International commodities trader Socrates Vasiliades has sold his 22-room Toorak mansion for much less than anticipated.
The buyer, Sarah Lew, obtained the property over the weekend for $18.7 million. The property’s asking price was revised to $25 million recently from the first listing price of $30 million.
Vasiliades’ wife Celeste bought the Towers Road address in 2002 for $4.6 million. It took the couple six years to build the house now located on the land, boasting 22 rooms, a lift, home theatre, gym, pool, and basement parking.
Vasiliades had tradespeople flown in from around the world to work on the house on the 2,140 square metre property.
The buyer, Ms Lew, had been living in a $4.2 million penthouse apartment in the same suburb since mid-2012.
Mr Vasiliades famously lived in the mansion for six days and shortly thereafter, moved his family to Europe and put the property on the market in April 2011.
Towers Road is one of Melbourne’s most exclusive streets, known as one of Toorak’s most expensive, made up of just seven huge properties.
Born in Melbourne, Vasiliades traded steel and bulk raw materials worldwide before setting up and becoming Core Mining’s chief executive in 2003.
If the property had sold at $30 million, it would have beaten the current record sale price of the $26 million for the Portsea cliff-top estate Ilyuka in 2010 and the $24 million paid in 2010 by Harry Stamoulis for the former Baillieu family estate in Toorak in the same year.
Source: Australian Financial Review