How Sydney’s property market was transformed in my 12 years of Title Deeds

Few have served the pages of Title Deeds as well as Mike Cannon-Brookes as he put his name to one of the country’s most extraordinary and extensive luxury home portfolios.

Back in 2013, the “accidental billionaire” had just two local forms of shelter: an apartment in Lilyfield and a converted warehouse in Paddington, known as the House of Desks. He added a Palm Beach weekender mid-year for $8.7 million.

Since then, there’s been the Double Bay phase that landed him three houses, and the Pittwater period which netted a handful of holiday houses from Newport to Coasters Retreat, leaving local holiday homeowners with soaring land tax rates.

The Southern Highlands stage has been more enduring, stockpiling farms from Kangaloon to Nattai, and that’s before we get to the $100 million Fairwater estate in Point Piper.

His Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar took a somewhat more humble approach. He paid $71 million (cash, again) for a doer-upperer next door to Fairwater, and because it was to be a family home, John B. Fairfax lopped a few million dollars off the price rather than take a higher offer from a developer.

Having reduced Elaine to a gutted shell during his seven years of ownership, Farquhar sold it a few months ago for $130 million to a mystery buyer who is already said to be hatching plans for a carve-up of the estate. Maybe don’t tell Fairfax.

Humble Scott has since moved into the Scottish baronial mansion up the road called Uig Lodge, paying $130 million cash.

The Atlassian mates are in good company when it comes to Sydney’s pantheon of trophy home collectors. Millennials such as William Wu and husband-wife rag traders Daniel and Georgia Contos have wowed us with their insatiable appetite – and budget – for high-end mansions, and Jen Hawkins has proved real estate pays even better than being a supermodel.

But no one holds a candle to Stephanie Conley-Buhre, who made a capital gain of $50 million this year when she sold her Spanish Mission mansion Alcooringa after just three years. Who needs the bank of mum and dad? Although, it didn’t hurt.

Financier Owen Chen must have been as shocked as the rest of Sydney by the late-night arson attack on his vacant, heritage-listed mansion in Northwood. As firefighters battled to contain the blaze from spreading to surrounding houses, Chen watched from the street alongside his neighbours, no doubt wondering who would do such a thing.

Turns out it was his former associate Steve Nassif. Still, Chen’s penchant for the neighbourhood remains. He and his family have eight houses at last count, of which one is yet to be approved to be rebuilt anew.

Billionaire Will Vicars has a tendency to buy anything left empty along the Bondi to Tamarama walk, bar tzar Justin Hemmes likes a crash pad near all his pubs, whereas WiseTech billionaire Richard White is inspired not so much by location as by the heart.

And who can forget John Changjin Li? He showed us the only thing worth more than a gold mine in Indonesia is a wife with residency and a house in Point Piper. Li’s company exchanged to buy Edgewater for $95 million in 2020 and is yet to complete the deal.

Robin Khuda’s data centre giant he founded, AirTrunk, sold recently for $24 billion, so he might have more time for his side hustle as a Manly and Palm Beach property developer, if not his slew of Mosman homes.

Ian Malouf was an avowed renter when his Dial-a-Dump business was acquired for $578 million. His conversion came in 2021, at which point he zealously bought half a dozen properties from Double Bay to Palm Beach, and a $60 million city pad.

Where are they now?

Just as Sydney’s trophy homes are a bellwether of a person – or industry’s – rising stocks, so too are they when their stocks fall.

One of property tycoon Ron Medich’s mates used to take umbrage when I referred to him as an “alleged murderer” after charges were laid for masterminding the shooting of his former business partner Michael McGurk. How dare I.

At the time, Medich – nicknamed “Cottees” after the “Thick ‘n’ Rich” ice-cream topping – was secretly trying to sell a Point Piper house at the centre of a loan dispute between him and Adam Tilley. His then real estate agent had the brainwave of listing it on property portals with no address on the ad.

So sneaky, no one will ever know who owns it, except that everyone knew because there are only so many houses that come with the opprobrium of being firebombed.

Listed for $16 million, it sold two months later for $10.65 million to property oracle Bruce McWilliam, who undertook a fantastic paint job before he sold it five years later for $32.5 million. It’s all right for some.

A year later, Medich’s luxury home at the end of Point Piper was sold for $37 million, much to his ex-wife Odetta’s delight, who took off for Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. Medich was last heard serving his maximum 39-year sentence at Lithgow Correctional Centre.

Few flew as high as Xu Jiayin, chairman of one of China’s once largest property developers, Evergrande. He slipped into town during China’s Golden Week holiday in 2014 to buy Julia Ross’ Point Piper home, Villa del Mare.

It was all meant to be hush-hush given his lack of residency and such, but flying in on a private jet and arriving at the inspection in a cavalcade of limousines might have given something away. That, or the fact the $39 million sale was the largest of that year.

Ultimately, shelf companies registered to the British Virgin Islands don’t offer lots of privacy if they’re still registered to the Evergrande headquarters.

A year later, Xu became a poster boy for then treasurer Joe Hockey’s crackdown on foreign buyers when he ordered Villa del Mare be forcibly sold, and Darling Harbour local Lola Li Wang was on hand to take the keys.

More recently, things have not gone well for Xu. Evergrande was ordered into liquidation early this year, and Xu has not been seen in public since he was taken away by Chinese authorities a year ago.

Hockey took exception to another wealthy developer from China, “Sam” Guo Kuizhang, known as the “Chinese Gatsby” to his Hunters Hill neighbours. He bought the heritage estate Windermere for $11.85 million in 2014 amid assurances he would build a second house on it, as per the terms of his Foreign Investment Review Board approval.

But Guo never did build the second house, and instead cleared the adjoining bush reserve, spray-painting over Indigenous artwork. He left town soon afterwards, and took with him $19 million for the estate. Thanks for coming.

Sydneysiders knew we’d finally made it as a global city in 2015 when China’s then ninth-richest man, JD.com founder Richard Liu Qiangdong, bunkered down in a $36 million Vaucluse house recently vacated by Leonardo Di Caprio.

Liu didn’t just fall in love with the harbour setting. He also fell for influencer “Nancy” Zhang Zetian, known on social media as “Sister Milk Tea”. They married in 2015. He was 41, she was 22, and to add to the romance he bought her a $16.2 million apartment in the Stanford Residences at The Rocks.

By 2018, the couple realised our “global city” was a long way from the rest of the planet. Goodbye to the Vaucluse house for $38 million, and ouch to the $13.5 million firesale of Zhang’s apartment at The Rocks.

The couple is still going strong, despite some awkwardness when Liu became a target of China’s #MeToo movement after a former Minnesota university student accused him of rape, an allegation Liu denied, and settled out of court.

Huang Xiangmo made lots of friends among Labor and Liberal fundraising types when he moved to Sydney, settling on his $12.8 million Mosman home in early 2013. So imagine their shock when their generous donor had his visa cancelled by ASIO amid claims of being a covert agent of influence, of all things.

Now that he is exiled in his $HK520 million townhouse in Hong Kong, Huang’s wife “Fiona” Huang Jiefang will find it tricky if she wants to sell the Mosman home. Freeze orders remain lodged on title as the Tax Office seeks $140 million in unpaid tax.

Packer came up trumps in the end. In 2013, as Packer was planning to sell his bachelor pad, then premier Barry O’Farrell signed off on Crown’s plans for a second casino atop a tower on the CBD’s western harbourfront. I mean, would people pay to live in a casino, above an industrial wasteland known as the Hungry Mile?

Yes, they would. Packer negotiated to buy a thumper of a pad in the Barangaroo tower for $72 million, only for Crown then to be sold to US private equity giant Blackstone for $9 billion, lining Packer’s pockets by $3.3 billion.

Crown is now worth far less, but Packer began this year by paying $105 million to have the family’s Bellevue Hill estate, Cairnton, signed over to his corporate interests.

Oh, and that Bondi Beach bachelor pad eventually sold for $29 million to Medich’s brother and nephew Roy and Anthony Medich.

End of an era

As Sydney’s high-end market limps to the end of a torrid few months, the federal government has passed the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML/CTF) Amendment Bill.

This does not sound glamorous, and it is certainly not usual Title Deeds fodder, but for those who take issue with buyers using real estate to launder illicit funds it is an early Christmas gift.

What this legislation does is expand laws first introduced in 2007 so that real estate agents and other “tranche 2” entities such as lawyers and accountants will be obliged not only to understand where a buyer’s funds are coming from, but report any suspicious matters.

Until now, why would an agent report something like, say, a buyer trying to pay a house deposit using a suitcase full of cash – as was known to happen on occasion. After all, that might threaten the sale, the commission, and don’t agents work for the vendor anyway?

From mid-2026, agents will have to report such things, or risk a fine or civil penalty.

Finally, thank you to the people who tipped me off, especially those whose names never appeared in the column. Keep them coming.