Kerri-Anne Kennerley sells Woollahra home for $22m, smashes suburb record

Television queen Kerri-Anne Kennerley has joined the ranks of Sydney’s trophy home sellers with an off-market sale of her Victorian home in Woollahra for more than $22 million.

The buyer remains a mystery, for now, but is understood to have purchased the property directly given Kennerley’s plans to downsize from the house she shared for more than two decades with her beloved husband John, who died in 2019.

The bullish sale result shocked prestige agents on Wednesday morning, but underscores the strength of Sydney’s high-end market given a dearth of houses for sale and an over-supply of buyers with deep pockets.

Sources close to the deal say the buyer was introduced by former international rugby star-turn-buyer’s agent Craig Wing.

Kennerley was already a familiar face on Australian television screens as the host of the Midday Show when in 1997 John Kennerley purchased it at auction for $2.49 million as a trade up from their nearby Fletcher Street home with space for his beloved train sets.

At the time it was sold by medico couple Richard Young and his wife June, it was known as “Walton” and for decades was known as Waltons Guest House after Annie Hope Gasch purchased it in 1937 for £2350.

“The thought that that house would sell for $22 million in the future would have been incomprehensible when we first lived there,” said Lisa MacDonald, whose parents Richard and June Young bought it in 1977.

“My siblings and I hated it to start with, but grew to love it.  Each bedroom had a kitchenette with a kookaburra stove and there were signs in the bathrooms about cleaning them after use.

“Most of the boarding house extras were removed over time except the pay phone downstairs which dad left as he thought that would be a good money spinner with four children.”

The two-storey residence, set directly behind the Chiswick restaurant in the consular belt, has a swimming pool and a self-contained studio with an internal lift above the three-car garage at the rear.

John was left a quadriplegic in March 2016 after a tragic fall while on a golf weekend at Coffs Harbour that left him bed-ridden and requiring around the clock care for the last three years of his life.

The sale is by far the highest in Woollahra, topping the $18.5 million set last year when tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes purchased the former German consul-general residence on a land size of 2000 square metres that is more than double the 892 square metre parcel of the Kennerley home.

It comes as COVID-19 restrictions have temporarily banned open inspections in NSW, forcing agents to offer only private inspections in an already tight market.

“It also means that agents have time on their hands to marry up the best buyers with the right sellers to see more of these deals done on the quiet,” said Alexander Phillips, of PPD.

“We are offering houses for sale off-market before we go out with marketing more broadly and given the demand are often selling before any advertising goes out,” Phillips said.