Revealed: The buyer of $141.55m Sydney apartment – the nation’s most expensive home

Millennial multimillionaire Yan Zhang has paid $141.55 million in cash for Australia’s most expensive home, a penthouse overlooking Sydney Harbour.

The 37-year-old Zhang, who was born in China, bought the top three floors of Lendlease’s One Sydney Harbour development at Barangaroo South.

An artist’s impression of the $141 million penthouse sold atop Lendlease’s Residences One tower at One Sydney Harbour.Credit: Rendering by JORG for Lendlease.

The off-the-plan sale, inked in 2019, is an amalgamation of the two-storey penthouse of the Renzo Piano-designed building, which is for himself, and a sub-penthouse directly below, for friends and family to stay in. The home settled with no mortgage on title.

It’s an upgrade from Zhang’s previous address, a $1.33 million apartment in the Century Tower in Sydney’s CBD, co-purchased in 2004 when Zhang was 16 years old. Co-owner of the Century Tower property Wei Ling Zhang was 41 at the time of its purchase.

The sale tops all of Australia’s previous confirmed house and apartment records, including Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar’s $130 million sale of the Point Piper mansion Elaine, which settled to a consortium of developers last week who are planning to carve it up and sell it off in four lots.

It also eclipses Crown Resort’s One Barangaroo circa $80 million penthouse next door, which is widely tipped to have sold to James Packer’s lieutenant Lawrence Myers last week.

The home set a national price record.Credit: Rendering by JORG for Lendlease.

The previous national house price record was held in conjunction with Uig Lodge, and was set by tech billionaire Farquhar when he paid $130 million in late 2022 for the Scottish baronial mansion, which he bought from rag traders Steven and Carol Moss.

That sale smashed the previous record, set by Atlassian’s other founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, by some $30 million.

Cannon-Brookes and his wife, Annie, bought Fairwater in Point Piper for $100 million, ending more than a century of Fairfax family ownership.

A mansion in Melbourne’s Toorak also sold this year for at least nine figures, although it is reportedly unlikely to top the national record. Sources have put the sale price at anywhere from $115 million to $135 million.

In Barangaroo, the luxury three-level penthouse spans more than 1600 square metres and includes nine bedrooms, a dramatic entry foyer, eight-metre-high ceilings, a rooftop swimming pool, a spa, a gymnasium and a vast main bedroom that is equal in size to many family homes.

The penthouse broke the elusive $100,000-per-square-metre record, with the sub-penthouse forming part of the overall home but able to function as a separate home.

The 72-floor tower 1 is the tallest of three buildings in the One Sydney Harbour development, all of which were designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, whose landmark contributions include the Shard building in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

As of March this year, 95 per cent of One Sydney Harbour had sold by value, with over $4 billion in sales across the three towers. The towers are complete and most residents have settled on their purchases and moved in.

The highest purchase that settled before the three-level property was by prolific property investor Qing Zhong, who paid $38.95 million for an entire floor, followed by surgeon Dr Franklin Yee and his wife, Gloria, and their $21 million purchase for a unit above it.

Barangaroo’s median unit price is $4,675,000, down 0.5 per cent in the three months to March but up 26.4 per cent in the five years to March on Domain data.