Medical entrepreneur makes $60m return to Sydney’s trophy home market

Medical entrepreneur Dr Glenn Haifer has made a grand return to the Sydney Harbour trophy home market this week, paying more than $60 million for the Darling Point residence of Lisa Allen, former wife of yachtie Matt Allen.

Haifer hasn’t owned a piece of the prized waterfront housing market in more than four years, when he sold his half-completed home, Deauville, on Point Piper’s Lady Martin’s Beach for $39 million to luxury car importer Neville Crichton and his wife Nadi.

The modernist-style residence was renovated in 2017 and listed for sale soon after.

It was about that time that the Allens listed their Darling Point home for sale with hopes of more than doubling their $32 million purchase price of 2013 from the estate of industrialist Sir William Tyree.

Alison Coopes, who listed it exclusively about six months ago after it was an open listing with a multitude of agents, declined to reveal the result, leaving it to sources to suggest it is in the low-$60 million range.

Medical entrepreneur Dr Glenn Haifer has bought in Darling Point for more than $60 million.

Haifer, a controlling shareholder in clinical trial and bioanalytical services company Agilex Biolabs, returns to the harbour front across the bay from his former Point Piper neighbours Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull to be a next-door neighbour to media boss Kerry Stokes.

It remains to be seen if Haifer plans to offload the Woollahra house he bought in 2018 for $6.3 million.

Prestigious Pyrmont

The ripple effect of the gentrification of The Rocks and Millers Point looks to have reached beyond Barangaroo to Pyrmont, judging by a record-smashing house sale for $17.75 million in the former industrial slum.

Settlement shows the cashed-up buyer of one of the 11 townhouses in the exclusive gated community, Grande, is Junying Ren, the wife of Chinese pharmaceutical mogul Zhenjiang Li.

Lockley Manor, the newly built residence in Pyrmont’s Grande development, sold for $17.75 million.Credit: Domain

Mr Li, who was ranked among China’s billionaires by Forbes more than a decade ago, is chairman of the China Shineway Pharmaceutical Group, as well as having been a representative to China’s 10th and 11th National People’s Congress.

It is one of three grand manors at the centre of the development, of which another is the registered Sydney home of TWT Property’s chairman David Tin, and the third and largest six-bedroom manor, featuring a private swimming pool, is being offered for $22 million by McGrath Projects’ Murray Wood.

Fashion designer Karen Gee has bought into the Grande development for $7 million.Credit: Tamara Dean

Fashion designer Karen Gee looks to have also made it her new home, with records showing her husband, Macquarie Bank executive director Andrew Gee, buying a $7 million residence in the complex last year.

KAK’s $22 million buyer

Kerri-Anne Kennerley has swapped her $22 million Woollahra home for a $13 million pad in Double Bay.

Television queen Kerri-Anne Kennerley has finally settled on her $22 million sale of her long-held Woollahra terrace, revealing the buyer to be returned expats Peter and Candice Berger.

The Bergers have been based in Chicago in recent years, where Peter has been part of the success story that is Akuna Capital, a trading firm founded by fellow Aussie Andrew Killion in 2011.

Killion made a grand return to Sydney’s housing market in 2020 when he paid $30 million for the Vaucluse home of media scion Alexander Ma.

Meanwhile, the Bergers had already lodged a DA for $5.5 million worth of “alterations and additions” to their new Victorian manor, following its sale last year by rugby star turned buyer’s agent Craig Wing.

The purchase by the 36-year-old Bergers has freed KAK to downsize to the Double Bay waterfront, where records show she was the $13.8 million buyer of an apartment in the converted 1850s Gothic mansion, Gladswood House, that was listed late last year by Ray White Double Bay’s Alan Fettes.

The Gladswood House apartment sold by Rob Rankin in 2016 for $4.75 million has resold for $13.8 million to Kerri-Anne Kennerley.Credit:

KAK’s purchase price did well by David Baldwin, senior managing director at Macquarie Asset Management, and interior designer wife Juanita Baldwin, who paid $4.75 million for it in 2016 from former Crown chairman Rob Rankin.

Ampol boss cashes in

Ampol chairman Steve Gregg has returned his historic “Gatehouse” in Point Piper’s Ardenbraught converted mansion to the market, this time with a $5.5 million guide, through 1st City’s Julian Hasemer.

The Point Piper house of Steve Gregg is up for sale for $5.5 million.

This is the free-standing townhouse Gregg purchased in 2013 for $2.63 million from Gayle Rivkin, widow of the late stockbroker Rene Rivkin.

It was last on the market in 2019 with $4.7 million hopes, following his purchase of Kiwi businessman Sir Owen Glenn’s $9 million pad.