An East Melbourne penthouse overlooking Fitzroy Gardens and the Melbourne CBD has been acquired off-the-plan by a local family for $19 million, setting a new apartment benchmark in one of Melbourne’s premier inner-city suburbs.

Developer Ilya Melnikoff, whose Luxcon Group is behind the 10-storey development at 380 Albert Street, said the buyers were a wealthy Melbourne family who had recently sold their large suburban home.

Selling agent Sarah Case from RT Edgar added that the buyers of the double-storey penthouse were empty nesters from Melbourne’s bayside suburbs who travelled a lot. Neither would identify them.

In another coup for Mr Melnikoff, the nephew of Meriton founder and Rich Lister Harry Triguboff, Luxcon sold a smaller sub-penthouse in the same development for $16 million, also to a local downsizing family.

The sales mean 12 of the 22 ultra-luxury apartments in the project – marketed by Luxcon as The Address – have sold off-the-plan. The development is under construction and due to be completed in October.

The sale of the top floor penthouse, which offers 485 sq m of internal space and 825 sq m in total, smashed the previous record for an East Melbourne apartment – $11.85 million paid in 2016 for a four-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor of 150 Clarendon Street, the suburbs most prestigious apartment building.

More recently, a 348 sq m penthouse in Mirvac’s The Eastbourne building at 280 Albert Street (next door to the Luxcon project) resold for $9.5 million, after it was purchased off the plan for $8.3 million in May 2016.

The record for a Melbourne apartment is $35 million paid last year for a 1000 sq m sub-penthouse that will take out an entire floor in the country’s tallest project, Beulah’s STH BNK skyscraper at Southbank.

However, this is nowhere near the $140 million paid in 2019 for the three-level penthouse at the top of Lendlease’s One Sydney Harbour at Barangaroo.

Source:
The Australian Financial Review
Larry Schlesinger
08/02/2023

https://www.afr.com/property/residential/wealthy-downsizers-spend-record-19m-on-east-melbourne-penthouse-20230208-p5ciru