Pokie game-maker Scott Olive sets Clontarf price record with $11.5 million beachfront home

A gaming entrepreneur who created one of the world’s top performing poker machine games is behind the recent record-setting $11.5 million sale of Clontarf’s most expensive home.

The beachfront house was purchased in a company name, Blue Sky Capital Investments, of which the sole director and ultimate owner is Scott Olive, the pokie game pioneer credited with creating the Lightning Link poker machine.

The sale smashed the previous suburb high by $500,000, offering a jackpot result to serviced apartment boss Peter Davis and his wife Rachel just a week after they listed it for sale.

Davis, founder and chief executive of Astra Apartments, bought the 639-square-metre property in 2010 for $4.225 million and commissioned architect Walter Barda to design the four-bedroom house with a pool on Clontarf Beach.

The sale through Cherie Humel, of Clarke & Humel, included an amphibious craft that drives over the sand and into the water, alleviating the need for a mooring.

The four-bedroom house with a swimming pool is a trade up for the Olive family from their Fairlight home, which they bought in 2009 for $3.65 million and listed in June for more than $4 million. That non-waterfront, designer house has since sold for an undisclosed price through Ms Humel.

Olive and his wife Tiane also bought a Whale Beach weekender last year for $8.16 million from former Aon Insurance chairman Robert Harrison.

The Clontarf purchase tops the suburb’s previous high of $11 million set in 2016 when Madina Phara and Mongkol Phara, of one of Cambodia’s ruling families, bought the nearby modernist landmark Portovenere from the estate of the late arts patron and Transfield co-founder Franco Belgiorno-Nettis and his wife Amina.

Olive is the 46-year-old owner and chief executive of Brookvale-based gaming production company High Roller Gaming, which designs pokies exclusively for Aristocrat.

The group specialises in creating pokies similar to their successful Lightning Link game with progressive jackpots, whereby the prize pool grows the more a player plays, and linked jackpots in which players sitting side-by-side vie for a common pool.