Sydney's holiday home boom crashes on Bundeena shores with $8m house sale

The sleepy oceanfront community of Bundeena has long been a little-known weekend getaway destination on the southern fringes of Sydney, but that hasn’t stopped the housing boom from well and truly crashing on its shoreline this weekend when news spread of an almost $8 million house sale.

Locals have been left stunned by the sale, given record prices have long hovered at the $3.3 million to $3.6 million level and drawn parallels with boom holiday home markets like Byron Bay and Palm Beach.

The Hamptons-style house on Horderns Beach is set on a north-facing block of more than 1500 square metres with a two-storey house fronting a level lawn that extends to absolute beachfront and a separate guest studio and garage at the rear.

The property was last traded in 1987 for $350,000.

Eastern suburbs agent Debbie Donnelley of PPD listed the property a week ago, and records show it sold within seven days. However, Donnelley was non-committal when pushed on the result.

By Monday, the marketing had been removed from property portals, but locals sources put the result at close to $8 million, smashing all previous records by more than 100 per cent.

The result is a big jump in values from previous highs set by the estimated 700 dwellings that make up the isolated beachside community on the edge of the Royal National Park.

The previous record high was set in late 2019 at $3.6 million when UBS banker Calvin O’Shaughnessy bought a beachfront house called Vitamin Sea on Gunyah Beach.

Despite being at the furthest edges of the Sutherland Shire, Bundeena is known for attracting high-profile buyers from eastern suburbs identities like former Wentworth MP Dr Kerryn Phelps and her wife Jackie Stricker-Phelps, who upgraded their local home in 2019 for $3.25 million.

Fellow locals include former West Australian premier, emeritus professor Geoff Gallop and his wife Dr Ingrid van Beek, AsheMorgan boss Michael Rothner and his wife Lisa, art collector and benefactor Sally Breen, and former Bellevue Hotel owner Susie Carleton.