How billionaire Harry Triguboff went from first-home buyer to property tycoon

Long before Harry Triguboff earned the moniker “Highrise Harry” or scored billing as the richest property tycoon in the country, he was just another first-home buyer grappling to enter the market when Sydney was at the peak of a housing boom.

It was 1960 and Australia’s median property values had skyrocketed 700 per cent in the post-war years since 1944, putting the median Sydney house price at a high of £4000.

In Roseville, a subdivision of 33 vacant lots owned by the Housing Commission included a 643-square-metre block, bought for £4025 by a textile engineer born in China of Russian parents, Harry Triguboff.

The conveyancing was witnessed by his late solicitor brother Joseph Travers, who had anglicised his surname. It settled the following year, three weeks before Triguboff turned 28. Also that year, 14 years after he arrived in Australia, he was granted residency.

Triguboff’s efforts to pay off his first home is an oft-quoted success story for first-home battlers: the developer owned a taxi fleet and supplemented his income with a milk run in Chatswood.

However the builder he’d hired was thrown off the job and, in classic Triguboff style, he finished building it himself. That blonde-brick house on Arrunga Avenue remains standing today, still owned by the White family who bought it from Triguboff in 1969 for $34,250.

Triguboff’s success has been replicated since. He next bought land in Tempe in 1963, with a partner, and developed it into eight apartments; followed by a site on Meriton Street, Gladesville in 1965 on which he built 18 apartments.

His company, Meriton, dates back to 1963 and was named after that first solo property development foray in Gladesville. Today it has built one in 10 Sydney apartments, and some of the tallest residential towers in Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast – a total of 75,000 apartments across the eastern states.

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There have been hiccups in the decades since, most notably in 1969 when his company went public. Having sold shares for 60 cents each, he bought them all back in 1973 at $1.30 a share.

Then there was the property crash of 1974-75 which reportedly left Triguboff with hundreds of unsold apartments and a $30 million debt with Citicorp. By 1976 he had repaid that debt, and resolved never to borrow again.

Sydney’s obsession with real estate has proved a windfall for Triguboff. He became a billionaire in 1997 and was ranked second in this year’s Australian Financial Review Rich List, worth $12.77 billion.

The 85-year-old and his wife, Rhonda, have been Vaucluse locals since 1983 when their waterfront home was bought by Meriton for $4.1 million, and next door added in 1998 for $6 million.

The amalgamated 5200-square-metre block is one of the largest, privately held waterfronts in Vaucluse, eclipsing Justin Hemmes’ Hermitage and fellow billionaire Leon Kamenev’a $80 million amalgamated block.