Animal Logic co-founder buys $12 million Byron Bay house in cash

Chief among his investments is a converted warehouse in Surry Hills for $32.25 million, the Belltower office building in Eveleigh for $18.25 million and a converted ice-cream factory in Camperdown for $13.2 million from bitcoin entrepreneur Kain Warwick.

Home care pays off

Home care tycoon Jon Kontopos and his wife Corrine Beville, daughter of property tycoon John Beville, are gearing up for some hefty renovation work judging by their recent $30 million house purchase.

The couple is behind the recent purchase of a doer-upper on the Rose Bay beachfront that was billed as “liveable” before it was sold by Sotheby’s Michael Pallier.

The sale comes more than half a century after it last traded for $147,000 in 1973 and pits it alongside neighbouring trophy homes sold along the prized beachfront. Rag trader Nick Kelly paid $29 million in 2022 for an Espie Dods-designed house a few doors away, and Laser Clinic’s Alistair Champion sold a few months later for $35 million.

Kontopos and Beville are currently Bellevue Hill locals where, in 2018, Beville paid $10.45 million for the former home of property developer Michael Malouf.

Kontopos founded Caring Group in 2015, turning it into one of the country’s largest in-home care providers specialising in looking after seniors and people with disabilities or dementia.

A year ago, Asia-based private equity outfit Navis Capital acquired a majority stake in the company, paying a reported $150 million.

WIN TV headquarters

When billionaire media mogul Bruce Gordon next returns to Sydney to meet the chief and co-directors of WIN Television, many of them may choose to attend in their pyjamas, given how many of the company’s senior ranks now own boltholes in the same harbourside building.

Most recently it is the media mogul’s daughter Genevieve Gordon who has bought into the Quay Grand at Circular Quay, paying $6.4 million cash for a two-bedroom bolthole.

Gordon and her husband, British racing car driver Tom Oliphant, are based in Wollongong, where she has been taking on ever-more-demanding roles at WIN, heading up radio and sitting on the boards of WIN and the St George Illawarra Rugby League Football Club. She also sits on the board of the family company Birketu, which happens to be the largest shareholder of Nine (publisher of this masthead).

Gordon’s newly purchased spread shares the same in-your-face view of the harbour as that of her parents, Judith and Bruce Gordon’s apartment, the first half of which cost $3 million in 2008 before next door was added in 2016 for $9 million as a home away from their Bermuda estate.

Then there’s the upstairs apartment that WIN chief executive and Nine board member Andrew Lancaster purchased two years ago for $8 million as his Sydney base. Alas, WIN chairman and Gordon Snr’s son Andrew Gordon is one of the few among the network’s top ranks yet to buy into the Mirvac-developed block.

Genevieve’s apartment was an off-market purchase from Southern Highlands-based Agripower boss Peter Prentice and settled to her name just in time for this week’s start of the Vivid Sydney 2024 festival.

Gordon Snr isn’t the only billionaire in the building. Miner Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest purchased his pad in the block in 2006 for $5.98 million, and in 2020 added next door for $12.6 million. He has since started a consolidation of the two apartments.