Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes pads out his property portfolio by another $25m

The property empire of tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes had already become the stuff of legend among Sydney property watchers by the time he amassed a portfolio of more than $240 million last year, but a slew of recent high-end purchases has swelled his property assets by more than $25 million.

Luxury weekenders on the Newport waterfront and Pittwater’s Scotland Island and yet another farm and heritage house in the Southern Highlands have all been widely tipped as the latest acquisitions this year of Cannon-Brookes and his wife Annie.

However, unlike Cannon-Brookes’ many purchases of previous years that were lodged in his own name  or in corporate entities directly held by him, his most recent purchases have been cloaked in secrecy and a spokeswoman for the couple offered no comment for this story.

Chief among their latest acquisitions is the 15-room Cooliatta mansion built  in the 1880s in Burradoo in the Southern Highlands for $3.9 million, complete with what the National Register of Big Trees says is the largest cedar deodar tree in the country.

Somewhat fortuitously, at the same time as Cooliatta was on the market, the 27 hectare farm adjoining it was also listed for $7 million by Duncan Hill Property, and sold in March amid widespread talk it is to be consolidated with Cooliatta by the Cannon-Brookes family. The sale of the farm is yet to settle, and Duncan Hill would not disclose the sale result, but it is expected to settle for less than $7 million.

That makes it five substantial properties owned by Mr Cannon-Brookes in the Southern Highlands given his Joadja farm, the $5.35 million weekender Rosehill Farm and their Kangaloon farm, Widgee Waa.

The couple are also behind the purchase of a $6.8 million house on 2600 square metres on the Newport waterfront, just a few doors from their Paloma trophy home they bought for $24.5 million last June from model Jennifer Hawkins and her husband Jake Wall.

And across the water on Scotland Island, the Bangalla estate was a well-known purchase by the Cannon-Brookes family from investment banker Alistair Jeffrey for $8 million, topping the island’s former $7 million high set in 2013 by Singaporean billionaire Philip Ng’s Far East Organisation.

The ownership of all three recent house sales is hidden behind separate corporate entities set up in recent months by Double Bay lawyers Gary and Jacques Kosmin, of Kosmin & Associates, and each with no financing required.

Records are nothing new to the co-founder and co-chief executive of software giant Atlassian. He set a national house price high of $100 million in 2018 when he bought the Fairfax family’s Fairwater estate in Point Piper, set a Woollahra house price high of $18.5 million last year, matched the Southern Highlands record of $15 million in 2019. He holds the northern beaches record thanks to his purchase of Paloma.

Cannon-Brookes’s penchant for property is chump change compared with the $1 billion worth of green energy investments and his personal wealth estimated at $20.18 billion by the Australian Financial Review Rich List 200, on which he was ranked Australia’s third wealthiest person in May.