REAL ESTATE: GOLDEN COAST
Point Piper is the pinnacle of Sydney living.
Sydney’s Point Piper neighborhood features two yacht clubs, one former prime minister and six billionaires.
In 1980, Jack cowin and his wife, Sharon, decided to move from Perth to Sydney, on the opposite side of Down Under. His fast-food business had grown across Australia, and he wanted to be in the country’s largest city. “We needed a house big enough to accommodate everybody,” he recalls, with space for their four young children. The Cowins knew Sydney for one thing: “traffic.” So they picked a secluded neighborhood called Point Piper, selecting a mansion steps from the ocean. They paid $870,000 (roughly $2.3 million today)—“a big gulp . . . three times what we had”—but Cowin felt they’d lucked out finding such a beautiful spot. Until he discovered the seller had bought the place for $555,000 ($1.7 million) just a year prior.
“I thought I was the biggest wood duck that ever walked the face of the Earth,” Cowin says. That is, he felt a bit duped. “Thirty-nine years later, it doesn’t matter.”
Indeed, Cowin, now 76, and Point Piper have both prospered since. He’s a billionaire today—the biggest Burger King franchisee in Australia—and Point Piper, situated on a small peninsula extending into Sydney Harbor, is now home to five other billionaires, the daughter of another and a former prime minister. The area is almost entirely residential aside from two yacht clubs. In recent years, prices in the neighborhood—named after John Piper, a Scottish sea captain who built a home there in the nineteenth century—have skyrocketed. Mike Cannon-Brookes, 39, the billionaire cofounder of software maker Atlassian, paid $72.2 million for a 2.7-acre estate there in 2018. That shattered the record for the most expensive home ever sold in Australia, a mark previously held by Cannon-Brookes’ cofounder, Scott Farquhar, 39, who lives next door. Still, not everyone is as close with their neighbors as the Atlassian partners; some Point Piper homes are owned by wealthy foreigners who are seldom in town.
“They obviously bought them, but they don’t live there,” says Cowin. “Anyway, less traffic, so that’s okay.”