The Sell: Israel Folau sells Kellyville property for $1.6m after buying it for $773K in 2010
Controversial code-hopper Israel Folau has quietly doubled his money on a Kellyville investment property 10 years after its initial purchase.
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Code-hopping football star Israel Folau has sold another of his Sydney investment properties. Folau, who is rumoured to be potentially making a move into politics with the support of billionaire Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, has offloaded a Kellyville home that has been held within his family’s investment company for over a decade.
The four-bedroom, four-bathroom home was sold quietly for $1,625,000, more than double the $773,000 outlay in 2010.
Modernised since then, the home has two master bedrooms, both with ensuites, as well as an upstairs rumpus room and formal living areas.
There’s a separate home theatre room with built-in home cinema system, as well as a study, in the home sold by Jensen Estate Agents.
Earlier this year Folau sold three side-by-side building blocks in Austral, in southwest Sydney, one for $480,000 and two for $490,000. He retains a Little Bay and Stanhope Gardens property in the family investment company.
His Kenthurst abode, bought for $2.1 million in 2015, has been retained.
Folau has signed a two-year contract with Japanese team Shining Arcs for the 2021-22 season of Japan’s Top League.
When he was finding a route back in to the NRL at the Southport Tigers in Queensland, he secured an acreage in Pullenvale, west of Brisbane, for $1.5 million.
BURGESS SELLS UP IN COOGEE
Speaking of footballers making property moves, South Sydney Rabbitohs star Tom Burgess is selling his former Coogee home. The star footballer now resides in the Shire with his fiancee Tahlia Giumelli and their two children.
The courtyard apartment, an investment in recent years since the extension of the family first saw them move to Little Bay and now their forever home in the Sutherland Shire, was bought for $1,282,500 in 2016.
Tom, the last of the Burgesses to get on the ladder, is the joint-youngest of the four brothers, along with his twin George.
He had the Carss Park-based niche renovation firm Renosell help with the apartment’s auction listing preparation.
Renosell is a renovate now-pay later business co-founded by his former Souths teammate Josh Mansour, who was labourer on the project during the apartment’s quick update. Mansour’s business partners are Hassan Najjarine, and Luke and Nathan Karam.
The interiors were freshened, with new light fittings, a landscaping effort in the courtyard, and a fresh paint job.
The 167sqm Berwick St apartment features an open lounge and dining area, and a sleek black stone kitchen with stainless-steel European appliances.
The last sale in the late-1990s block of nine was a two-level, two-bedroom apartment next door, which sold for $1,425,000 in February.
Median Coogee apartment prices sit at $1,375,000, according to realestate.com.au. Based on five years of sales, Coogee has seen a compound growth rate 5.7 per cent for units. There was a $1 million median when the apartment last sold.
Burgess’s former teammate, NG Farah agent Beau Champion, who has sold a number of properties for all of the four Burgess brothers, has the listing. He has a $1.5 million price guide for its November 27 auction.
Champion suggested the rent could yield around $900 a week if it was purchased by an investor. It had been let at $860 a week prior to the makeover.
“Gonna miss this pad in Coogee, but I know the next person is going to love it as much as I did,” Burgess posted to Instagram.
Burgess and Giumelli initially relocated to Little Bay with their daughter Sophie to an apartment secured off the plan.
They sold that and headed to Woolooware, where earlier this year they secured a family-friendly five-bedroom home, having had their second daughter Elodie.
The couple have an Instagram account of their renovation, Building with the Burgesses, which documents their continued renovation efforts.
CARRAMAR REGAINS MOUNTAIN RECORD
Expatriate artificial intelligence entrepreneur Liesl Yearsley has emerged as the $4.15 million buyer of Carramar, the historic weatherboard home in the Blue Mountains.
The Wentworth Falls trophy home was the Blue Mountains’ record holder when it sold for $3.3 million in 2008, and has regained the mantle.
The home, which dates back to the 1900s, sits on 8000 sqm of parklike grounds, originally designed by Paul Sorensen and featuring cold-climate exotics amid towering redwoods.
There are four bedrooms and two bathrooms in the main home, which features period details including high ornate ceilings, timber floors and wooden shutters.
There is a two-bedroom coach house abode on the property.
Rowan Stubbs and Daniel Jennings at Stubbs & Co Estate Agents apparently secured the off-market sale.
Zambian-born Yearsley, who builds robots for NASA, co-founded the AI company Akin, in 2017 in San Francisco.
She had previously founded the multinational education franchise company Toptots back in 1994, then Mooter, an architect and inventor of technology which was listed on the ASX in 2005. After that she founded Cognea, another AI firm, which was acquired by IBM.
The Blue Mountains record residential price went unchallenged until 2018, when the Wilcox family listed Karoola at Leura, with $5 million expectations, which where never achieved.
But last November, businessman Charles Fairfax and wife, Kate, secured the historic Balquhain at Blackheath for a then-record $4.05 million.
DEVELOPER ACQUIRES THEATRE
The neglected Diamond Horseshoe Theatre on Oxford St, Woollahra, appears set to become a luxury apartment complex.
Charles Mellick, chief of the acquisitive Fortis development group, has done a deal with its longtime owner Irene Notaras.
The development company, chaired by Patrick Keenan and with Daniel Gallan as its chief investment officer, has taken a put-and-call option over the theatre and her adjoining terrace properties. It has also secured agreements with two other neighbours.
No plans have been unveiled yet for the seven-lot acquisition, but it will join Fortis’s $1.25 billion pipeline of the group as its capitalises on the downsizers market.
Notaras, born in Grafton in the mid-1930s, made her name as the importer of the Atomic coffee machine in the mid-1960s.
The bulk of the Woollahra site, not far from the Centennial Hotel, or Park Inn as it was then known, was bought in 1968, when the club had been vacant for most of the decade.
The Sell last wrote about the Horseshoe in the late-1980s when there was approval for a Victor Berk-designed drama school and theatre.
There had been a 1977 proposal which attracted a letter of opposition to the Local Government Appeals Tribunal from Neville Wran, who then resided on nearby Victoria Ave.
He used the Premier’s letterhead which prompted the matter being raised in the state parliament by opposition leader Eric Willis.
Wran had feared the premises could be used for “blue movies”.
WARD OFFLOADS MANHATTAN UNIT
Corporate leader and former Qantas director Barbara Ward has sold her apartment in the Manhattan complex in Elizabeth Bay.
Gympie-born Ward, who served on the Qantas board from 2008 until earlier this month, came to prominence as an adviser to Paul Keating between 1979 and 1985, the latter two years when she was in the federal Treasurer’s office.
She was then at TNT Finance between 1985 and 1993, when she became the chief executive of Ansett Worldwide Aviation Services.
The word on the street is that $5,551,000 was secured by the Jason Boon sales team, although there’s been nothing official on price for the three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with two car spaces. Ward paid $2,275,000, when downsizing from Queens Park in 2005.
The apartment first traded in 2001 at $1.85 million, when it was among the hotel sites converted into apartment complexes following the 2000 Olympic Games.
Her strata fees in the Greenknowe Ave apartment complex, which comes with concierge, gym, steam room and pool, sat at $4900 a quarter.
STERLINGS TRADE IN AT TERRIGAL
Parramatta Eels legend Peter “Sterlo” Sterling and his wife Selina have sold their Terrigal downsizer townhouse.
It had been bought in 2018 after the couple sold their longtime 3ha Central Coast block at Matcham for $3.25 million.
They pocketed $1.35 million for the two-level townhouse, which overlooks bushland in a gated community of 59 townhouses complete with a resort-style pool and barbecue amenities.
With three bedrooms and two bathrooms, it had cost $1.05 million in 2018.
Sterlo, who recently retired from NRL commentary commitments with Channel 9, retains a Sydney apartment that cost $1.46 million in 2018.
He had been at home on the Central Coast since the mid-1990s after making the move from the northern beaches.
A DIAMOND DEAL
Tech tycoon Dave Greiner has purchased a Shoalhaven retreat.
Dubbed Diamond in The Rough, the secluded 10ha mountaintop holding is at Morton, outside the township of Ulladulla.
Tom Saveski of Boutique Residential managed the $2.5 million sale of the building block property. It last sold for $750,000 in 2013 with a house.
Tech tycoon Greiner is based in the Sutherland Shire with wife Renee, where they await planning permission for an $11 million Kerstin Thompson-designed dual occupancy abode in Cronulla on a site that cost $23 million in 2018.
They have owned a holiday home at Mollymook since 2013.
Alongside his lifelong friend Ben Richardson, the duo established the Campaign Monitor software company.
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