Sydney auctions: Bondi Beach penthouse sells for $20.1m, setting apartment auction record

A Bondi Beach penthouse sold for $20.1 million at auction on Saturday, becoming the most expensive apartment ever sold at auction in Australia.

The Notts Avenue home, owned by former world champion yachtsman James Mayo, drew seven registered bidders and has doubled in value in five years. It last traded for $9.8 million in 2016.

Bidding on the four-bedroom, four-bathroom penthouse overlooking Bondi Beach kicked off at $14.5 million – within the buyer’s guide of $13 million to $15 million.

Auctioneer Damien Cooley, of Cooley Auctions, had to knock back a second bid of $14.6 million before the bidding rose in $250,000 jumps up to $16.5 million.

From there, it slowed to smaller increments, with the auctioneer even threatening to pass in the property before a new bidder – the eventual buyer – jumped in with an offer of $16.8 million.

Once it was declared to be on the market at $17 million, the bidding took off like a rocket, jumping mostly in $50,000 and $100,000 increments.

Five of the seven registered bidders made offers on the penthouse at the southern end of Bondi Beach, with a total of 65 bids before the gavel fell.

The Bondi Beach home sold through Ben Collier of The Agency Eastern Suburbs to a local buyer.

The property is the most expensive apartment ever sold at auction in Australia and one of the most expensive of any residential properties sold by auction.

Australia’s auction record was smashed by the $24.6 million sale of a five-bedroom Vaucluse house in September. The previous year a Rose Bay trophy home, also listed with Mr Collier, sold for $23.56 million, days after it was passed in at auction for $23.25 million.

Lachlan Murdoch bought a Bellevue Hill house at auction for $23 million in 2009.

Mr Collier was pleasantly surprised with the result for the penthouse, which had drawn local, interstate and international interest.

“The difficulty for vendors, buyers and agents alike is trying to ascertain where the market level currently sits with any property, and that’s why we’re seeing a recalibration [of the market] with properties such as this,” Mr Collier said.

Mr Cooley was also pleased. “It’s a phenomenal result for an apartment,” Mr Cooley said. “It’s a world-class apartment, and it was a world-class result.”

The Bondi Beach sale also came close to Bondi Beach’s $21 million suburb record – set in 2013 – when Rich List fund manager Will Vicars bought a double penthouse atop the Bondi Pacific. The off-the-plan sale was a record price for an Australian apartment at the time.

Mayo’s north-facing spread scored a lavish renovation by former Glencore coal-executive-turned-property-mogul Vaughan Blank about a decade ago before the Blank family lived there while their beachfront trophy home on Watsons Bay’s Camp Cove was being redesigned. Blank then sold it to Mayo for $9.8 million in 2016.

The north-facing spread is in the dress-circle Notts Avenue cul-de-sac above Bondi Icebergs. The area is not only luring more of the Insta-crowd to its protected shoreline but has long attracted a who’s who of eastern suburbs property shoppers, including the likes of businessman Victor Comino next door, James Packer before he gifted his designer pad to Tziporah Malkah (then known as Kate Fischer) and polo enthusiast Spencer Young, who has reportedly knocked back an offer of $20 million for his penthouse a few doors away.

Mayo, who as a teenager was crew on the Sydney-to-Hobart winning super-maxi yacht Sovereign, clearly has a well-honed appreciation for a northerly aspect. Having spent his formative years in the family’s Green Gables waterfront house in Vaucluse, he is set to return to the north-facing harbourfront this year when he settles on the Point Piper beachfront house of businessman Michael Zammit, which he bought late last year for about $36 million.