Hedges Ave: Andrew Fahey plans giant beach front millionaire’s row mansion

A betting industry figure who spent $17.5m buying a site for a family home on Mermaid Beach’s Multi-Millionaires’ Row has doubled down. SEE THE PLANS

A BETTING-industry fellow who spent $17.5 million a year ago buying a site for a family home in Mermaid Beach’s Multi-Millionaires’ Row has doubled down, in the short term, both money and land-wise.

Andrew Fahey has taken his spending to around $35 million and in the process snared the biggest absolute beachfront holding created in Hedges Ave for several years – 1800 sqm.

A bigger site, spanning a shade over 2000 sqm, was put together pre-GFC by BreakFree travel founder Tony Smith when he assembled five lots at a cost of $27 million.

Eight years ago the Smith camp bought a low-rise building on a 2112sqm site at the head of Heron St for $12 million, built a home, and in 2020 it sold for $25 million.

Andrew Fahey

The new Fahey buy has involved the amalgamation of the tired and near 50-year-old Parthenon unit building.

The enlarged holding is not all destined for a Fahey home – little more than half of the site will be retained by the family man, one of the founders of online betting business PointsBet, and partner Katrina Ludland

The couple, who moved to the Gold Coast for a barefoot beach lifestyle and have three young children, want to build a dream property that they can call home for 20 years or more.

To that end, it seems they suddenly didn’t want to find the Parthenon grabbed by a developer and a multi-level apartment building rising on their boundary.

Instead, they’d rather have some control over what happens next door and will retitle the complete site, taking 90 sqm to add to their $17.5 million holding and selling off the balance.

The planned Fahey house on Hedges Ave

That balance quietly popped up at the weekend on the Kollosche agency website, being offered either as one 810 sqm lot or two 405 sqm ones.

Andrew and Katrina should recoup much of their latest spend in the sell-off.

Their total Parthenon outlay is believed to be close to, or slightly exceeding, their $17.5 million original buy.

There’s a dearth of available beachfront land in Hedges Ave and prices could be heading north of $9 million for 405 sqm.

The Fahey-Ludland ‘home’ block was bought from Nava Abedian, wife of Sunland’s Sahba Abedian, and has fronts both Hedges and Ocean avenues.

It has a 22.5-metre beach frontage, one that will grow to 25 metres under the retitling plan.

The logic behind buying the Parthenon apparently is to not only to enlarge that holding to 990 sqm but to allow more scope for landscaping.

The view of the proposed house from the beach.

Architect Baden Goddard has designed a home for the couple that apparently will cover only the front portion of the site.

Andrew, who had $200 in the bank, was one of three fellows who in 2015 started the PointsBet operation while sharing a small office in Melbourne.

Today the business has more than 700 staff and operates in Australia, the US, Canada, Ireland and the Philippines.

It listed on the ASX in 2019.

Andrew, these days PointsBet’s chief marketing officer for Australia, has sold down his holding and today is regarded as a non-substantial shareholder – he has fewer than a 5 per cent of the shares.

Meanwhile, he and Katrina won’t be squatting while their dream home is built – two years ago they paid $5.6 million for a beachfront house at Palm Beach.