Meet Sydney’s teenage trophy home shoppers spending millions – in cash

As HSC exams draw to an end this week, Title Deeds looks back on how some of last year’s students are faring in the housing affordability crisis.

Congratulations to Guan Cheng Tao, the former St Joseph’s College Hunters Hill student who last year made the HSC Distinguished Achievers List. A year later he has bought his first Sydney home – finance-free.

His parents Bai Yun Niu and Yong Sheng Tao must be proud, so much so that they may have even chipped in on the $19.75 million residence.

Tao’s new digs, settling to his name this week, are not quite the student accommodation many readers once knew. Instead of beds on milk crates and door frames as clothes hangers, this is a grand six-bedroom, four-bathroom mansion in Bellevue Hill with a pool and self-contained quarters.

Pocketing the proceeds is investment banker and former Rothschild managing director Colin Richardson and his wife Helen, who had listed it with Laing+Simmons’ D’Leanne Lewis.

Richardson bought it in 1998 for $1,485,000 back when he was recently appointed adviser to the billionaire pastoralist Kahlbetzer family, then headed by the late agribusinessman John Kahlbetzer. It’s a role he maintains for Kahlbetzer’s sons Markus and Johnny.

Still with our teenage cash buyers, the corporate interests of 19-year-old Xinyue Xue has paid $7.9 million for a whole-floor apartment in Point Piper sold recently by Raine & Horne’s Mark Yeats.

Xue’s purchase of the three-bedroom garden apartment comes just a few months after she also purchased her first home, a starter’s pad in Chatswood’s Altura building for $2.5 million.

Xue is coming from Mosman where her mother Maggie Ying Yu owns a $20 million mansion she bought in 2019 from her brother-in-law Wilson Hui Xiong Xue, known as the “shoe king” of China and was until 2018 honorary president of the Beijing-linked lobby group Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China.

Incidentally, Xue’s purchase comes as Yu and her uncle Wilson have jointly established a not-for-profit organisation called Bridge & Town aimed at promoting reconciliation and education between cultural groups.

Not everyone paying cash is so young. Georgia Gazal is 31, and has paid $9.6 million for a four-bedroom house with a pool in Rose Bay.

Records for the sale have been wiped from property portals, but it was listed with Bradfield BadgerFox’s Mark Daley on behalf of colorectal surgeon Professor Michael Solomon and his wife Amanda.

It wasn’t Gazal’s first home. The daughter of rag trader Michael Gazal was in her mid-20s when in 2019 she purchased a terrace in Paddington for $2.9 million, cash. It was sold recently for $4,825,000 by Ray White’s Randall Kemp and Jack Taylor.

Of course, not all of this week’s Millennials are buyers. The Terrey Hills luxury acreage Angophora Lodge owned by 25-year-old Yinqi Bao is back up for sale through BlackDiamondz’ Monika Tu and Phillip Sheh.

Bao was just 21 when she bought it for $10 million cash on Christmas Eve in 2020.

The guide is about $20 million thanks to a lavish refurbishment and with encouragement from last year’s record $24.5 million purchase of the nearby Charlotte Park by star cricketers Alyssa Healy and Mitchell Starc.

Northbridge’s $25m buyer

Any interest rate moves, or lack thereof, are unlikely to worry Junjie Ma, who at 34 has purchased the $24.8 million Northbridge home of Jill and Andrew Swan, head of Asian equities at MAN GLG.

Ma is the director and owner of Ruizean Holdings, the local arm of a London-headquartered financial services company.

Her new digs is an eight-bedroom residence designed by Tobias Partners that was commissioned by the Swans.

It was listed a year ago with Forbes’s Ken Jacobs with bullish hopes in the high $20 million range.

At Lowes

Finally, Stephanie and Jeffrey Mueller, the latter of whom owns Lowes retail empire with his sister Linda Penn, have paid $38.5 million for a contemporary house in Rose Bay, no finance required.

The Muellers’ new digs was a six-year construction project for property developers and investors Maxine and David Pacanowski to a design by Studio Johnston architectural firm with a pool, internal lift, a central courtyard and sensational harbour views. It previously traded in 2015 for $6,825,000.

Mueller and Penn are the children of the late entrepreneur Hans Mueller, a refugee from Europe with an inspiring, rags-to-riches story. He arrived in Australia in the wake of World War II with no money and few prospects, but managed to open his first menswear store in 1948 and in 1981 bought the retail chain Lowes.

By the time Mueller died in 2018 Lowes had 200 stores nationwide.

No sign yet what the Muellers plan to do with their Vaucluse home of more than 30 years.