Moving and Shaking on the Northern Beaches

8 September 2023 | Northern Beaches Property Buyers

Luxury Sydney Property Palm Beach

Ah, Sydney’s Northern Beaches, a playground for the elite, a paradise for surfers, and lately, a hotbed of some very interesting real estate transactions. And when I say interesting, I mean the kind that grabs headlines in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) and fuels dinner conversations among Sydney’s upper echelon. The AFR article dated 1st September 2023 calls this region “the insular peninsula,” but it’s not without merit. Three interwoven Northern Beaches Prestige Property sales have recently been inked here, totalling an eye-watering $39.25 million. As Northern Beaches Buyers Agents, we can confirm that these transactions only affirm what we’ve been seeing: Northern Beaches Prestige Property is like hotcakes, selling fast, almost regardless of the economy or interest rates.

Northern Beaches Prestige Property – Case Study 1: The Roberts’ Palm Beach Abode

First, let’s discuss the Roberts family—Matthew Roberts, an ex-JPMorgan bigwig, and his wife Samantha. They recently acquired a property from Frank and Jan Boffa, a name closely associated with a hairdressing dynasty. Located on the prestigious Palm Beach Road, this luxurious $12 million property was built in 1934 and has an aura of grandeur about it. A pool, butler’s pantry, and jaw-dropping views from terraces make it the perfect weekender for the couple. The irony here is rich, given that this house will serve as a ‘weekender’ while they keep their primary base in Bellevue Hill. Talk about options!

Northern Beaches Prestige Property – Case Study 2: The Boffas’ Newport Beachside Bliss

The Roberts and the Boffas are not only tied through hair—erm, houses. Chris Boffa, Frank’s brother, and his wife Julieann purchased the Roberts’ Newport beachside property for $13 million. The home boasts six bedrooms, an 11.5-meter mosaic-tiled lap pool, and overlooks the splendid Newport Beach. The Boffas appear to be on a real estate shopping spree, having just sold their Pittwater-fronting property for $14.25 million. One might say when it comes to real estate, the Boffas are really making waves.

Case Study 3: Annie Cannon-Brookes’ Newport Venture

Continuing the interconnected saga, Annie Cannon-Brookes, recently separated from Atlassian co-founder Mike, acquired the Boffas’ Pittwater property. This expands her Newport footprint, as she already owns the property next door. With a 3000-square-meter land area, one has to wonder if she’s planning to build a tech incubator or just a really large garden.

Case Study 4: Justin Braitling’s Quick Exit

In an apparently unrelated event, Justin Braitling, the CIO at Watermark Funds Management, sold his Pittwater waterfront home for around $6 million just a year after buying it for $5.6 million. A profitable year, it seems, at least for waterfront real estate!

Case Study 5: Whale Beach’s Record Sale

Finally, let’s talk about Whale Beach, where a luxury hillside property sold for a suburb record of circa $14.4 million. Owned by BT’s former head of equities Mike Crivelli, and his wife, Susan, the property features everything from a steam room to a lap pool and has been designed with exquisite taste.

The Bottom Line

These real estate transactions tell us more than just who’s moving in and out. They show us that the Northern Beaches continue to be a magnet for high-end buyers, whether for their primary homes, weekend retreats, or investments. The connections between buyers and sellers, often extending beyond simple transactions, make these Northern Beaches Prestige Property deals all the more interesting. It’s all a game of Monopoly but with real money and real properties.
This is consistent with our observations as Northern Beaches Buyers Agents. Quality properties here are more than just sought after; they’re in extremely high demand. Whether it’s the allure of the beach, the exclusivity of the enclave, or just the desire to be part of Sydney’s ‘insular peninsula,’ people are more than willing to open their chequebooks.
So, if you are contemplating whether or not to invest in Northern Beaches Prestige Property, these case studies should tell you one thing: the market here is more buoyant than ever. Time to make your own splash!

 

The $10 million club: what a decade of Lower North Shore prestige sales actually shows

Two pieces of analysis, one honest picture — the macro view across the Lower North Shore, and the micro view inside Mosman.

 

Ask most people what has happened to prices at the top of the Lower North Shore and you tend to get the same answer: everything has doubled, the trophy homes are flying, and you would have been mad not to buy a decade ago. The first part is broadly true on paper. The rest deserves a closer look.

We have recently approached that question from two directions. We ran a deep dive into every Mosman house sale since 2015, and a wide sweep of every sale of $10 million or more right across the Lower North Shore — from Mosman in the east through to Hunters Hill in the west. Read together, the macro and the micro tell a more useful story than the headline number, and a more honest one. For anyone weighing up a purchase at the top of this market, the difference matters.

The $10 million club has grown up

Start with the breadth of the market. Across the Lower North Shore we identified more than 470 genuine individual purchases of $10 million or more since 2015 (we removed development-site amalgamations, bulk strata settlements and corporate acquisitions from the raw data, so what remains is people buying homes). The pattern is unmistakable. In 2015 there were just four house sales at $10 million-plus across the entire region. By 2025 there were 86 — a rise of more than twentyfold. The number of homes trading above $10 million has gone from a rarity to a near-weekly event.

That broadening is the single biggest shift in the prestige market, and it is the one most commentary misses by fixating on a median. But it needs one honest qualification. A $10 million line is a fixed nominal threshold, and inflation quietly pushes more homes across it every year. Some of the club’s growth is genuine new prestige activity; some is simply the dollar buying less than it used to. Hold that thought, because it is the key to reading the rest.

Most of the headline growth is inflation

This is where the Mosman deep dive earns its keep, because Mosman has the depth of sales to measure properly. In plain, as-sold terms, the Mosman house median rose from $3.10 million in 2015 to $5.82 million in 2025 — up 88 per cent, which is where the “prices have doubled” story comes from. But once you convert every sale into today’s dollars using the Consumer Price Index, the broad market grew about 42 per cent over the decade, or 3.6 per cent a year in real terms. Solid, dependable growth — and a long way short of doubling.

The gap between those two numbers is the most important thing a prestige buyer can understand. Nearly half of the headline gain is not the house becoming more valuable; it is the currency becoming less so. A home that looks like it almost doubled has, in real purchasing power, grown by a bit over forty per cent. That is still a good result for an asset you also get to live in. It is just not the runaway number the dinner-party version implies.