Vanity pays off for Babak Moini as cosmetic treatments are replaced by bricks and mortar

Babak Moini might have made his first fortune from Sydneysiders’ penchant for botox and hair removal, but he is well placed to make his next from that other Sydney obsession, bricks and mortar.

The co-founder of Laser Clinics Australia cashed in on the company’s runaway success two years ago when one of the world’s largest investment firms, KKR, bought it out for more than $600 million.

Since then Moini has turned property investor, snapping up more than a dozen inner-west properties from Rozelle to Newtown for more than $32 million, and redeveloping a handful of them.

And while Sydney’s investors stand on the sidelines of the property market watching and waiting for signs of a bottom to the downturn, Moini has parlayed the first of those property investments into a real estate windfall.

Moini was already a Mosman local in the $6.5 million house he bought in 2015 when he bought his first inner-west investment, a dilapidated warehouse in Rozelle for $3.5 million in August 2017.

The site dated back to 1918 when it was known as the furniture factory of brothers William and Harold Henry, but was knocked over to be rebuilt into two ultra-contemporary townhouses spread over four levels with state-of-the-art finishes designed by architect Anthony Nolan and renamed The Henrys workshop.

The first has now sold for $3.7 million through Cobden & Hayson’s Ben Southwell, well above its $3.5 million guide of earlier this year, and its twin townhouse next door hit the market this week for $3.3 million.

That warehouse site purchase was soon followed by a dozen more inner-west properties, including seven shop fronts on Parramatta Road, Annandale, purchased between late 2017 and early 2018.

In late 2017, neighbouring Forest Lodge properties were also bought for a total of $3.57 million, a former garage and neighbouring Victorian cottage bought in Annandale for $5.3 million at the same time, and his most recent purchase of a former garage in Newtown for $4.55 million added a year ago.

Sydney City Council records show that a DA to demolish the Newtown property to make way for a 25-room boarding house was knocked back.

Laser Clinics co-founder Alistair Champion – who helped grow the business founded in 2007 into Australia’s largest provider of hair removal and cosmetics treatments – has been no less conspicuous on the Sydney property market in recent years.

A month after KKR bought out the company in 2017, Champion bought a Victorian Italianate residence in Woollahra, Icilus, for $13.5 million and then he and his wife Kate sold their Bellevue Hill home for $8 million.

Champion last appeared on the Young Rich List in 2017, then aged at the cut-off age of 40, with a net worth of $144 million.

Having already bought a beachfront getaway at Palm Beach in 2013 for $7 million, Champion added a $4.8  million weekender to his portfolio last year in Berrima in the Southern Highlands.