Oroton boss Ross Lane to test Manly's trophy market with $16.5m price record hopes

Manly’s trophy home market recorded its strongest run of sales last year, capped by a $16 million result that smashed all previous highs, but Oroton chief executive Ross Lane is hoping to better that with the sale of his own home.

The four-level residence on Little Manly Beach is expected to be a good test of the high-end market given its $16.5 million to $18 million guide and at a time when Domain data shows Manly’s median house price has fallen 10.4 per cent in the past 12 months.

“While local house values have fallen, the $10 million-plus market in Manly has been marching to the same tune as Sydney’s prestige market, which had its biggest year ever last year,” said Jake Rowe, of Rowe Partners.

Rowe cites not only the Manly record, but new suburb highs set last year in Clontarf of $11.5 million,  Queenscliff’s $12 million and Collaroy’s $15.5 million.

Lane’s 592-square-metre property was previously part-owned by the late Olympian Betty Cuthbert, before Tom Lane and his wife Emma bought it in 2007 for $4.4 million.

Lane rebuilt the four-level residence with internal lift and home theatre before he sold it to his brother Ross in 2016 for $9 million.

“That was a brotherly rate at the time and should have sold for closer to $11 million,” said selling agent Rowe.

At the time, Manly’s oceanfront homes at Fairy Bower were recording a run of bull sales of their own, thanks in large part to the Catholic Church’s decision to offer longer, more flexible leaseholds of up to 99 years on the many homes it owns on the Eastern Hill rather than the 17-year options.

Ross Lane sold his oceanfront reserve home set above Shelly Beach in 2016 for $9.5 million to Seven’s chief executive Tim Worner, the latter of whom offloaded his house on the high side of the street for $6.72 million in April that year.

The Manly record had long stood at $11 million for a block of waterfront land sold in 2009 to philanthropist and retired transport magnate Greg Poche and his wife Kay van Norton.

But in May last year, that high was smashed when Sophie Hutchinson, wife of former chief executive of collapsed education and training provider Vocation Mark Hutchinson, sold their Fairy Bower home for $16 million to  specialist laparoscopic surgeon Craig Taylor.

That sale, through Rowe, more than doubled the $7.25 million purchase price of 2014 when the Bower Street property was sold by motorcycle legend Wayne Gardner, although it had scored a major renovation by Squillace Architects shortly before it was sold.

The previous high was topped again a few months later when Dr Taylor sold his oceanfront reserve home nine doors away for $14 million to Justine Acret, wife of Smartline mortgage broking franchise co-founder Chris Acret.

Ross Lane’s four-level residence on absolute beachfront, the only one not owned by the Catholic Church in Manly, has been renovated throughout again in recent years with interiors by Briony Fitzgerald.

Lane returned to head up his family’s handbag brand two years ago after a decade-long absence from the company that was founded by his grandfather Boyd Lane in 1938.

In late 2017, Oroton went into voluntary administration, but was bought out by funds manager Will Vicars and is reportedly set to return to profitability this year.