Sydney's top 20 house sales in the 2011-12 financial year: Title Tattle

Retired car dealer Laurie Sutton was the undoubted kingpin of Sydney property during the 2011/2012 financial year. No sooner had he secured a near-record Kalua (pictured below), the Joye family’s plantation-style Palm Beach trophy home for close to $23 million in April. Sutton thereby took the top two spots on the Title Tattle Top 20 Sydney houses list for the financial year. It represented the second highest price ever paid for a beachfront holiday home in Australia, the highest being the $26 million Ilyuka estate at Portsea in late 2010. But with so little prestige sales activity over the past 12 months, and winter upon us, no wonder so many agents were unable to discuss their sales this week given their overseas holiday sojourns.

While things are bleakly slow, at that still unconfirmed price, the Joyes’ sale realised a remarkable compound capital gain on the home of about 14% per annum over 33 years of ownership, which bettered the Suttons’ 12% annual gain for their Mosman home, which was owned for a similar lengthy period. Kalua is the 1920s Ocean Road holiday home best known as having been the prestige Christmas holiday rental for international luminaries including Nicole Kidman, John Cleese and James Murdoch. Sutton and his wife will be the 1920s beach bungalow’s third owner. It was last sold by the Hordern retailing family to the more entrepreneurial Joye family, the current vendors, for $330,000 in 1978. It’s a five-bedroom, six-bathroom house with three-bedroom guesthouse along with studio cabana, pool and tennis court on its 5,500-square-metre dress circle block overlooking Cabbage Tree Boat Harbour. It sold through Ken Jacobs and Darren Curtis at Christies International in conjunction with LJ Hooker Palm Beach agents David Edwards and Peter Robinson. Folklore has it that the Hordern family sent their architect by sea to Oahu, Hawaii, to copy “stick by stick and stone by stone” the impressive Dillingham plantation residence.

Sutton’s 5154-square-metre Bay Street, Mosman holding (pictured above and below) – the suburb's largest harbourfront estateYing Li. The residence, which had been the Suttons’ home for almost 35 years, was bought from the Pick a Box presenters Bob and Dolly Dyer in 1977 for $376,960, when the Dyers headed to Queensland.

Its price was confirmed at $20 million. The Bay Street tropical holding is like Hawaii meets Hamilton Island on Middle Harbour and despite renovations over the past three decades, there are still traces of the Dyers' day, including the imposing sandstone fireplace in its living room that overlooks Quakers Hat Bay.

Ros Oatley-Lambert, the former wife of the former Southcorp wine chief Keith Lambert, sits in third place on Title Tattle's list given she paid $19 million to buy neighbouring Balmoral harbourfront property Albert Bertini, the flamboyant property developer. The Lamberts own the adjoining Rivendell, which is set on a 2,000-square-metre double block. It previously traded for $22.5 million in pre-global financial crisis 2007. Bertini and his former wife, Heather, bought Kahala from the successful veteran property developer Phil Arnold, who'd owned it since 1980.

Arnold paid $380,000 for the estate when it was sold by Lady (Delzie) Hooker, the widow of the real estate tycoon Sir Leslie Hooker, whose ashes are buried on the foreshore rocks. In 1940, Les Hooker paid £3,050 for the property, and during the 1950s he built a three-level house and a boatshed. Bertini started works to rebuild the house as well as two pools, garaging for eight cars and a $1 million tunnel with a lift to the boatshed. Bertini’s boatshed, currently accessed by 160 stairs, has his boating pride and joy – a 26-foot timber boat once owned by the US's most powerful family, the Kennedys. Bertini was recently filmed aboard his luxury boat, Jasa, during the Channel 9 series The Secret Millionaire in 2009. The Oatley viticulture family, who sold their Rosemount wine business to Fosters in 2001 for $1.4 billion, paid a then record $15.5 million for their Balmoral residence, Rivendell, which has limited boating facilities, when it sold through Richardson & Wrench Mosman agent Robert Simeon.