A crypto bro paid $80m for an unfinished house in Melbourne

Ed Craven just smashed the record for the most expensive purchases of an Australian house ever.

Ed Craven just smashed the record for the most expensive purchases of an Australian house ever.

A little-known 27-year-old crypto currency casino owner has made one of the most expensive purchases of an Australian house ever, outlaying about $80m to also smash the Victorian record for a residential sale.

Ed Craven, the co-founder of Stake.com, paid the record amount for a mansion in Melbourne’s upmarket Toorak that has stood idle for more than three decades, despite its location on one of the suburb’s most prestigious streets. 

Known as Toorak’s “ghost mansion”, the unfinished house has been owned by David Yu, director of property developer Ausvest Holdings, and sits on about 7200sq m of land.

Craven is the public face of Stake.com, a privately owned cryptocurrency-friendly online casino that offers sports betting and casino games.

Although he is Australian, Stake is a global business with hundreds of employees, the majority based in Europe. The business also sponsors English soccer teams such as Everton.

The deal – agreed to last week in an off-market transaction negotiated for Craven by buyers agent Kim Easterbrook – obliterates the previous high mark for Melbourne, set in 2018 when art dealer Rod Menzies sold the former government house, Stonnington, in the neighbouring suburb of Malvern for $52.5m.

It is also just behind the biggest deal for an existing house in Australian history, the $100m purchase by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes of the 1.12ha Fairwater harbourfront mansion in Sydney in 2019.

Developer Lendlease this year sold top floor apartments in its ­latest Barangaroo luxury residential tower in Sydney for more than $100m, part of three towers ­currently under construction. 

The sales in the second ­Lendlease tower follow on from the success of the first building, in which a three-level penthouse sold for $140m, smashing records in 2019.

Craven was also reported in March to have paid $38m for ­another Toorak mansion, a two-level home set on almost 2000sqm on Orrong Road that had been rebuilt by Melbourne property developer Will Deague.

Yu put Craven’s latest purchase, on St Georges Road, Toorak, on the market in 2020, just shy of 30 years after he had paid $5m for it in 1991 as Australia was emerging from its last recession.

He had bought the property from then-Hoyts boss Leon Fink – who had half-built a French ­Renaissance-style mansion on the block before offloading it in the midst of the early 1990s recession – and has left it untouched since.

Yu had reportedly turned down several offers for the property before quietly putting it on the market in early 2020. He had previously attempted to subdivide the landing into nine lots in 1992, an application that was rejected by local planning authorities.

“This is a generational property. It has been about 15 or 20 years since anything like this has become available in Toorak,” Andrew Baines, managing director of agency Andrew Baines & Co, told The Australian in 2020 when it emerged the property was being offered for sale.

The sale to Craven eclipses the previous Toorak record residential sale of between ​$43m last year to Chemist Warehouse chief executive Sam Gance, who bought a Lansell Road mansion featuring seven living areas, a teppanyaki grill and an onsite wellness retreat.