Millennial multimillionaire William Wu goes on $50m property buying spree

William Wenhao Wu is only 28 but that hasn’t stopped him from snapping up more than $50 million worth of real estate in the past 12 months, all of it in the well-heeled eastern suburbs.

Likely helping to fund it all is his mother, Jing Wang, who heads up the Chinese-backed property developer Mayrin Group, of which Wu has been a director since he entered the workforce six years ago.

And if his mother’s property acquisitions are added to the family portfolio, the total real estate spend of recent years is almost $100 million.

Vaucluse is clearly the family’s preferred address given that the family home was purchased by Ms Wang in 2018 for $20.8 million from hotelier Marcus Levy and his wife Vanessa Sanchez-Levy.

And early this year Ms Wang bought again, paying more than $25 million for a waterfront house on Vaucluse’s Carrara Road from Margaret and Richard Prokop, directors of scaffolding group Natform.

Wu, whose first home in Sydney was a one-bedroom pad on the waterfront at Barangaroo in 2015 for $2.39 million, upgraded to the east a year ago, paying $11.08 million for the Bellevue Hill mansion of developer Barrie Nesbitt and his wife Emma.

A few months later Wu lodged a caveat on the Herman family’s Vaucluse home for about $13 million on a delayed settlement, and in February bought a Vaucluse Road property in a company name for about $7.4 million for its good view.

More recently, a 1920s Vaucluse manor with a Burley Katon Halliday extension at the rear was sold by dentists Gloria Shih and Lawrence Lau last month for about $20 million, more than double the $9.3 million that the property last traded for back in 2015 when it was sold by Julianna Deeb and Clayton Utz partner Steven Klimt — and with no council records of any major renovation since.

Wu declined to comment for this story but the principal of the Ray White Double Bay office Elliott Placks said on his behalf that the houses have all been purchased for the use of the Wang family.

The portfolio is already set to be culled in the coming weeks, however. The Bellevue Hill residence Wu bought a year ago from the Point Piper-bound Nesbitt family has scored a major renovation and update of its interiors.

The six-bedroom mansion with a swimming pool on 1168 square metres is set to hit the market through Placks and his Ray White team.