Billionaire David Teoh smashes Chatswood record buying $10.2m digs

Reclusive billionaire David Teoh and his wife Vicky have emerged at the end of a long and convoluted paper trail as the ultimate buyers behind the historic Hiawatha mansion that smashed the Chatswood record when it sold recently for $10.2 million.

The purchase comes less than six months after Teoh stepped down as chairman of TPG Telecom, after 30 years at the helm of one of Australia’s largest broadband companies, and less than a year after TPG merged with Vodafone Hutchison Australia.

The landmark residence was built in 1897 for boot merchant John Callaghan and was used as a boarding house in the 1950s and 60s before it starred in the 1976 film Caddie when it was owned by filmmaker twin brothers Jim and Hal McElroy. They sold it in 1981 for $75,000.

Georgina and Mike Gaynor, the director of lab-supply company Integrated Sciences, bought it in 1998 for $750,000 from Lord Howe Island resort owners Bill and Janne Shead, and the restoration and renovation overseen by architect Marc Biancardi that followed won a heritage award.

Teoh is known as one of Australia’s more publicity-shy members of the rich list, which might explain why the property’s ultimate ownership is hidden behind various corporate entities, and the strict gag orders placed on the McGrath selling agent Glenn Curran over the price and buyer’s identity.

Title records show Teoh, who is said to be worth an estimated $2.55 billion in this year’s AFR Rich List 200, has long been a Castlecrag local, having purchased his waterfront trophy home at the northernmost end of the peninsula in 1991 for $2.825 million.

While the couple are not expected to swap their waterfront home for Chatswood, it might be just the thing for Teoh’s son Shane, who earlier this year stepped down from the TPG Telecom board after he was convicted for assaulting an Uber driver.

After all, Hiawatha is also conveniently up the road from prime retail strip Victoria Street, where Shane and family corporate interests have purchased more than $41 million worth of real estate in the past year.

Buying the block

If there is an asset-class climbing in value in the eastern suburbs this pandemic, it might just be the apartment block. Not the single unit, mind, but the whole building.

Take the recent purchase by architect Ben Shand, son of the Vaucluse-based property investor and developer Greg Shand. Just days before he turns 30 this Saturday he settled on a block of four parkside apartments with a seven-car garage in Rushcutters Bay for $15 million. No finance required.

The apartments were sold by Richardson & Wrench’s Jason Boon on behalf of retirees Jill and Reg Powell, who had bought out the block over the past 20 years.

It comes just months after billionaire Nick Molnar bought the block of apartments next door to his North Bondi home for $18.5 million and heiress Dr Orna Trigaboff followed suit, buying a block of four for $11.5 million in North Bondi.

Lockdown be damned

Many of Mosman’s high-end home sellers are adamant they won’t list until lockdown conditions end, booming house prices be damned. But not so litigation lawyer Ann Donohue and her environmental planner partner David Snashall, who are selling their designer digs for $15 million to $16.5 million through Atlas’s Michael Coombs.

Snashall and Donohoe, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, purchased the house on prized Kirkoswald Avenue in 2010 for $4.75 million, and have since undertaken a major redesign, with interiors by Cameron Kimber and gardens by Peter Fudge.

The sales campaign starts in what agents agree is one of the tightest high-end markets in years, amid a slew of jaw-dropping off-market sales, not least of which agents say is Ken Jacobs’ $20 million sale of a knock-down rebuild on Balmoral slopes to tech entrepreneur Robin Khuda.

More recently, agents have been shocked by the $10.135 million purchase in Clifton Gardens by Ed Fox, husband of legal heavyweight Michelle Fox, who heads the Australian office of the litigation powerhouse Quinn Emanuel.

The Kardinia Road house sale was a major windfall for Ting Wei, wife of Little Harvard Kindy co-owner Peter Lin, who paid $3.35 million for it in 2015.

Wei isn’t moving far. Sources say she and Lin were the $7.75 million buyers of a house on nearby David Street sold by Raine & Horne Mosman’s Brendan Warner.

Expect to see the Fox home up the road from their new digs hit the market soon.

Prefab boss makes Pittwater play

Expect to see prefab construction boss Nick Leos and his wife Emma on the sand at Palm Beach come summer after the couple purchased a waterfront home on Pittwater for $8.6 million.

The Leos clan moved to Sydney from Toorak in 2018, buying the Bellevue Hill home of fashion designer Camilla Freeman-Topper and her husband David for $16.5 million. This freed the Toppers to buy the estate once owned by the late prime minister Sir Billy McMahon and his socialite wife Sonia for $15.75 million.

Records show the Leos’ purchase on deepwater frontage through LJ Hooker’s Peter Robinson was from Thurgarland Kapital’s Martin Thurgarland and his wife Catherine, who have in turn bought on the Palm Beach hilltop for $5.5 million from real estate funds management boss Steven Sewell.

Sewell and his wife Sarah didn’t own the Norma Road house long; they purchased it two years earlier for $4.075 million from former Australian trade minister Andrew Robb and his wife Maureen.

Michelmores join Byron unflux

Byron Bay’s days of being known as a hippy getaway look ever more distant as cashed-up corporate leaders from Sydney and Melbourne continue to buy into the town. The most recent is former champion rower and mining boss Andrew Michelmore and his wife, women’s health advocate Janet Michelmore.

Michelmore, former chair of the International Council on Mining and former chief of Minerals and Metals Group, and his wife are ordinarily based in South Yarra but, come the end of lockdown, will no doubt be making a beeline for the recently purchased house, The Harrow, near Clarkes Beach, which they bought for $5 million.

Vaucluse mega-mansion plans loom

Gold mining businessman “John” Changjin Li is not expected to settle on the $95 million Point Piper property Edgewater for at least another year, but meanwhile he has lodged plans to knock down his Vaucluse house to build a more than $10 million mega-mansion designed by MHN Design Union.

While the Vaucluse house is Li’s registered address, it was purchased by Changren Cheng in 2010 for $6 million from the O’Neil family, and the 2500 square metre property has remained largely untouched for the 11 years since.

The Shanghai businessman, and head of Kingland Gold and Kingland Mining, has been one of the most prolific, high-end property shoppers of recent years, including an $11.5 million house in Bayview with his Kingland Mining co-director Meihong Yang.