Fascinating tale from today's Title Tattle:
"Title Tattle aims to tell you first – and sometime before it has happened – so it was imperative that the mid-week second auction of the Bellevue Hill residence of Tim Clarke be attended. It’s been the home that everyone had an opinion about. With lavishly appointed Marco Meneguzzi interiors, the five-bedroom, four-bathroom house was again being offered through Richardson & Wrench Double Bay agents James McCowan and Michael Dunn. There was a $5.8 million opening bid, then a $6 million vendor bid at which proceedings concluded. In between a casually attired registered bidder standing next to the auctioneer asked twice if it was on the market, without himself lodging any offer. Word is that a deal at around $6.41 million was soon secured with the obvious would-be buyer.
In June Title Tattle recalls there was a $6.3 million opening bid of $6.3 million and a vendor bid of $6.4 million with the auctioneer Peter Baldwin accepting incremental increases of $5,000 until the property was passed in at $6.52 million. The Clarkes had paid $2.55 million in 2005 and possibly spent quite a bit more than $3 million on the project. The buyer was none other than Darren Harvey – widely regarded as Australia’s best fixed-income trader and his wife, Jaz, who sat in the front row of the auction. They'd been perennials in recent months getting close to buying on Kambala Road and Victoria Road, elsewhere in Bellevue Hill.
Maybe it’s just the industry in which he worked, but the eastern suburbs property market was alight with speculation that he'd been offered $200,000 by the underbidder to sell soon afterwards— but said no. Harvey was at Deutsche Bank in Sydney and London, where he was head of derivatives, and now runs a very successful fixed-income fund called Bower Capital, which has generated spectacular returns over the last five years."
