Crown recently slashed the six-bedroom apartment’s asking price by 10% from A$100mil and appointed flamboyant TV personality Monika Tu as selling agent alongside Knight Frank. — Bloomberg
OPULENT, elevated, expensive. There are plenty of descriptive terms for the A$90mil (US$59mil) home perched high in Crown Resorts Ltd’s twisting skyscraper in Sydney. “Sold” is not one of them.
The chrome-heavy duplex has been on the market since at least 2021 when the 271-m-tall One Barangaroo tower was completed.
Conceived in an age when Chinese cash flooded the globe, elevating asset prices from Sydney to London, the property’s target market has all but disappeared as crackdowns by China’s president Xi Jinping cut the fortunes of the country’s elite and choked outflows.
To stimulate demand, Crown recently slashed the six-bedroom apartment’s asking price by 10% from A$100mil and appointed flamboyant TV personality Monika Tu as selling agent alongside Knight Frank.
Tu, who’s built a successful career selling Australian assets to wealthy Chinese, concedes the 8,600-sq-ft apartment complete with plunge pool and home theater is a challenge.
“We do have to work a little bit harder on this one,” said Tu, owner of Black Diamondz Group and a regular on Amazon Prime’s Luxe Listings Sydney.
One stumbling block is the flashy nature of the home, located on the 81st floor of a tower that also houses a casino and a six-star hotel.
The complex was a pet project of billionaire James Packer before the uncovering of wrongdoing at Crown’s casinos in Melbourne and Perth prompted him to sell his stake in the company two years ago.
At A$112,500 per sq m, the penthouse would be one of the country’s priciest homes ever sold, based on publicly available records.
American actor Mark Wahlberg rents an apartment in the tower, while singer Taylor Swift stayed in the roughly A$40,000-a-night presidential suite of the hotel when she played in Sydney this year.
“Chinese may still buy expensive and nice properties but they don’t necessarily want people to know about it,” said Qiang Li, associate professor at Deakin Business School in Melbourne, who focuses on real estate.
“That becomes harder when you make a high-profile purchase like this.”
The shift in Chinese buying patterns has reverberated through luxury developments in cities including Hong Kong and London. In Australia, it coincided with a dramatic worsening of ties with its Asian neighbour.
Chinese investments in the country collapsed over the past five years after Canberra stepped up scrutiny of foreign acquisitions, cracked down on foreign interference and called for a probe into the origins of Covid-19.
In 2023, direct investment by Chinese companies was the second lowest in 18 years, according to a report from KPMG and the University of Sydney.
While there’s been a warming of relations in recent months, it’s unlikely to spur fresh interest by China’s wealthy who are restricted from parking their cash overseas.
“We’re still dealing with Chinese-origin buyers, but they already have residency here,” Tu said. “They are not necessarily holding a Chinese passport anymore.”
Investment by Chinese entities in Australia’s commercial and residential real estate sector totalled almost A$13bil last year, down some 60% from the frenzied buying seen in 2016, according to Foreign Investment Review Board figures.
By law, overseas buyers of Australian homes are limited to new builds.
Crown, which is now owned by US private equity giant Blackstone Inc, had its own run in with Xi. In late 2016, a crackdown by Chinese authorities led to the conviction of more than a dozen Crown employees for illegal promotion of gambling, and sparked a global retreat by the company.
Then, in 2019, media reports that criminal gangs laundered cash inside Crown’s casinos triggered a string of inquiries in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The probes uncovered a range of shortcomings and found Crown was unsuitable to run casinos in the three cities. Packer departed not long after.
The regulatory outlook for Crown is improving. Last month, the company was allowed to keep its licence to operate its casino in Sydney.
That came weeks after the company retained the licence to run its casino in Melbourne, where the state regulator said Crown had rectified misdeeds including underpaying taxes and facilitating money laundering.
Yet, the disappearance of Chinese high rollers continues to be felt.
Last year, the company closed one of its two VIP gambling floors at One Barangaroo in Sydney and laid off 275 people. It will cut a further 1,000 jobs across its three Australian gaming resorts, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
The delisted company, which was acquired by Blackstone in 2022 in an A$8.8bil takeover, posted a A$199mil loss last year, according to local media reports.
All the more reason for Crown to expedite the sale of the Sydney penthouse.
Tu is confident she will find a buyer. She travelled to Los Angeles this week to market the home, and is working through her Rolodex of the wealthy. She has cachet.
Tu sold two of the top 10 properties in Australia last year, including a A$60mil five-bedroom house in Sydney’s Point Piper.
The 62-year-old selling agent, who moved to Australia in 1988 from Shenzhen in southern China, said she has received initial interest from people in Australia as well as countries in South-East Asia, including Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore.
“There is nothing like this in terms of quality, views and location,” she said during a tour of the apartment.
The property’s extravagant features, prominence in Sydney’s tallest building and central location are among its selling points.
There’s a terrace, a gym, wine cellar, internal elevators and a private garage that can fit four vehicles. Residents have access to 24-hour concierge and VIP treatment at the hotel’s 14 bars and restaurants, including Nobu and Oncore by Clare Smyth.
Such amenities come at a cost of A$65,000 per quarter in management fees.
The tower, designed by the late British architect Chris Wilkinson, won the global Emporis Skyscraper Award in 2020 in a first by an Australian structure. The building is just a 10-minute walk from Darling Harbour, adjacent to the city centre.
Big-ticket sales have happened in the area before. A larger penthouse in a neighbouring building sold in 2019 for A$140mil, an Australian record by total value.
Sydney accounts for every two in three luxury house transactions in Australia. Indeed, the top three trophy home sales in Australia last year belonged to the harbour city, with heritage-listed estate in Bellevue Hill near the popular Bondi Beach selling for A$76mil.
Local buyers from businessmen to crypto entrepreneurs dominated purchases in 2023.
Returning Australians or permanent residents were another popular cohort, as migration hit record highs last year, real estate agents said.
Both are part of the redevelopment of Barangaroo, which was an industrial hub before becoming part of one of Sydney’s largest and most controversial urban renewal projects.
The neighbourhood now contains residential and office blocks, a ferry pier and parks. — Bloomberg
Swati Pandey writes for Bloomberg. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
