and Yvon Attia, of the Celebrate Freedom ministry, sold the house next door to Parry’s to Yangyang Tu, the 27-year-old director of the Northern Territory cattle farm Tutee Farms.

Records show Parry bought the waterfront house in 1994 for $825,000 after he had unsuccessfully tried to buy in the exclusive eastern suburbs.

As The Age reported in 2002: “I went over there in my usual attire, you know, T-shirt, shorts and thongs, and I went into this [agent’s] office and said: ‘I’m looking for waterfront property.’ He just looked me up and down and he said: ‘You haven’t got the money.’ Which was a big mistake because I bought a waterfront property that day.”

The double block of 1700 square metres was rebuilt about 20 years ago into a three-level residence with a home theatre, multiple studies, steam room, sauna, pool, spa, putting green, marina berth, jetty, pontoon, slipway and one of the suburb’s few tennis courts.

The inner-west record was reset in 2017 at $12.2 million when hotelier Rod Salmon sold his Drummoyne waterfront mansion, topping the $11.8 million set when the daughter of billionaire Kerr Neilson, Paris Neilson and her husband Todd Buncombe bought on the Balmain East waterfront in 2014.

Birchgrove has claimed three waterfront sales of more than $11 million, the highest of which was $11.75 million two years ago when property developer Thomas Tosich sold to healthcare boss Jayne Shaw.