News Corp’s former finance chief Stacey Brown buys $3.6m Palm Beach digs

News Corp’s former chief financial officer Stacey Brown has had a busy first half of the year. Having packed up her desk at Rupert Murdoch’s local print empire, and handed over the need to sign off on large-scale job cuts, she has decamped to recently purchased digs in Palm Beach.

Brown and her husband Ben Price paid $3.6 million for the hillside residence set on one of the suburb’s dress-circle streets, directly across the road from former trade minister Andrew Robb’s recently sold $4 million weekender.

The off-market purchase coincides with news Brown has further ended her media responsibilities, stepping down from the board of Australian Associated Press, replaced by News Corp Australia’s head of merger and acquisition execution Tim Archer.

It was an off-market purchase by Brown, although local word has it that LJ Hooker Palm Beach’s Peter Robinson handled the deal on behalf of Bernadette and Peter Salt, the recruitment industry boss.

It has been renovated since they purchased it in 2014 for $2 million.

The deal was just a month after Brown and Price did an equally quiet sale on their Willoughby home for $3.4 million – well up on the $1.765 million paid for it a decade earlier.

Brown was appointed News Corp CFO in 2017, replacing New York-based global financial chief Susan Panuccio.

Palm Beach’s values have soared this year, even before the COVID-19 pandemic saw renewed interest from Sydneysiders.

A $24 million record was set in February when the daughter of the late media legend Sam Chisholm, Caroline Jumpterz, sold her family holiday home to fund manager Mike Messara.

And in June Charlotte Mackenzie, the wife of private equity boss Adrian Mackenzie, bought the $11.5 million weekender of Shay Lewis-Thorp, daughter of the late property tycoon Bernard Lewis.