‘Sometimes I really admire myself’: Tu’s rise from market stall to real-estate riches

This story is part of the March 29 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Monika Tu leads the way to her dressing room. “I normally don’t show people,” she says, as we enter a space that has the look and feel of a fearfully expensive boutique. Racks of gowns. Shelves of handbags. Rows and rows of designer shoes. Tu is a high-heels person, but since having surgery on both knees a couple of years ago, she has added some comfortable footwear to her wardrobe. Quite a lot of comfortable footwear, actually. For a moment I contemplate a line-up of loafers branded with the “H” of the French fashion house Hermès. “I’ve got all of them,” she says cheerfully. “The whole range. Normally if I like something, I’m, ‘OK, one of each colour.’ ”

Tu is a celebrity real estate agent. She specialises in selling houses and apartments with stratospherically high price tags, many of them to wealthy Chinese immigrants. “I’m sure I’m not the No. 1 agent,” she says. “I don’t need to be No. 1. I’m the most famous agent.” Whether that’s true is open to debate, but Tu is indisputably a determined self-promoter. “I’m a very good marketer,” she writes in the introduction to her self-published 2022 memoir, #NeverTuMuch. Most real estate agents focus solely on marketing real estate. Tu’s approach is different: “I made a conscious decision to market myself.”

As the title of her book suggests, restraint hasn’t been a feature of her campaign. In a promo still to be found on YouTube for the 2021-22 reality TV series Luxe Listings Sydney, in which she starred with three other agents, Tu is seen watching clips from the show and exclaiming delightedly when she appears on screen. “Look at me! Oh my god, I’m so skinny!” she says. And: “I think I’m the best-looking one. Even though I am the oldest!” On social media, she exuberantly blows her own trumpet. Her caption for a picture of herself in a spangly red dress: “Timeless elegance is more than a style, for me it’s a way of life.”

She’s boastful, she’s brazen, she’s breezy, she’s a lot. And she has agreed to admit me to her world for a couple of days. The idea is to get to know Tu and to tag along while she does whatever real estate agents do to persuade rich people to pay preposterous sums to put roofs over their heads. It’s mid-morning on a Monday when I arrive at her palatial pad at Bellevue Hill, one of Sydney’s ritziest harbourside suburbs. I decline her offer of a coffee, explaining that I had one just before I came. “You want a tequila?” she asks. I like her already.

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The dressing room is one of the first stops on my tour of Tu’s house. I could mooch around in here for hours, stroking the hand-painted silk that lines the closet doors and thinking about the dedication required to gather so many European labels in one place. Chanel, Balmain, Versace, Louis Vuitton – they’re all here. I linger in front of a pair of Christian Louboutin stilettos. “Shoes are everything, right?” says Tu, who I sense is keen to move me along. She’s a busy woman. We briefly inspect her bedroom and massage room, then take the lift to a lower floor, where she has a home cinema with stars on the ceiling, a wine room, gym, sauna, steam room and, outside, a swimming pool. Up one level is the main living area, its white walls hung with works by some major Australian painters. She draws my attention to pictures by Del Kathryn Barton, David Boyd and Robert Dickerson. “I’ve got a really good eye for art,” she says.

My visit is the week after Valentine’s Day. On the dining table is a huge arrangement of red roses, to which is attached a cluster of red foil balloons in the shape of hearts. “From my husband,” says Tu. “I don’t need gifts, but flowers don’t arrive, he’ll be in trouble.” Jad Khattar, her third husband, who soon strolls in to join us, is as softly spoken and mild-mannered as Tu is flamboyant. They met at a salsa night at a dance club (“Of course they did,” says a friend, when I relay this information) and have been married for 16 years. Khattar is originally from Lebanon; Tu is from China. He’s 43, she’s 62. At first glance, you’d think the only thing they had in common was a taste for fancy watches (“matching Rolexes”, Khattar says of the glittering timepieces on their wrists) but those who know them say they are a great pair, bound together in part by their shared passion for selling real estate.

Tu is the face of Black Diamondz, the agency the couple founded in 2009. She oils the wheels in property deals, charming Australian-born vendors with her heavily accented English (“Till today, it’s still Chinglish, right?”) and communicating with prospective buyers in Mandarin. Khattar is the guy beside her with the facts and figures at his fingertips and a calculator in his hand. Their company is headquartered in Sydney’s CBD and has a staff of 13. Tu says their average annual sales total is between $250 million to $300 million. In 2021, she secured a price of $45 million for Villa Florida, a house at Sydney’s Rose Bay once owned by comedian Barry Humphries. Black Diamondz’ biggest single transaction was the $60 million sale of the house of Sydney FC owners Scott and Alina Barlow to Vietnamese-born property investor Hoang Trang Do in 2023. The same year, the agency sold Do’s Vaucluse house for $38 million.

It’s a parallel universe, the premium property market. Australia is in the grip of a housing crisis: for many people, finding somewhere affordable to rent or buy is pretty well impossible. At the top of the market, though, the mood is upbeat and business brisk. “Last year, Sydney had the highest number of sales above $10 million ever recorded,” says property valuer Paul Donovan. Data compiled by Donovan’s firm, Pontons, shows the number of sales over $10 million in the city more than doubled from 151 in 2020 to 310 in 2023. Then in 2024, the figure jumped 23 per cent to 381. In Melbourne, it was reported last month that transport and logistics magnate Paul Little and his wife, University of Melbourne chancellor Jane Hansen, had sold their Italianate pile in Toorak for $150 million. If the price is correct, it is the highest amount paid for a house in Australia, beating the previous record of $130 million set by two houses in Sydney’s Point Piper in 2022.

Tu is a brand ambassador for the German carmaker BMW. She says in her memoir that when she shows people through a property, she arranges for a few of the luxury vehicles to be parked in the driveway. No pressure is put on the house purchasers to buy the BMWs, she writes, but “20 to 30 per cent of the time, Chinese people will just buy them anyway. They will buy three of the five cars.”

“I love luxury,” says Tu (pictured with Peanut, one of her two dogs), “because, why not? I work hard. I deserve something amazing, right?”Credit: Peter Brew-Bevan

Hyper-consumerism doesn’t offend Tu. If anything, she identifies with it, confessing in the book to owning about 20 Hermès handbags: 10 in the Kelly range and 10 in the Birkin style. “We won’t confirm or deny the price of our products,” says Hermès Australia’s communications director, Eric Matthews. But I gather these are bags that cost as much as a car, even if not a top-of-the-range BMW. “I love luxury,” Tu says. “Because, why not? I work hard. I deserve something amazing, right?”

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Personal adornment was considered a sign of spiritual corruption when she was growing up in China. Yan Ling Tu, as she was then known, was born in Guiyang City, capital of the south-western Guizhou province. She was four years old when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, and 14 when it ended. During this period, both men and women dressed in loose grey or blue trousers and jackets.

Tu says her maternal grandfather had been a wealthy businessman but had to surrender all his property, including his books, paintings and musical instruments. She vividly recalls members of the paramilitary youth brigade known as the Red Guards ransacking his house, which was home to her extended family. They would knock on the walls and smash holes anywhere they thought valuables might be hidden, she says. She was scared of these khaki-clad intruders but to her, as to a lot of young people, they had a kind of glamour: “The Red Guards were so cool. You wanted to be one of them.“

With her father, Guang Shan Tu, and mother, Shu Xian Wu, in 1978.Credit: Courtesy of Monika Tu

After Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong died in 1976, and access to education was restored, her grandfather gave Tu some advice: “He said, ‘You should study a language. It will give you the opportunity to see the world.’ ” From the age of 16, she says, she spent four years at the Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages, becoming fluent in German. After graduating in 1982, she returned to her home city and landed a government job as a German interpreter – the only one in the province.

She soon found herself travelling to and from Europe, assisting with the importation of manufacturing equipment from Germany. A secure post in the Foreign Affairs office was highly prized, but at the age of just 23 she quit and moved to the bustling metropolis of Shenzhen, bordering Hong Kong, where the creation of a “special economic zone” was attracting massive foreign investment. She worked on major joint-venture projects. “I was super-successful,” she says. “On top of the world.”

By this time, she had married civil engineer Yu Gang. “He’s now the No. 1 golf course designer in China,” she says. “Just brilliant. Very good family. Treated me really well. But I treated him like shit. No respect. I looked down at him. And he still put up with me, right?”

Tu’s language course had not included English, yet in 1988 she accepted an invitation from a receptionists’ school in faraway Melbourne to do a three-month course in typing and office skills. Looking back, she gives herself points for audacity. She adopted an easy-to-pronounce German name, Monika, and learnt typing by day, English by night. Unfamiliar with burgers, she became a big fan of Hungry Jack’s. “I was obsessed with the Whopper,” she says. “I had a Whopper every day. I was so fat. Seriously.”

Tu with her grandfather, Xiao Gao Wu, who told her to learn a language and see the world.Credit: Courtesy of Monika Tu

She went back to China after the course, intending to revive her marriage and resume her high-powered career, but she soon decided to return to Melbourne. She won a scholarship to study international trade at RMIT University, she says, and was one of the 42,000 Chinese people in Australia granted permanent residency after the 1989 massacre of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Tu has sometimes given the impression that she started her life in this country with little but the clothes on her back. “I came here with zero,” she told Forbes Australia in 2022. To me, she says she had enough money saved to buy an apartment in East St Kilda for $128,000. “My god, I should have kept it,” she adds.

Lean times were ahead, though. She couldn’t find work in international trade so, in 1992, the year she became an Australian citizen, she moved to Sydney and set about making a living any way she could. At weekend markets she sold computer accessories, including boxes of the so-called floppy disks then used for data storage. Her second husband was one of her suppliers: he suggested she work for him Monday to Friday and keep operating the market stalls on Saturdays and Sundays. “I worked seven days a week for more than 10 years,” says Tu, who blames all the standing and heavy lifting for her problems with her joints.

She tells me she had knee surgery shortly before a Lunar New Year gala in 2023 to raise money for the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation. She was still using crutches but set them aside when she went on stage to conduct a fundraising auction. “The first time I walk after surgery,” she says. It was also the first time she’d acted as an auctioneer. “And god bless me, I nailed it.”

The event raised almost $1 million. I ask if she wore flat shoes. “No, I wear the wedges,” she says. “Come on! You have to look amazing.”

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This isn’t the first time I’ve crossed paths with Tu. I met her in 2017, when researching a story about a boom in demand for luxury goods sparked by the arrival in Australia of a cohort of crazy-rich Asians. We rendezvoused at a house she was selling at Rose Bay. I noted in the piece that she was wearing a red Valentino dress, a Chanel necklace and Hermès bangle. She admired my non-designer jacket, saying kindly: “Looks like Gucci.”

She told me then that it wasn’t easy dealing with some of the newly arrived Chinese immigrants she showed around waterfront mansions. “They spit, and they shout, and they smoke in people’s houses,” she said, making clear that she didn’t hold this against them. China’s rapid transformation from Third World country to economic superpower had made some people vast fortunes before they’d had time to acquire polish. “You’ve basically gone from a peasant to a king. And the problem is, if you are that rich, nobody really tells you what is right or wrong.”

‘When you’re out with Monika, she does know everybody. But it’s not just transactional. It’s genuine and warm.’

Andrew McEvoy, former chief executive of Tourism Australia

Tu saw it as her responsibility to gently pull the newcomers into line and educate them about the way things work here. The commission she receives from house sales – about 2 per cent – is paid by the vendors, not the buyers, but she has always regarded it as part of her job to foster her fellow émigrés’ integration into the Australian community. “I’m here to help them,” she said.

Eight years later, I’m surprised and flattered by how pleased Tu seems to be to catch up with me again. Not until lunchtime, when we walk into a Double Bay cafe where several of the diners wave and smile at her, do I realise that it’s standard for her to whoop with excitement when she greets people. Extravagant praise is routine, too. Lines like: “Oh my god! You look fantastic.” Or: “Look at you! Incredible.”

If networking were an Olympic sport, Tu would be a gold medallist. “When you’re out with her, she does know everybody,” says her friend Andrew McEvoy, former chief executive of Tourism Australia. “But it’s not just transactional. It’s genuine and warm. People hug her.” Former federal senator and NSW premier Kristina Keneally agrees: “Monika is genuinely a positive and happy person and she brings that to all her encounters.”

Tu with former NSW premier Kristina Keneally, who calls her a “positive and happy person” who’s helped raise more than $65 million for the foundation Keneally runs.Credit: Courtesy of Kristina Keneally

In the afternoon, I go with Tu and Khattar to Hunters Hill, north-west of the CBD, to meet a young Chinese resident who is leaving Sydney and wants to sell the house he bought two years ago for $5.5 million. He’s not expecting to make a huge profit; he’d let the place go for $6 million, he says. This is a smaller sale than Tu usually handles herself, but he’s a pleasant guy with a realistic attitude. “I’d really like to work with him, actually,” she says, as we leave.

In the car on the way back to town, she takes part in a four-way phone conversation with one of her agents and a couple whose house is on the market for more than $15 million. So far, not much interest. Tu’s agent suggests this is because the price is too high: buyers’ agents have put the value of the place at closer to $10 million. The vendors insist it’s worth much more. “Can’t we just lie and say we’ve already had an offer of $15.5 million?” the female half of the couple asks with a laugh. While Tu listens politely, the woman suggests that the problem could be the marketing campaign: the wrong people are coming to look at the house. “It’s like people who shop in Target versus people who shop in Gucci,” she says. “We’re not interested in the people who shop in Target.” The woman pauses. “Not to sound snobby.”

In the back seat, I make a mental note never to become a real estate agent. I wouldn’t have the patience to deal with obnoxious clients – and I don’t mean only the spitters and shouters.

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When Tu realised her second marriage wasn’t working, she thought about how shabbily she had behaved toward her first husband. She remembers saying to herself: “This is just God giving me the punishment. I have to take it.” She and her second husband stayed together for 12 years, in which time they built a successful IT accessory company that she still part-owns. They also produced a daughter, Maylin, who is now 26 and works for Black Diamondz. Tu is extremely proud of Maylin, and needs little encouragement to rattle off her attributes: “She’s Australian-born, private education, very good family values. Also, very organised.” These days, Tu and her second husband get along well (“He’s a nice guy”), but she remains a firm believer in karma. “What you did in the past, or even in a past life, it will come back. For sure.”

Tu with Maylin, her daughter from her second marriage, and third husband Jad Khattar. Tu and Khattar met at a salsa night and have been married for 16 years.Credit: Courtesy of Monika Tu

If so, she is racking up some serious credit. Not only does she generously support several charities, she convinces deep-pocketed newcomers to Australia to do likewise. “I give first,” she says. “I’m like a living example for all the migrants. They follow my journey.” The 20 tables of people who attended the Lunar New Year dinner that Tu hosted this year coughed up $2.15 million for the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation. “The majority of them were Asian,” she says. “Chinese, Vietnamese, from all walks of life.”

She is on the foundation’s organising committee for the annual Gold Dinner, an invitation-only event for 500 people that last year raised $33 million. According to Kristina Keneally, the former politician turned chief executive of the foundation, Tu is unbeatable when it comes to rustling up the big bucks. “She uses every network at her disposal – and believe me, Monika has many networks,” says Keneally. “We reckon that through her committee work and her own donations, she’s helped us raise more than $65 million.”

Tu also makes hefty contributions to cultural institutions. She’s an honorary ambassador for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and a member of the Art Gallery of NSW’s President’s Council. Every now and then, she reminds herself how far she has come since she spent her weekends flogging floppy disks at the markets. “From there to here. I think that’s really very inspiring,” she says. “Sometimes I really admire myself.”

‘You don’t have to like me. I don’t give a shit. Seriously. I don’t care!’

Monika Tu

The three seasons of Luxe Listings Sydney are still screening on Amazon Prime Video. My favourite moment in the entire show is when Tu flicks her hair and says, “I’m a Chinese fairytale.” A close second is the scene in which she takes buyers’ agent Simon Cohen on a tour of an enormous house and casually points out the cheese room. Cohen stops in his tracks. He’s never seen one of those, he says. “Oh really?” Tu replies. “All my houses have cheese rooms, darling.”

The series presents the upper echelon of the real estate industry as ruthlessly competitive: between agents, there’s mutual distrust beneath a thin veneer of civility. In one episode, we see Cohen alighting from his Porsche at a soaring new apartment block in which Tu has a penthouse for sale. Cohen is talking into his phone about the price she’s asking. “Word on the street is 18, 18-and-a-half,” he says. “And if that’s the case, she’s absolutely smoking crack.” Tu pulls up in a BMW convertible. “Hello Simon, my darling!” she cries.

We get a glimpse of how tough Tu can be when Cohen expresses incredulity that she’s expecting to get $9.8 million for a house in the southern Sydney suburb of Blakehurst. He points out that the price is almost 40 per cent higher than the street record. “I don’t give a shit about the street record,” Tu says. “If you want a grand house like this, you just have to pay for it.” (She tells me the place ended up selling for close to $11 million.) Another of the agents in the show, Gavin Rubinstein, distances himself from Tu from the start. “I’ve got absolutely no interest in dealing with her,” he says on camera. When I phone Rubinstein’s office and request an interview, I’m told that he has nothing to say about Tu.

Two other people reluctant to comment on her are former Black Diamondz agents Martin Ross and Robert Page, who in 2017 separately commenced legal action over hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions they said they were owed. Both cases were settled out of court. When I raise the subject with Tu, she says: “I don’t want to talk about that. That’s bullshit.”

Some of the criticism Tu attracts is tinged with racism. The woman selling off Sydney to rich Chinese was the headline on a story in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph. In fact, all her clients have been granted permanent residency or are Australian citizens, she says. They may be recent migrants, but they have every right to buy property.

For this reason, her business won’t be affected by the federal government’s introduction of a two-year ban from April 1 on foreign investors buying established homes. Tu doubts the ban will make an appreciable difference to the national housing shortage. Existing rules tightly restrict foreign buyers anyway, she says. According to the Foreign Investment Review Board, they make 1 per cent of all residential property purchases.

Social media commentary is water off a duck’s back to her, Tu says. “You don’t have to like me. I don’t give a shit. Seriously. I don’t care!” She does wish, though, that the real estate business was a little more collegiate and less cut-throat. “This is the worst industry,” she says, admitting that at times she’s been so dispirited she has considered quitting. “But it’s so much money!”

Tu has an ally in D’Leanne Lewis of the agency Laing+Simmons, the other female star of Luxe Listings. “Being a woman, being ethnic – people can dismiss you fairly easily,” Lewis says. “I know. I’ve experienced the same thing. And for that reason, I say to her, ‘Bravo to you.’ I love that she’s unapologetic. She says what she thinks.”

One night, I have dinner with Tu and Khattar at Golden Century, the venerable Sydney dining institution that has relocated from Chinatown to the gleaming Crown tower at Barangaroo. As we nibble on lobster, conversation turns to the night Tu and Khattar met at the dance club. It was 2008. Khattar, who had arrived from Lebanon a year earlier, was a long-haired, 27-year-old salsa king. He entered competitions. Tu, on the other hand, was a complete novice. “I don’t know what salsa is. Never heard about it,” she says, remembering how chuffed she was when Khattar invited her onto the floor. “After the dance, we just chatted. I think he found me really interesting.”

She leans toward me and lowers her voice. “He was so young. Twenty years junior and a salsa dancer, you know what I mean? Very good-looking. And very nice.” She turns to Khattar: “Tell Jane your feelings.” Khattar smiles into his plate and keeps eating. Tu continues. “He found me really nice, really positive, but he didn’t know how old I was, right? Because it was really dark.” She hoots with laughter.

A few months later she had a party, she says, and decided to invite Khattar. She made sure there was salsa music. “That’s how we got to know each other.” Even now, their age difference astounds her. “When I finished uni, you were six months old,” she says to him. “So ridiculous. Oh my god.” Another explosion of mirth. “And we’re still together, which is fantastic.”

Tu once told The Australian Financial Review Magazine that after her funeral, she wanted the finest champagne served at her wake. “I don’t mind which brand,” she said. “Whoever can give us the best deal. I’m very into tequila, so a tequila bar and maybe a whisky bar, too. Let’s get some sponsorships going.” I discover during my time with Tu that she is actually a very moderate drinker. Two shots of tequila at most, she tells me. “I never get drunk. You never see me lose control. I don’t like that feeling.”

We’re bright-eyed and clear-headed when we meet at Double Bay the morning after the Golden Century dinner. By the time I arrive, Tu is partway through showing an apartment to a man in his 90s. The place is 230 square metres and has two bedrooms. The price is $9.8 million, she tells him, but the vendors might accept even less. “Really cheap! What do you think? You have cash?” The prospective buyer, who has known Tu for a while and is familiar with her banter, says he needs time to think about it. “I’ve been in the place 20 minutes and you want me to say I’m going to spend $10 million?” he says. “I don’t make decisions that quickly.”

Tu, full of bonhomie, asks how long he needs. “Two days? Three days? I’m pushing.” After a bit more back and forth, she escorts the man down to the street, where his driver is waiting. As he climbs into the car, she shouts after him: “How many times am I allowed to call you?”

Her friend Lorraine Tarabay, chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, assures me there is more to Tu than meets the eye: she’s not just a real estate hustler with a Hermès handbag. “The public Monika is very different from the private Monika,” Tarabay says. “She’s fantastic at making fun of herself, which is hugely endearing – talking about her Chinglish and so forth. But actually the private Monika is very serious, very thoughtful. And much quieter.”

I’m intrigued. What is on private Monika’s mind? “She believes very strongly in the sisterhood, if I can put it that way,” Tarabay says. Also, “she’s very serious about wanting to give back to her adopted home of Australia”. Kristina Keneally speaks of Tu in a similarly respectful tone: “I call her the indomitable Monika Tu. You could also call her indefatigable.”

You could. But on reflection I prefer the adjectives Tu herself uses in the YouTube clip promoting Luxe Listings. “I’m the most fabulous one,” she says. “And humble. Humble!”

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