Racing identity Max Whitby cashes in on Kings Cross pad for $12.5 million

Legendary punter and racehorse owner Max Whitby has long done well off the back of Kings Cross, so it is only fitting that he’s scored a $12.5 million windfall from the sale of his Potts Point apartment.

The result almost doubles the $6.6 million Whitby paid for the three-bedroom sub-penthouse in 2012 when it was sold by retired car dealer Ray Harris and his wife Robyn.

Whitby has been a well-known Kings Cross identity since the late 1960s when he first worked for the bootlegger and restaurateur Bernie Houghton.

Having left to work as a stockbroker, Whitby returned to the Kings Cross hotel game after the sharemarket crash of 1987, running local institutions like the Bourbon and Beefsteak bar and Texas Tavern, and accumulating an impressive stable of more than 120 race horses, including Cox Plate winner Savabeel.

The sale by Richardson & Wrench Elizabeth Bay’s Jason Boon and Geoff Cox is one of the highest apartments sales in the increasingly well-heeled neighbourhood, topped only by the $15 million paid in 2012 by liquor industry heavyweight John Piven-Large for the penthouse and a separate apartment below in the Pomeroy building.

Bullish downsizer demand for luxury homes locally has seen a run of record high sales in recent years, including the $13 million paid for the terrace home of socialite Heidi Onisforou in 2016, followed by a $12.5 million terrace sale a few doors away in Challis Avenue last year.

In June Macquarie executive John Wilson sold his apartment on level one of the Pomeroy building for $10.05 million, also through Jason Boon.

The same apartment had previously traded for $6 million in 2010 when sold by socialite Di Jagelman, former wife of 1980s corporate high flier Grant Jagelman.

The Villard is a block of 19 apartments built in 1998 by developers Ted Byrne and Jim Lewis and designed by architect Ercole Palazzetti.

Whitby’s spread was previously owned by David Kunde, who sold it to Harris in 2006 for $7,387,500, and by the late interior designer Garth Barnett who bought it off the plan in 1998 for $2.15 million and sold the following year for $3.55 million.