Seven's Bruce McWilliam leads trophy home owners to market with $32m Point Piper house

Media mogul Bruce McWilliam is renowned for his timing buying and selling high-end real estate, so his decision to list one of his prized investments on the Point Piper waterfront next week with a $32 million to $35 million guide is hoped to act a fillip to other trophy home owners.

The Network Seven commercial director is no doubt encouraged not only by the booming state of Sydney’s property market, but the sale last Sunday of his Bellevue Hill investment mansion the day after its first open inspection.

Brad Pillinger, of Pillinger, was gagged from revealing the exact price, but it is expected to settle at more than $9 million – about double the $4.72 million paid for it in 2007.

Mr Pillinger is expected to do even better on Mr McWilliam’s more upscale Point Piper property thanks to a major redesign by celebrated trophy home interior designer Blainey North and Briony Fitzgerald.

The high-end redesign is no doubt expected to outshine the home’s colourful past as the centrepiece to a loan dispute between finance broker Adam Tilley and convicted murderer Ron Medich that resulted in the entrance to the battle-axe block being firebombed by late businessman Michael McGurk more than a decade ago.

The three-level residence with uninterrupted harbour views was previously home to fashion designer Lisa Ho and her then husband Philip Smouha until 2003 when they sold it for $7.75 million to Medich.

As detailed by the Herald’s Kate McClymont in her book Dead Man Walking, Medich sold the investment 18 months later for $12.5 million to finance broker Adam Tilley with a loan of $17 million and a deal to build a five-storey apartment block on the waterfront site.

However that BKH-designed development never went ahead and when a $20 million sale of the property in 2009 was never finalised, the outstanding debt was transferred to Mr McGurk.

A year after Mr McGurk firebombed the property he was shot dead out the front of his Cremorne home. Less than a decade later a jury found Medich guilty of being the mastermind behind his murder, for which he is currently serving a minimum 29-year sentence.

The waterfront residence remained part of an insolvency arrangement, of which Medich was the main creditor, until it was sold in 2013 to Mr McWilliam for $10.65 million.

It was a discounted sale at the time from initial $20 million hopes, hampered not only by its notoriety, but the fact Mr Medich briefly lived in one of the duplex apartments that then made up the property before it sold.

More than a decade later and values on the Point Piper waterfront have skyrocketed. The house next door was sold by Westpac board member Steve Harker in 2019 for $40 million to start-up investor Gabriel Jakob, and a vacant block of land on the other side was sold by yachtie Jim Cooney a few months later for $22 million.

Mr McWilliam owns a handful of investment properties in Point Piper, including his own beachfront trophy home at the end of the peninsular, purchased in 2014 for just shy of $30 million.